Step 1 - If your LVM hasn't forgotten its own configuration yet, get that sucker off an LVM as fast as you possibly can.
When I first discovered LVM (and it had already reached a quite mature V2
at that point), I thought it the greatest thing in volume management since
the invention of the RAID.
I didn't half-ass it, I took my time to learn how it works, set up and broke
a few, added a new PV and grew it to make sure it worked, backed some up, recovered from deliberately broken volumes (which works great - as long
as you never try to bring the broken volume online by, say, rebooting),
etc. Then I turned it on and loved it.
Then I received a hard lesson in what it means to say that JBOD has
a failure rate multiplicatively proportional to that of each
individual drive. And, surprise surprise, LVM amounts to nothing
more than fancy OS-level JBOD, without even the performance boost
of a proper RAID controller.
Thanks but no thanks. If I want to span a volume across multiple disks,
I'll use RAID 5 or 6 from now on, ThankYouVeryMuch. I can only thank
Zeus that I hadn't yet gotten around to cannibalizing my old file server
when the LVM one day decided to eat itself (even if I could have
salvaged something from the individual drives, I couldn't once it "fixed"
its configuration to reflect the new PV set).
Ugh, I don't like cubicles much, but I loathe "Open"
designs.
They work well in living spaces where you feel safe and comfortable,
and make optimal use of soft lighting to relax.
In an office environment, I want by back to a nice solid wall, only
one easy approach vector to my side of the desk, a comfy chair, and
a coffee pot. Outside that, I really don't care (though the fewer
old-style fluorescent light tubes - Up to and including "total
darkness" - the better).
lowering it to the level of a nervous habit akin to chewing gum.
Oddly enough, I agree with you on everything except gum.
Personally, I chew gum because it helps keeps my mouth clean and my teeth
healthy... And yes, some studies have found it lowers stress, but I consider
that a side-benefit rather than an actual reason to chew.
But then, I suppose tis reflects a generational thing... Personally, I would
much rather talk to someone chewing gum over someone on whose breath
you can smell everything they've eaten over the course of the day. Mmmm,
chive and lox, what better way to enforce a 10ft "personal space" zone around
yourself?;-)
Looks about the same size of worms we have here in Ontario.
No kidding... I suspect these things just hide fairly well.
In Northern New England,
I've personally seen worms stretching all the way across my front walkway (over two
feet) during light evening rain - And judging by the speed with which it snapped back
into its hole when I poked at it, I'd say it had more than half its body still
underground at the time.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
Just because we haven't caught and dissected one yet, doesn't mean they don't exist.
That's cool because all the water in the solar system, including almost
every drop you drink on Earth today, must have formed in exactly this way
more than 5 billion years ago in a pre-solar dustcloud
Why must it? Could you justify that statement?
Gravity alone tends to cause interstellar clouds to collapse into stellar accretion
disks, and then into stars and planets.
Although the Hydrogen and Oxygen in the original cloud may have had almost zero
chance of getting together, once the cloud collapsed into relatively dense planetary
atmospheres, why couldn't water have formed then?
I couldn't tell who was what, what I was looking at or even what kind
of conflict the movie centered on.
I'd say you've answered your own question to the GP... Your comments on the
trailer pretty much accurately reflects the original series as well, so it
sounds like you understood it juuuuust fine.;-)
Seriously... Of all the series they could have done a modern live action
remake of, why choose Speed Racer? It had no plot (unless the "secret"
of Racer-X as Speed's long-lost brother counts), no character development (and
that, with completely flat characters to start with), and not even good animation
(though I suppose this movie will at least address that problem).
If this movie does well, it will do so for the novelty of the effects,
and no other reason.
Re:Long time Iron Man fan...
on
Iron Man Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Unless there's someone at your local theater holding a gun to your head, your faux-outrage at being
theoretically forced to do something that you never would have done in the first place is quite amusing.
Who said anything about "forced"?
Some movies really do put interesting "featurettes" after the credits... Pixar has done that a number
of times, and I do not resent sitting through the credits for more actual content.
However, the FP article made it sound like Iron Man would have something similar, and the post to
which I responded acted annoyed that the GP outed the "surprise" as nothing more than the
equivalent of a Rick-Roll.
So yes, it would have greatly annoyed me to voluntarily (I neither said nor implied anything about
"forced") sit through the credits expecting to see more actual content, only to watch an ad.
Well, you just keep raging against the machine, li'l mister too cool to get excited about an upcoming movie.
Hey, if you like calling yourself a "consumer", good for you. My time has value beyond the number of ad
impressions The Sponsors can trick me into watching per minute. I have nothing against you getting excited to
watch an ad, I simply have no desire whatsoever to do so myself.
Re:Long time Iron Man fan...
on
Iron Man Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Thanks for spoiling the surprise, dickass.
Spoiler? Wha???
Put down the corporate-shill-crack-pipe, my friend. I would have felt
mightily pissed to sit through 20 minutes of "3rd reserve gaffer
to the animal trainer's assistant coffee-wench", only to watch a goddamned
advertisement.
Yes, advertisement. Wake up, people - "trailers" do not count as
"content" to eagerly look forward to, they count as the same BS we pay
$200-$400 for fancy digital VCR-like boxes that let us skip them.
So, a hearty thank you to the GP post, for saving me from wasting an extra 20
minutes only to leave the theater infuriated.
I'd certainly be more likely to take a vacation somewhere if I knew I'd get a huge bill from the government if I got lost.
Y'know, you (indirectly) make an interesting point...
If a kid climbs my fence and drowns in my swimming pool, I somehow end up liable for that.
Yet Nevada advertises this "attractive nuissance" of theirs, some rich guy comes to
play over their "beautiful" vast tracks of desert wasteland, and goes missing. And his
widow gets to pay the tab???
You can't beat the government, but I can certainly understand and root for those who try.
Good literature? I've never seen it. I don't know
why people bother reading a bunch of made up crap
Well, because humanity has an innate drive to surpass our present state
of existance, rather than pointlessly trying to fight unavoidable change.
Some people improve what we have now incrementally. Some people
take existing ideas to their logical (or sometimes beyond) extreme,
which can't exist yet but someday may. And some people don't
let any existing reality (or limitations thereto) get in the way of
their flights-of-fancy, coming up with ideas so fantastic they
inspire the rest of us to keep putting one metaphorical foot in
front of the other, knowing we'll never personally stand on a
planet orbiting another star, but that someday, our descendants could.
it's a lot more interesting (and fun) to read about real
things that actually happen.
No one can call you "wrong" in preferring history to fantasy. But
realize that you express a matter of opinion, not fact.
BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's
VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic.
...Or, for those interested in FOSS versions (and more cross-platform
to boot), you could try
SmallBasic.
I first used it because I couldn't find any other decent interpreters
for an ancient Palm, then discovered it supported just about every
platform I regularly use (oddly enough, however, no official Mac
build exists, though I'd imagine you could get the Linux version
to build on OS X).
And now, I even keep a copy installed on any Windows machines I use...
VB.Net may have a lot more power, but (at the risk of sounding
elitist), who the hell wants to code in Basic if you need to go
through all the trouble of creating a project and compiling? Basic
excels at one task - Near-instant testing of small blocks of code,
up to "toy" one-off programs. And for that, it works perfectly.
I don't think it'll be big. E-paper/ink readers are here
and they just need to get faster, cheaper, bigger displays,
thinner, and evenntually color
While a niche certainly exists for what you describe, e-readers
in anything even vaguely like their current form will simply never replace paper.
Now, if/when nanotech lets us make them so thin, cheap,
and high resolution that telling the difference from real paper
would require more than casual inspection, they might really
replace dead trees. I don't see that happening in under 20 years,
however.
For now, I would love paper that I could reuse
a few times. Most of what I print out at work, for example,
has a meaningful lifespan of under an hour. The ability to
reuse that paper even a few dozen times would save whole trees
over the course of a year, just for me (and I tend to use small fonts,
duplex everything, and encourage people to use email as much
as possible). Modern office environments quite simply waste (literally)
TONS of paper for short-term purposes.
Those who haven't had to walk through the coals are far
more likely to use the exact tech terms and lose the user
claiming superiority and user error instead of lack of
communication skills.
Having worked on both sides of the "glass IT desk", I can
confidently say that virtually all problems do result
from user error, oftentimes bordering on sheer stupidity.
Sorry, but you can only walk so many people - people who
use a Windows machine daily, both for work and at home - through
the concept of double-clicking, before you come to realize that
most people should not have access to computers.
"Okay, I found the source of your virus... It came in an emailed
fake greeting-card. Not sure how you got infected, though, your
AV works and can detect this one..."
"Well, I wanted to see the greeting card attached, and this stupid
window kept popping up saying it had blocked my attempt to run it."
"So... Your AV program told you it contained a virus?
Why did you disable your AV program and run it???"
"I told you, I wanted to see the greeting card!"
"Did you know the sender and not believe it had a virus?"
"No, never heard of him, and it went right to my junkmail
folder... I didn't even know about it until the popup told
me about it, and some crap about it having worms".
< sound of head repeatedly hitting desk in a sad attempt to kill
enough brain cells to remain sane >
they've temporarily blocked the US Department of
Justice from editing pages for suspicious edits.
Because, y'know, the DOJ only has a single point of entry to the
internet, and couldn't possibly get around this block by,
say, having people doing it from their home PCs...
What is the best way to implement a Dead Man's Switch
on personal data (laptop, online accounts etc).
Just store it using "real" encryption, and never
write down the key.
Yes, someday computers will advance to the point
where they can crack it, but any interest in you will have
long since vanished. Effectively, when you die and the
key goes with you, anything encrypted with it reverts to
nothing more than a random string of bits (for at least the
next 20 years or so).
BTW - Am I the only one having problems with the new Reply
box?
Nope - I have yet to get the damned thing to work. Haven't managed
a single post using it, I always have to use the "old" form.
Perhaps it would work better if I logged in before posting, but
I almost never do - I read anonymously, and only log in when I
post.
In similar cases in the past, online services have almost ubiquitously
refused, until compelled by a court order, to help the next of kin
access the deceased's account. Don't even bother asking - They'll
just lock the account, preventing any attempts at cracking it.
It's illegal
IANAL, but no legal or ethical issue exists here (his heirs now
"own" those accounts) - I see this as no different than helping
a friend crack their own account after forgetting the
password); other than simply not wanting to get involved with a
family's grief, no reason exists not to try cracking anything
that may answer the family's questions.
And I'd lay much better odds on his GMail or private MySpace
account answering those, than that he left something useful on a
laptop.
Consider your own machines and accounts - Or, take me as an example,
if you like. For my laptop, everything even remotely personal
on it lives in a TrueCrypt volume, with the password written
nowhere except my own brain; and before I discovered
TrueCrypt, I simply didn't keep anything personal on my computers
at all. On my primary home PC, you'll find plenty of stuff
my family wouldn't want to see (*cough*porn*cough*), but
again, almost nothing personal. If, however, you look at
my GMail accounts, you can find out pretty much everyone I know,
most of my business dealings (excluding actual financial details,
of course), most of my hobbies and interests, and probably
something (not necessarily relevant, of course) from
the previous few hours of my life.
His Linux laptop is fair game though. In fact, probably not that
hard to crack.
Despite what I wrote above, I too would start with the laptop. At
the very least, his browsing history will tell where he has gone
recently. And if lucky, he lets his browser automatically log him
in to most of the sites he visits, making "cracking" his online
accounts as trivial as logging in as him and firing up FireFox.
London MPs have expressed doubt as to whether the UK will
receive value for the money it will pay, but have acknowledged
that the British government doesn't actually have any choice
about Galileo under EU funding rules.
Don't have any say???
As if EU members needed any more reasons to disband
their borderline-organized-crime overlords, I'd say that
aught to push any holdouts over the edge.
Using extorted farm subsidies, for an already-failed space
program (Galileo specifically - I don't mean to condemn the
entire ESA), with the actual funding nations having no recourse?
Imagine that! Video cameras more expensive than still cameras!
Except, the described purpose doesn't actually require 30fps video,
just a high enough frame rate that you'll get at least a few of the criminal
at various angles.
And that $180 6MP camera can take pictures "fast enough" for the purpose described,
usually limited only by the speed of writing to its storage medium (my own, not all
that far from the stated "$180 6MP", can take 4-5 pictures per second).
I recommend you invest in a quality still-picture digital camera if you want
an economic solution for high quality digital imaging.
You may have more experience in this area than I do, but I've looked, on occasion
(for the same purpose as the FP), and we have one slight problem - None exist designed
for the power/mounting/enclosure/control styles suitable for security cameras. For want
of a $0.50 bracket and a $1.50 servo, we have to go from "cheap digital camera with pretty
good quality images" to "extremely expensive crap (for an extra $2 in hardware) in glorious
QVGA or NTSC quality".
Yes, plenty of other security-camera specific features exist, and we might find them
worth paying for (IR illumination, variable focus, weatherproof/ruggedizes, etc) on top
of a reasonable base price. But as a geek, I just can't compare the two and call the
"security" camera market anything more than thieves preying on the other end of the same
set of victims.
The big area for debate around prototyes is wheather or not they should be realeased.
I don't think the question involves "should", so much as "at what price". Pretty much everyone except
the physical owners agrees that these things should hit the 'net for the benefit of us all.
it's still likely to be someone's intellectual property
While technically and legally true, these things come from companies that went under years ago. Many in the emulation
community have even tried establishing various chains-of-IP-ownership, to get official permission
to play/own/distribute them, only to end up with such a murky end that you have to wonder if it really counts
to get "permission" from the son-by-another-marriage of the widow of a random developer who went unpaid
in company X's collapse.
But morally and ethically, this amounts to a no-brainer. As much interest as we enthusiasts may have for
getting our hands on an unreleased game, they essentially have zero commerical value aside from the
physical collectibles, such as the EEPROMs themselves as found by the FP author (and you
could argue that you can't even legally sell those, since no plausibly kosher path exists from the dev's lab
to physical possession).
Hell, these things don't even have any serious play value... The small percentage of "fun" Atari 2600 games
(out of the roughly 2600 games (auspiciously enough) known to exist) attests to that. Given a random ancient
video game, you can pretty much presume it will suck.;-)
A lot of collectors refuse to relase prototypes they've discovered incase it lowers the value of them.
And we burn wheat rather than give it to starving third worlders. That doesn't make it right.
I did an analysis of all the code I've written a year or so ago, and I found that there
is approximately one usage of a pointer in every 5700 lines of code (the way I write it, at least).
If you ignore the fact that arrays exist as pointers, you could probably say the same for plain ol' vanilla
C. 99% of code doesn't need anything more than a few KB in stack variables; 99% of the remainder doesn't actually
need dynamic allocation, it just needs a big chunk o' statically-allocated heap.
And what remains? Yes, boys and girls, computers can and do use memory in messy, potentially dangerous, ways.
If you can't actually cook when the package doesn't come with microwave directions, get the hell out of the kitchen.
and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
Well, that proves you as a troll right there...
Even Christian rock bands avoid the label like the plague... Mention Jesus in a pop song, and you
sound religious; Get labelled "Christian Rock" and you may as well turn into a Barry Manilow cover band
for all the respect you'll get.
Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect.
No. First of all, if you really target the niche you claim, kids do not shop
at your store without their grannies. Second, not even granny would consider
it "lete" to upload a "family friendly" album anywhere. And third, if you carry
anything (non-local, of course) that I can't already get online, I'll give you a
sale and buy it from you just for the novelty.
I'll use this in class to point out the importance of good backup strategies.
And security: this data should not have left the company.
Riiiight... Because this doesn't make a perfect example of why such information can do
the world good, long after a company has ceased to exist as a viable market presence.
You might want to gloss that bit over in class. "Remember, protect everything,
because your company will always sit at the top of the niche-X market, will never
go bankrupt, and no one will ever care about your work long after the fact".
Personally, I consider the rarity of amazing find like this, further proof of the
absurdity of existing copyright law. Copyright exists to grant a limited monopoly
on creative works, rather than making them vanish into obscurity (deliberately, as with the
BBC's pre-1970 archive purge, or not, as with all nitrate and acetate film ever made).
We need copyright to expire early enough that society can preseve both the released form
and any historically-interesting raw materials (ie, source code). Not only that,
I would go further, to say that we need to require the eventual release of such
raw materials, for the grant of copyright in the first place.
I don't know about C# but in java null pointers are a lot less dangerous than null pointers are in C.
As long as we assume that the VM has no bugs.
The FP article specifically points out the untruth of that assumptionl; and if you consider
this "the last one", I have a bridge for sale...
I mentioned that C mirrors how the hardware behaves for a reason other than
the performance. When you write for a JVM, or the ActionScript VM, or whatever safety net
you prefer, your code still ends up doing something at the same unsafe hardware level you
so disdain.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1 - If your LVM hasn't forgotten its own configuration yet, get that sucker off an LVM as fast as you possibly can.
When I first discovered LVM (and it had already reached a quite mature V2 at that point), I thought it the greatest thing in volume management since the invention of the RAID.
I didn't half-ass it, I took my time to learn how it works, set up and broke a few, added a new PV and grew it to make sure it worked, backed some up, recovered from deliberately broken volumes (which works great - as long as you never try to bring the broken volume online by, say, rebooting), etc. Then I turned it on and loved it.
Then I received a hard lesson in what it means to say that JBOD has a failure rate multiplicatively proportional to that of each individual drive. And, surprise surprise, LVM amounts to nothing more than fancy OS-level JBOD, without even the performance boost of a proper RAID controller.
Thanks but no thanks. If I want to span a volume across multiple disks, I'll use RAID 5 or 6 from now on, ThankYouVeryMuch. I can only thank Zeus that I hadn't yet gotten around to cannibalizing my old file server when the LVM one day decided to eat itself (even if I could have salvaged something from the individual drives, I couldn't once it "fixed" its configuration to reflect the new PV set).
Open Plan for the win.
Ugh, I don't like cubicles much, but I loathe "Open" designs.
They work well in living spaces where you feel safe and comfortable, and make optimal use of soft lighting to relax.
In an office environment, I want by back to a nice solid wall, only one easy approach vector to my side of the desk, a comfy chair, and a coffee pot. Outside that, I really don't care (though the fewer old-style fluorescent light tubes - Up to and including "total darkness" - the better).
with the real doll, eating a sandwich playing wii....
Uh, mods? RFTA before casting people into the pit.
The parent post doesn't count as OT (or a troll)... I saw pretty much the same sidebar ads when I visited the page.
lowering it to the level of a nervous habit akin to chewing gum.
;-)
Oddly enough, I agree with you on everything except gum.
Personally, I chew gum because it helps keeps my mouth clean and my teeth healthy... And yes, some studies have found it lowers stress, but I consider that a side-benefit rather than an actual reason to chew.
But then, I suppose tis reflects a generational thing... Personally, I would much rather talk to someone chewing gum over someone on whose breath you can smell everything they've eaten over the course of the day. Mmmm, chive and lox, what better way to enforce a 10ft "personal space" zone around yourself?
Looks about the same size of worms we have here in Ontario.
No kidding... I suspect these things just hide fairly well.
In Northern New England, I've personally seen worms stretching all the way across my front walkway (over two feet) during light evening rain - And judging by the speed with which it snapped back into its hole when I poked at it, I'd say it had more than half its body still underground at the time.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Just because we haven't caught and dissected one yet, doesn't mean they don't exist.
That's cool because all the water in the solar system, including almost every drop you drink on Earth today, must have formed in exactly this way more than 5 billion years ago in a pre-solar dustcloud
Why must it? Could you justify that statement?
Gravity alone tends to cause interstellar clouds to collapse into stellar accretion disks, and then into stars and planets.
Although the Hydrogen and Oxygen in the original cloud may have had almost zero chance of getting together, once the cloud collapsed into relatively dense planetary atmospheres, why couldn't water have formed then?
I couldn't tell who was what, what I was looking at or even what kind of conflict the movie centered on.
;-)
I'd say you've answered your own question to the GP... Your comments on the trailer pretty much accurately reflects the original series as well, so it sounds like you understood it juuuuust fine.
Seriously... Of all the series they could have done a modern live action remake of, why choose Speed Racer? It had no plot (unless the "secret" of Racer-X as Speed's long-lost brother counts), no character development (and that, with completely flat characters to start with), and not even good animation (though I suppose this movie will at least address that problem).
If this movie does well, it will do so for the novelty of the effects, and no other reason.
Unless there's someone at your local theater holding a gun to your head, your faux-outrage at being theoretically forced to do something that you never would have done in the first place is quite amusing.
Who said anything about "forced"?
Some movies really do put interesting "featurettes" after the credits... Pixar has done that a number of times, and I do not resent sitting through the credits for more actual content.
However, the FP article made it sound like Iron Man would have something similar, and the post to which I responded acted annoyed that the GP outed the "surprise" as nothing more than the equivalent of a Rick-Roll.
So yes, it would have greatly annoyed me to voluntarily (I neither said nor implied anything about "forced") sit through the credits expecting to see more actual content, only to watch an ad.
Well, you just keep raging against the machine, li'l mister too cool to get excited about an upcoming movie.
Hey, if you like calling yourself a "consumer", good for you. My time has value beyond the number of ad impressions The Sponsors can trick me into watching per minute. I have nothing against you getting excited to watch an ad, I simply have no desire whatsoever to do so myself.
Thanks for spoiling the surprise, dickass.
Spoiler? Wha???
Put down the corporate-shill-crack-pipe, my friend. I would have felt mightily pissed to sit through 20 minutes of "3rd reserve gaffer to the animal trainer's assistant coffee-wench", only to watch a goddamned advertisement.
Yes, advertisement. Wake up, people - "trailers" do not count as "content" to eagerly look forward to, they count as the same BS we pay $200-$400 for fancy digital VCR-like boxes that let us skip them.
So, a hearty thank you to the GP post, for saving me from wasting an extra 20 minutes only to leave the theater infuriated.
I'd certainly be more likely to take a vacation somewhere if I knew I'd get a huge bill from the government if I got lost.
Y'know, you (indirectly) make an interesting point...
If a kid climbs my fence and drowns in my swimming pool, I somehow end up liable for that.
Yet Nevada advertises this "attractive nuissance" of theirs, some rich guy comes to play over their "beautiful" vast tracks of desert wasteland, and goes missing. And his widow gets to pay the tab???
You can't beat the government, but I can certainly understand and root for those who try.
Good literature? I've never seen it. I don't know why people bother reading a bunch of made up crap
Well, because humanity has an innate drive to surpass our present state of existance, rather than pointlessly trying to fight unavoidable change.
Some people improve what we have now incrementally. Some people take existing ideas to their logical (or sometimes beyond) extreme, which can't exist yet but someday may. And some people don't let any existing reality (or limitations thereto) get in the way of their flights-of-fancy, coming up with ideas so fantastic they inspire the rest of us to keep putting one metaphorical foot in front of the other, knowing we'll never personally stand on a planet orbiting another star, but that someday, our descendants could.
it's a lot more interesting (and fun) to read about real things that actually happen.
No one can call you "wrong" in preferring history to fantasy. But realize that you express a matter of opinion, not fact.
BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic.
...Or, for those interested in FOSS versions (and more cross-platform
to boot), you could try
SmallBasic.
I first used it because I couldn't find any other decent interpreters for an ancient Palm, then discovered it supported just about every platform I regularly use (oddly enough, however, no official Mac build exists, though I'd imagine you could get the Linux version to build on OS X).
And now, I even keep a copy installed on any Windows machines I use... VB.Net may have a lot more power, but (at the risk of sounding elitist), who the hell wants to code in Basic if you need to go through all the trouble of creating a project and compiling? Basic excels at one task - Near-instant testing of small blocks of code, up to "toy" one-off programs. And for that, it works perfectly.
I don't think it'll be big. E-paper/ink readers are here and they just need to get faster, cheaper, bigger displays, thinner, and evenntually color
While a niche certainly exists for what you describe, e-readers in anything even vaguely like their current form will simply never replace paper.
Now, if/when nanotech lets us make them so thin, cheap, and high resolution that telling the difference from real paper would require more than casual inspection, they might really replace dead trees. I don't see that happening in under 20 years, however.
For now, I would love paper that I could reuse a few times. Most of what I print out at work, for example, has a meaningful lifespan of under an hour. The ability to reuse that paper even a few dozen times would save whole trees over the course of a year, just for me (and I tend to use small fonts, duplex everything, and encourage people to use email as much as possible). Modern office environments quite simply waste (literally) TONS of paper for short-term purposes.
Those who haven't had to walk through the coals are far more likely to use the exact tech terms and lose the user claiming superiority and user error instead of lack of communication skills.
Having worked on both sides of the "glass IT desk", I can confidently say that virtually all problems do result from user error, oftentimes bordering on sheer stupidity.
Sorry, but you can only walk so many people - people who use a Windows machine daily, both for work and at home - through the concept of double-clicking, before you come to realize that most people should not have access to computers.
"Okay, I found the source of your virus... It came in an emailed fake greeting-card. Not sure how you got infected, though, your AV works and can detect this one..."
"Well, I wanted to see the greeting card attached, and this stupid window kept popping up saying it had blocked my attempt to run it."
"So... Your AV program told you it contained a virus? Why did you disable your AV program and run it???"
"I told you, I wanted to see the greeting card!"
"Did you know the sender and not believe it had a virus?"
"No, never heard of him, and it went right to my junkmail folder... I didn't even know about it until the popup told me about it, and some crap about it having worms".
< sound of head repeatedly hitting desk in a sad attempt to kill enough brain cells to remain sane >
they've temporarily blocked the US Department of Justice from editing pages for suspicious edits.
Because, y'know, the DOJ only has a single point of entry to the internet, and couldn't possibly get around this block by, say, having people doing it from their home PCs...
What is the best way to implement a Dead Man's Switch on personal data (laptop, online accounts etc).
Just store it using "real" encryption, and never write down the key.
Yes, someday computers will advance to the point where they can crack it, but any interest in you will have long since vanished. Effectively, when you die and the key goes with you, anything encrypted with it reverts to nothing more than a random string of bits (for at least the next 20 years or so).
BTW - Am I the only one having problems with the new Reply box?
Nope - I have yet to get the damned thing to work. Haven't managed a single post using it, I always have to use the "old" form.
Perhaps it would work better if I logged in before posting, but I almost never do - I read anonymously, and only log in when I post.
I'd not try to crack online services.
In similar cases in the past, online services have almost ubiquitously refused, until compelled by a court order, to help the next of kin access the deceased's account. Don't even bother asking - They'll just lock the account, preventing any attempts at cracking it.
It's illegal
IANAL, but no legal or ethical issue exists here (his heirs now "own" those accounts) - I see this as no different than helping a friend crack their own account after forgetting the password); other than simply not wanting to get involved with a family's grief, no reason exists not to try cracking anything that may answer the family's questions.
And I'd lay much better odds on his GMail or private MySpace account answering those, than that he left something useful on a laptop.
Consider your own machines and accounts - Or, take me as an example, if you like. For my laptop, everything even remotely personal on it lives in a TrueCrypt volume, with the password written nowhere except my own brain; and before I discovered TrueCrypt, I simply didn't keep anything personal on my computers at all. On my primary home PC, you'll find plenty of stuff my family wouldn't want to see (*cough*porn*cough*), but again, almost nothing personal. If, however, you look at my GMail accounts, you can find out pretty much everyone I know, most of my business dealings (excluding actual financial details, of course), most of my hobbies and interests, and probably something (not necessarily relevant, of course) from the previous few hours of my life.
His Linux laptop is fair game though. In fact, probably not that hard to crack.
Despite what I wrote above, I too would start with the laptop. At the very least, his browsing history will tell where he has gone recently. And if lucky, he lets his browser automatically log him in to most of the sites he visits, making "cracking" his online accounts as trivial as logging in as him and firing up FireFox.
London MPs have expressed doubt as to whether the UK will receive value for the money it will pay, but have acknowledged that the British government doesn't actually have any choice about Galileo under EU funding rules.
Don't have any say???
As if EU members needed any more reasons to disband their borderline-organized-crime overlords, I'd say that aught to push any holdouts over the edge.
Using extorted farm subsidies, for an already-failed space program (Galileo specifically - I don't mean to condemn the entire ESA), with the actual funding nations having no recourse?
Daaaaaaaamn!
Imagine that! Video cameras more expensive than still cameras!
Except, the described purpose doesn't actually require 30fps video, just a high enough frame rate that you'll get at least a few of the criminal at various angles.
And that $180 6MP camera can take pictures "fast enough" for the purpose described, usually limited only by the speed of writing to its storage medium (my own, not all that far from the stated "$180 6MP", can take 4-5 pictures per second).
I recommend you invest in a quality still-picture digital camera if you want an economic solution for high quality digital imaging.
You may have more experience in this area than I do, but I've looked, on occasion (for the same purpose as the FP), and we have one slight problem - None exist designed for the power/mounting/enclosure/control styles suitable for security cameras. For want of a $0.50 bracket and a $1.50 servo, we have to go from "cheap digital camera with pretty good quality images" to "extremely expensive crap (for an extra $2 in hardware) in glorious QVGA or NTSC quality".
Yes, plenty of other security-camera specific features exist, and we might find them worth paying for (IR illumination, variable focus, weatherproof/ruggedizes, etc) on top of a reasonable base price. But as a geek, I just can't compare the two and call the "security" camera market anything more than thieves preying on the other end of the same set of victims.
The big area for debate around prototyes is wheather or not they should be realeased.
;-)
I don't think the question involves "should", so much as "at what price". Pretty much everyone except the physical owners agrees that these things should hit the 'net for the benefit of us all.
it's still likely to be someone's intellectual property
While technically and legally true, these things come from companies that went under years ago. Many in the emulation community have even tried establishing various chains-of-IP-ownership, to get official permission to play/own/distribute them, only to end up with such a murky end that you have to wonder if it really counts to get "permission" from the son-by-another-marriage of the widow of a random developer who went unpaid in company X's collapse.
But morally and ethically, this amounts to a no-brainer. As much interest as we enthusiasts may have for getting our hands on an unreleased game, they essentially have zero commerical value aside from the physical collectibles, such as the EEPROMs themselves as found by the FP author (and you could argue that you can't even legally sell those, since no plausibly kosher path exists from the dev's lab to physical possession).
Hell, these things don't even have any serious play value... The small percentage of "fun" Atari 2600 games (out of the roughly 2600 games (auspiciously enough) known to exist) attests to that. Given a random ancient video game, you can pretty much presume it will suck.
A lot of collectors refuse to relase prototypes they've discovered incase it lowers the value of them.
And we burn wheat rather than give it to starving third worlders. That doesn't make it right.
I did an analysis of all the code I've written a year or so ago, and I found that there is approximately one usage of a pointer in every 5700 lines of code (the way I write it, at least).
If you ignore the fact that arrays exist as pointers, you could probably say the same for plain ol' vanilla C. 99% of code doesn't need anything more than a few KB in stack variables; 99% of the remainder doesn't actually need dynamic allocation, it just needs a big chunk o' statically-allocated heap.
And what remains? Yes, boys and girls, computers can and do use memory in messy, potentially dangerous, ways. If you can't actually cook when the package doesn't come with microwave directions, get the hell out of the kitchen.
and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
Well, that proves you as a troll right there...
Even Christian rock bands avoid the label like the plague... Mention Jesus in a pop song, and you sound religious; Get labelled "Christian Rock" and you may as well turn into a Barry Manilow cover band for all the respect you'll get.
Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect.
No. First of all, if you really target the niche you claim, kids do not shop at your store without their grannies. Second, not even granny would consider it "lete" to upload a "family friendly" album anywhere. And third, if you carry anything (non-local, of course) that I can't already get online, I'll give you a sale and buy it from you just for the novelty.
And in English?
A = anonymous Wiki node, B = Independent article.
A make a claim with B as a reference.
B makes the same claim with A as the reference.
Thus, both sources have technically substantiated their claim, despite the niggling li'l absence of "truth".
I'll use this in class to point out the importance of good backup strategies. And security: this data should not have left the company.
Riiiight... Because this doesn't make a perfect example of why such information can do the world good, long after a company has ceased to exist as a viable market presence.
You might want to gloss that bit over in class. "Remember, protect everything, because your company will always sit at the top of the niche-X market, will never go bankrupt, and no one will ever care about your work long after the fact".
Personally, I consider the rarity of amazing find like this, further proof of the absurdity of existing copyright law. Copyright exists to grant a limited monopoly on creative works, rather than making them vanish into obscurity (deliberately, as with the BBC's pre-1970 archive purge, or not, as with all nitrate and acetate film ever made).
We need copyright to expire early enough that society can preseve both the released form and any historically-interesting raw materials (ie, source code). Not only that, I would go further, to say that we need to require the eventual release of such raw materials, for the grant of copyright in the first place.
I don't know about C# but in java null pointers are a lot less dangerous than null pointers are in C.
As long as we assume that the VM has no bugs.
The FP article specifically points out the untruth of that assumptionl; and if you consider this "the last one", I have a bridge for sale...
I mentioned that C mirrors how the hardware behaves for a reason other than the performance. When you write for a JVM, or the ActionScript VM, or whatever safety net you prefer, your code still ends up doing something at the same unsafe hardware level you so disdain.