As it reads, 454,000 SOFTWARE purchases exceeds 75% of all HARDWARE purchase(r)s. Does that mean 75% of all wii purchases, or 75% of all console purchases ? If it's the latter, does that mean non-wii owners have been buying this game (if that's at all possible) ?
If you see two ways to interperet a statement, and one of them doesn't make any fucking sense to you, go with the other one.
Data that has actually been overwritten, even just once, can never, no matter what anyone tells you, be recovered by any kind of analysis of the drive.
That's just not true. It certainly isn't going to be recoverable without taking the drive apart, but there's a reason FIPS standards require multiple overwrites with 1s, 0s, and random bit patterns.
When you "delete" a file, it just gets marked as free space -- what's worse, it actually gets marked as "free space, after a fashion, but only use as a last resort" so as to give you a longer window of opportunity to recover it.
There are filesystems that do this, but not FAT, or NTFS, or EXT2. A file may not get overwritten because it's not the right size (a deleted 1MB file won't make room for a 2MB new file, so the OS might choose a bigger free chunk to drop it in, rather than having to fragment it), but there's no preference given to "clean" bits.
You can make sure data gets overwritten by first filling up the drive with junk files till there's no room to save anything else, then deleting the stuff you want rid of (which just marks it as free space), then creating more junk files -- knowing that the only place they can possibly be saved now, is over the top of the stuff you just deleted. Delete all the junk files and the drive is ready for re-use.
Neither necessary nor sufficient. US Government offices use a secure deletion program like shred(1) (or rather, a variant that they've certified) for sensitive data, and a belt sander for top secret data.
what is the long term implication for our species' ability to survive?
Natural selection favors traits that allow a species to survive in its environment, not in some other environment, such as the one its forbears inhabited.
So, for example, our forefathers were genetically predisposed to not be allergic to peanuts. That was simply not a trait a specimen could express and survive. Nowadays, with effective diagnosis and cortizone shots and "May contain nuts" labels all over the place, it's something you can live with. Nowadays, lots of people are deathly allergic to peanuts, and those people can breed just like everyone else
Does that mean that the current human species is less fit to survive? Well sure, but only in a habitat substantially different from our own. I kinda doubt we could survive on the ocean floor, either, even though we had ancestors that could. I don't hear any whining about that
I suppose in some gut reaction kind of way, being reliant on modern technology makes us less "tough" as a species, and that rankles. But does it rankle more than babies dying all over the place? Than having to worry if your baby in particular is going to bite it for what seems like no good reason? I hardly think so.
It's not like this "damage" is irreversible, either. Genetic drift aside, traits that don't impact fitness in the current environment will vary randomly, so should conditions change due to the science fiction scenario of your choice, the people who have the "right stuff" will survive just fine.
being "several weight classes" above someone doesn't always mean a whole heck of a lot.
The hell it doesn't. Sometimes some less easily visible or quantifiable thing means more. If it didn't matter, no one would ever have endless drunken discussions over who the "best pound for pound fighter" is.
Is playing games for a job less awesome than playing games when it isn't your job? Yes.
Is it still awesome? Yes.
I'm sure it'd be more fun to be independantly wealthy and play games for fun all the time, But I bet on the whole, he's having more fun than if he were a typewriter salesman by day and a gamer by night.
Congratulations on thinking up the lousiest examples of circumstantial evidence ever. Of course it's stupid to arrest someone on circumstantial evidence if that evidence is, in fact, stupid.
Can I play too? Ok, your neighbors saw you and your wife leave your house Saturday and don't remember seeing the car in your driveway the rest of the day. Sunday your wife was found buried in a shallow grave a few hours drive from your house. Nearby was found a shovel with the "Ace Hardware" sticker intact. There's a receipt on your credit card for a shovel bought at an ace hardware in the town 5 miles from the body. A search of your garage has not turned up any shovels.
All circumstantial evidence, mind you. I guess someone would have to be a real idiot to suspect you merely based on that.
On the other hand, just ignoring the problem will drive some of those people to revenge killings - this is what happens in societies that break down, like Iraq. The government is seen as powerless or uncaring, so people take matters into their own hands...
And of course this is a real problem in the EU where the death sentence is illegal because of a variety of treaties. Revenge killings are commonplace and... oh, hold on, no they're not. Must be something wrong with your logic.
And of course throughout the EU governments are clearly just ignoring the problem. As soon as the death penalty was abolished, they just stopped doing anything to punish muderers.
Oh, I get it. So you should only delay the ruling if you're wrong. In this case the 6th circuit was right. Hey, you know, maybe we could make this whole procedure simpler by not even having appeals courts, and simply asking the judge who made the ruling whether it should stand or not.
I guess you'll need one of those things that Wine Is Not.
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't like the idea that some people make intrisicly "good" programers, and the rest are all somehow "bad"; as if some of us had bigger brains or something
Every skill is a function of talent and training. The cornerstone of elitism is to grossly overestimate the role of talent, but to dismiss it altogether is no less foolish.
in cold seasons, the power consumption will just turn into heat and make itself slightly useful
That will serve to offset the cost a lot, but not completely, because chances are your household heat is provided by either gas (which costs less per joule) or a heat pump (which is over 100% efficient because it can steal heat from outside).
You wouldn't be revoking my previously existing right to copy it to papyrus, you'd be granting me the previously non-existing right to copy it to anything other than papyrus.
If a company wants to cater to the disabled (or the brown-eyed or Asians or left-handed Latinos), it should be able to make that decision for itself. But nobody has a RIGHT to do business with any particular company.
In our society there are certainly instances where one does have that right. You can't be thrown out of McDonalds because your black. You can't be thrown out of Home Depot because you're a woman. You can't be thrown out of Target because you can't see. And now it would seem you can't be thrown out of Target's website because you can't see, either.
And how would i easily put these soundfiles together in such a way so that a hacker wouldn't simply do hash checks of each sound and use them to identify the letter/number being said?
Similar to the way you easily put together images in such a way so that a hacker wouldn't simply do hash checks of each image and use them to identify the letter/number being shown.
This is more of a cover-your-ass routine so that people with little prior understanding of technology don't buy something completely unsuitable then come back ranting and raving.
Are you saying that only elderly people can be technological lunkheads?
That's a rather disingenuous question; his statement does not reasonably allow for such an interpretation.
Obviously he's saying that if you assume that a given person is a technological lunkhead, you're more likely to be correct if that person is elderly. Of course he's right. His experience bears it out, my experience bears it out, and I'd bet yours does too.
Just because that fact is true doesn't justify building a policy around it, of course. Our society takes a dim view of making decisions based on who someone is rather than what they've done, and rightly so in my opinion. Throwing away some statistically useful data is a small sacrifice to make on the altar of egalitarianism.
I'm working real hard to avoid invoking Godwin's law here, but part of following orders is facing the obvious consequences of those orders. Boss tells you to shovel horse manure? You're going to get dirty, and it's not the horses' fault. Boss tells you to kick a beehive? You're going to get stung, and it's not the bees' fault. Boss tells you to stand under a falling rock? you're going to get injured, and it's not Issac Newton's fault. Boss tells you to treat me like dirt? I am not without sympathy, but I will do my best to ensure that your path of least resistance is to appease me rather than him, and I feel no remorse for doing so.
I just don't see the point of removing the DRM from a paid for iTunes file, because FairPlay does seem pretty generous with what you are allowed to do with it.
Why would that bird ever want out of that gilded cage? It's so shiny.
you never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and need to use swap... no matter how much RAM you've got.
You never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and swap combined, no matter how much swapspace you've got.
a piece of bad AJAX code that ran overnight wound up using all the RAM and had some seriously detrimental effects on the performance of the server
too bad you had all that swapspace for it to run rabid across. if you'd had no swap at all, 1 of 2 things would have happened:
the kernel kills the process because of a low memory condition
an attempt to allocate memory fails. The application then handles this somehow. Since we've established that it's a lousy application, I'd guess it handles it by crashing.
Either way, the Dude^W server abides.
Naturally if you actually had that much physical RAM, the process would have still gone nuts, but your server wouldn't have had to thrash its disk for every process except the prodigal son, so the performance hit probably wouldn't have been noticeable.
I'm a little mystified why the author doesn't recommend making a live CD of your favorite Linux distro.
I'm just guessing, here, but that might be because it's "A Guide to Troubleshooting Windows XP."
Yes, that would be why he suggested a live CD. Those are often valuable tools for troubleshooting Windows XP. Suggesting an install CD would be flippant, but a live CD is a perfectly good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
If you see two ways to interperet a statement, and one of them doesn't make any fucking sense to you, go with the other one.
That's just not true. It certainly isn't going to be recoverable without taking the drive apart, but there's a reason FIPS standards require multiple overwrites with 1s, 0s, and random bit patterns.
There are filesystems that do this, but not FAT, or NTFS, or EXT2. A file may not get overwritten because it's not the right size (a deleted 1MB file won't make room for a 2MB new file, so the OS might choose a bigger free chunk to drop it in, rather than having to fragment it), but there's no preference given to "clean" bits.
Neither necessary nor sufficient. US Government offices use a secure deletion program like shred(1) (or rather, a variant that they've certified) for sensitive data, and a belt sander for top secret data.
Natural selection favors traits that allow a species to survive in its environment, not in some other environment, such as the one its forbears inhabited.
So, for example, our forefathers were genetically predisposed to not be allergic to peanuts. That was simply not a trait a specimen could express and survive. Nowadays, with effective diagnosis and cortizone shots and "May contain nuts" labels all over the place, it's something you can live with. Nowadays, lots of people are deathly allergic to peanuts, and those people can breed just like everyone else
Does that mean that the current human species is less fit to survive? Well sure, but only in a habitat substantially different from our own. I kinda doubt we could survive on the ocean floor, either, even though we had ancestors that could. I don't hear any whining about that
I suppose in some gut reaction kind of way, being reliant on modern technology makes us less "tough" as a species, and that rankles. But does it rankle more than babies dying all over the place? Than having to worry if your baby in particular is going to bite it for what seems like no good reason? I hardly think so.
It's not like this "damage" is irreversible, either. Genetic drift aside, traits that don't impact fitness in the current environment will vary randomly, so should conditions change due to the science fiction scenario of your choice, the people who have the "right stuff" will survive just fine.
Is playing games for a job less awesome than playing games when it isn't your job? Yes.
Is it still awesome? Yes.
I'm sure it'd be more fun to be independantly wealthy and play games for fun all the time, But I bet on the whole, he's having more fun than if he were a typewriter salesman by day and a gamer by night.
Congratulations on thinking up the lousiest examples of circumstantial evidence ever. Of course it's stupid to arrest someone on circumstantial evidence if that evidence is, in fact, stupid. Can I play too? Ok, your neighbors saw you and your wife leave your house Saturday and don't remember seeing the car in your driveway the rest of the day. Sunday your wife was found buried in a shallow grave a few hours drive from your house. Nearby was found a shovel with the "Ace Hardware" sticker intact. There's a receipt on your credit card for a shovel bought at an ace hardware in the town 5 miles from the body. A search of your garage has not turned up any shovels. All circumstantial evidence, mind you. I guess someone would have to be a real idiot to suspect you merely based on that.
Liberty is an inalienable right as well. States have a nasty habit of taking it away from felons.
Oh, I get it. So you should only delay the ruling if you're wrong. In this case the 6th circuit was right. Hey, you know, maybe we could make this whole procedure simpler by not even having appeals courts, and simply asking the judge who made the ruling whether it should stand or not.
I guess you'll need one of those things that Wine Is Not.
You wouldn't be revoking my previously existing right to copy it to papyrus, you'd be granting me the previously non-existing right to copy it to anything other than papyrus.
http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?200 5/01/01/11-captcha
That's a rather disingenuous question; his statement does not reasonably allow for such an interpretation.
Obviously he's saying that if you assume that a given person is a technological lunkhead, you're more likely to be correct if that person is elderly. Of course he's right. His experience bears it out, my experience bears it out, and I'd bet yours does too.
Just because that fact is true doesn't justify building a policy around it, of course. Our society takes a dim view of making decisions based on who someone is rather than what they've done, and rightly so in my opinion. Throwing away some statistically useful data is a small sacrifice to make on the altar of egalitarianism.
I'm working real hard to avoid invoking Godwin's law here, but part of following orders is facing the obvious consequences of those orders. Boss tells you to shovel horse manure? You're going to get dirty, and it's not the horses' fault. Boss tells you to kick a beehive? You're going to get stung, and it's not the bees' fault. Boss tells you to stand under a falling rock? you're going to get injured, and it's not Issac Newton's fault. Boss tells you to treat me like dirt? I am not without sympathy, but I will do my best to ensure that your path of least resistance is to appease me rather than him, and I feel no remorse for doing so.
So that's what that whoosh sound was.
it is when we do it under duress, or out of fear of reprisal.
- the kernel kills the process because of a low memory condition
- an attempt to allocate memory fails. The application then handles this somehow. Since we've established that it's a lousy application, I'd guess it handles it by crashing.
Either way, the Dude^W server abides.Naturally if you actually had that much physical RAM, the process would have still gone nuts, but your server wouldn't have had to thrash its disk for every process except the prodigal son, so the performance hit probably wouldn't have been noticeable.