I can't tell if this post is offtopic or not because I am unclear as to what the YRO section of slashdot actually means.
So, with the context of this article, is it my right to be the victim of fraud and racketeering? Is it my right to violate copyright if I think the law is wrong? Is it my right to be a web hermit?
My point is that the YRO section seems to be confused between the controversial stuff like copyrights and patents and generic legal stuff like this article where I would imagine that few or no slashdotters would see this as being controversial or a violation of or rights or the people who are being arrested.
Of course, I did not read the article, but it seems as though these guys were bad guys and got caught for it. So, my thoughts are, gambling is bad m'kay. Getting arrested by the FBI when your being bad is bad m'kay. My rights do not appear to be violated and this does not seem like a controversial YRO article m'kay.
But I have to wonder. If high-tech medicine is actually effective--not just awe-inspiring, exciting, and, well, entertaining--why is it that with so much of the stuff, the United States ranks about #40 in infant mortality (worse than New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia)? Why is our life expectancy only 78 years when forty-seven other countries, including Aruba, Spain, and Iceland, do better?
These are social problems, not technical ones.
For example, why are there hungry, homeless people in XYXYE when there are plenty of houses and plenty of wasted food in the world?
Although myths expand beyond the US, the US is full of them.
The first myth is that "everyone is created equal". Wrong. Crack babies or those born with AIDS are not equal to those who are born to say Hilton Hotel fortunes.
Another myth is that "since everyone is created equal, its just hard work that makes different outcomes". Bzzt. Wrong. There are plenty of people that work very hard and barely make ends meat, and there are those that are pretty much slackers that do quite well. Also, see myth #1.
Back to the medical issues here in the US.
Give a calculator to someone who can't add, and they cannot mysteriously add. The same applies to doctors. In my experience, doctors are not all they are cracked up to be. Yes, there are exceptions, but your average to below average doctor is very skilled at making money and memorizing crap in med school, but any of us in the tech field knows that KSAs have to be updated constantly, and also a majority of minor medical issues will be healed merely by time. Sure the puserman/snake oil thing still works, and can be fun, but medical doctors have not spent the time and effort in prevention of health problems and maintenance of health vs say dental doctors. A quick quiz of your parent's dental health and other health issues should be suffice here.
Also here in the US, medicine is just business, and a BIG business as well. Supposedly most of those nice cars in the hospital parking lot belong to those in the subbed out billing and insurance businesses, not direct medical staff. So, even though health care seems to be expensive, your making great involuntary donations to those poor people in billing and insurance companies.
Also, American culture is filled with lazy, uneducated, and unhealthy fast food eating slobs. When my friends moved here from Japan, they were very let down at how fat and ugly we were compared to the people on TV and movies. Ah, the allure of hollywood.
You do know that someone wrote the lyrics to that song. That someone is not always the singer.
yes. There are many channels for lyrics. Some are basically stolen from random individuals who reply to small ads in the back of Rolling Stone or whatever with little to no compensation to the author. Some are fulltime lyricists like Robert Hunter or John Barlow, and they made sure they were compensated for their lyrics from the beginning.
Now, people that write "lyrics" but don't have them in songs are not lyricists, but rather poets and they have a different avenue for getting paid.
Lyrics over 99.9% of the time only work when sung in a particular song. They don't have much of a royalty value outside of that model. The web lyrics sites are only there for the token advertisement junk like much of the junk on the web. There are about something like 5 or so of them and they battle each other over google rank because none are significantly better than the other because nobody really cares about the "content". Oh, and they have more than just the token lyrics under the RIAA cartel as well.
So, under the slashdot mantra, as all other information, lyrics want to be free!
Personally, I'm waiting for them to put an anal probe up our ass and shocking us when we hear a song on the radio if we don't pay.
I don't see the problem here. Songs, by definition, have lyrics/singing in them, and people go to these sites to read the lyrics after hearing the song on the radio and they can't get the whole thing or don't understand some words, or because looking at the lyrics is different than having them sung to you. People hit these sites after a quick google search and they either click on the first one or the one that that gives them the fewest spyware or whatever.
AFAIK, there is not "Official" RIAA compliant version available whatsoever, but these people feel "they are above the law!" and just want to pull access to these sites, even though the song is the canonical source. Its rare, and no business model whatsoever for someone to pay to read lyrics to songs on the web without having the song.
This reminds me of the baseball outfits claiming all our data belongs to us with the web stats sites and/or books. Does anyone else see a similarity between these two, and does anyone know the status of the baseball stats?
urandom is of course more predictable than an infinite set of zeros. Also, the bs= parameter is MUCH faster than doing it one character at a time (the default for dd). YMMV, with the size of bs but the cache size on the disk seems reasonable to me, maybe a little less, but something greater than 1 byte at a time.
Also, I was being silly with the predictable part, but also using dd is almost exclusively in kernel space, not userspace (hence, the need to be root). I hope the parent was being funny there as well.
Good luck in destroying your drive more efficiently:)
A given distro can now come with a handy Windows InstallShield Wizard and INSTALL UNDER WINDOWS and BOOT/SHARE the same partition.
Is this new?
I may be delusional, but I thought there was a way years ago via loadlin.exe and something like umsdos filesystems under linux, and booting and sharing between the two was theoretically possible. I never tried it, but I vaguely remember such a thing.
Also, InstallShield is a good brand name, but from what I remember in working with it, and using it, it was not a panacea. Any recent Linux distro that installs linux today is pretty straight forward. Put CD in CD-ROM, boot from CD, hit return and answer some basic questions. About the same or easier than Windows from what I remember.
If you think that the possession of the Administrator password means that you should have unfettered access to every scrap of data on the network, you need to see a psychiatrist about your delusions.
Patient: Doc, I need a pill to help with a delusion I persistently have, but cannot stop.
Doc: What kind of delusion is this?
Patient: Well, I have the Administrator password, and I believe I should have unfettered access to every scrap of data on the network at work.
Doc: Interesting. In a general sense, when you are in a power position similar to this, do you believe that you have unrestricted and absolute access to everyone you may have power over?
Patient: No. Its limited to when I'm at work and with those under me when they want privacy and security. Thats it.
Doc: Interesting. Well, we have a number of medications that can help with this kind of problem, but unfortunately none are FDA approved yet. I know a psychologist who is pretty good at helping those to cope with narcissism, delusions of grandeur, paranoia, and the "good ol boy" complex.
Patient: Doc, I've got work to do. I've got this damned constitution that keeps me from doing my job, and over 200 million people don't approve of how I do my job. I simply need to try harder to convince these 200 million people that they are wrong. I am right, and I need to just keep avoiding that damn constitution until everyone forgets about that silly thing. I know I'm right, its just that everyone else is wrong, and I only have 1 1/2 years to either ride out this job, or even better, make it so I can stay in this job, but again, that damn constitution gets in the way.
Doc: I'm sorry. There is absolutely nothing I can do for you at this time. Please see the receptionist on your way out, Mr. Bush.
If you are being sued, and a lawyer protects you from the lawsuit, and the lawyer gets his or her fees paid for having accomplished something good, why is that a bad thing? I don't get it.
Lawyer fees are basically charity for those who have the spare time in their lives to know the rules of society.
Its rare that they do anything positive or negative, but they always have their hand out, and they get paid both when they are right or wrong.
Remember lawyers, like doctors, are the only people that are allowed to charge to practice what they do.
However, this case is landmark in that it is the first time the RIAA has been told to stop doing what they are doing and that they were publicly punished for their behavior. A precedent has been set, and maybe now they will swallow their pride and now give us what we want. We want to spend the same amount on music, but we simply want more of it.
And patenting their protocol here in the States would have what effect in China? Please share, as I seem to have forgetten and am in need of a reminder.
It would go against the Chinese business plan.
Make cheap crap and sell it to Americans.
China now makes most of the 50$ and less DVD players, and they gladly pay the 20$ or so license fee (or whatever you want to call it) for the DVD label and whatnot so they can sell it to cheap Americans.
In other words, it usually pays to go along with the rules, even if you do not agree with them or think they don't apply to you.
Acutally there is a whole host of companies even Fortune 500 companies running Windows 98. Dumb, yeah but cheap for the companies. Money wins over common sense far too often.
Yeah, every Fortune 500 company is at the top of companies because they are dumb. That is why smart people like me don't and won't work for Fortune 500 companies with their stupidity and all of that money and crap.
The factory would be in a position to - create the needed replacement parts themselves - pay the original creator to fix the problem - pay some new person to fix the problem - abandon some or all of the systems and retrofit something else in its place
Now, you might say "ok, but if the engine had failed, wouldn't any engine work as long as it had a shaft outout and spun the same direction at the same speed?"
Probably, with some work. I assure you, i cannot go and put my BMW's engine in my Audi and have it all just "work".
So, how did we answer these questions? Or at least we try?
Open standards and interchangeable parts.
Sure there is always going to be some degree of customization because the standards or interchangeable parts will never satisfy every situation and every case, but an engine swap would be impossible if it were not for standard hex nut sizes, and things like that.
Computers are still new, and they are becoming more commodity and interchangeable over time. For the most part, you can have the hardware and software of your choice and share things like the web, email, pictures, music, movies, etc. Tons of stuff.
Now, there are custom apps or environments that do not always conform to standards because there is not one, nor is there enough of a market to create one. And that is where you pick an environment, for good/bad/indifferent, block it off from the outside world, and then DON'T TOUCH IT.
Its like the whole cathedral and bazaar debate. My thesis is that its better to make information like this that arguably belongs to the public anyway and let them archive it and maintain it for everybody.
I'm a big Grateful Dead fan even though Jerry Garcia will be dead 11 years on the 9th of next month. I have been collecting "tapes" of recordings of their concerts for almost 20 years now. And you know what? It works. Even though it may not appear on the date that I want it, by having thousands of monkeys out there uploading and downloading the crap over and over again for me, I can always get the show that I want, and the quality always gets better because new recordings get "found" over time. Its beautiful.
Clearly, the US government sucks at maintaining data storage either just in the sense of keeping it around as in these tapes, or at keeping their secret data secret. So, what's my libertarian hippie answer?
Give our data to us, and let us determine what is worth keeping and what is not. Human nature has its own built in "forgetter" of stuff that is worth forgetting, and the ability to remember what is worth remembering. By having free redundancy of the data out there, then the likelihood that any one source will disappear is next to zero.
Funny, but this brings up the debate about distribution, copyright, and file sharing.
Just think. If these recordings were digitally transferred and uploaded somewhere like http://archive.org/ (which I believe they belong), then we would have access to these things basically forever in the best quality that they could be.
As Linus has said, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
Well, times have changed and p2p is arguably better than ftp.
No, this is training for gorilla warfare. Maybe you meant guerrilla warfare?
Wow. I'm a spelling nightmare, and never thought about it not being gorilla vs guerrilla even though they are not complete homonyms, I just never thought about it.
Maybe that is why I got the funny mod. Out of my own ignorance, and the moderators being nice to me.
The sad thing is that a simple Google search of "gorilla warfare" asks if you meant "guerrilla warfare". Google knows all.
If you say the Grateful Dead are the best thing to happen to music in the past 100 years, I say they've an awful lot of competition.
Sure, I'm into most all of those bands. I don't like the "jam band" label, and am not as much into the derived bands, but aside from the improv and jamming, the only real influence the Dead have left is the format of live concerts into orchestrated sets, which even the Dead didn't solidify until the late 70s.
Its not just the music, but the concert experience that they had that I should have qualified better. Their studio albums were average at best, but when the Dead got the first and second sets stable from the late 70s to the end of their career, well that was brilliant. And like I said their career is second to none in their appeal over 30 years the way they would retire songs, bring them back, and introduce new songs, and modify/keep fresh the old ones.
I saw a Rush concert on cable a couple of months ago, and WOW! The way they have freshened up their music is amazing. Teases and loosening up their anal retentiveness blew me away.
I'm still upset that Jerry is dead. The last time I saw them in 95, one of the last shows before Jerry died, I knew it was over, or at least it was for me, and then I got the news that Jerry was dead, and poof, so was the Grateful Dead.
It would be nice if web developers got off of a few kicks here and there.
- do not "help" me when I'm inputting a form. I've had javascript that took me forever to guess what the hell they wanted for correct stuff _as I typed_ into a form. It was especially difficult for an email address. A UI hint here. If the user has to get into a battle with the application to decide the best way for them to behave in order to get some kind of agreement with the application, then the application is broken. Word, yes, I'm thinking of you. Don't make me go into a ritual to write a simple paragraph like I used to. Don't go back and reformat the shit for me, and make me type a certain way so you will not correct it incorrectly. The email form I wrestled with at one time, was blank or had a red X by it that changed to a green check as I typed. I use disposable email addresses on the web, and I didn't know if it was parsing to see if I was using the website name as part of the email address or what. It ended up that all I had to do was just keep typing and not watch the X change back and forth between the check and it eventually liked my email address. All it had to do was leave me alone and tell me to fix it if there was something wrong after I hit return. Thanks. Data entry 101.
- do not "help" me by opening up new window after window after window after window after window. Sure, my browser tells me when its going to happen, but its a pain in the ass to have to look on each link, and then use a click modifier instead of just clicking on the simple link. I'm a big boy, I know how to open up a new window, I just rarely do it because it does not benefit me (I use tabs).
- do not burry links in onClick javascript stuff and show the link as '#'. do not burry the links in a javascript thingy either. NEVER assume that I have a plugin installed, especially for something simple like a PDF. Believe it or not, but I may want to download such a thing for future reference, and having it buried in a javascript popup to a dynamic database generation of a PDF document is simply not cool. I simply could not download my bank statement last night because of this.
- do not make every single freely available downloadable document with the same name or one that makes no human sense. I've seen places where every PDF document was named something like Document.pdf After having 10 or so of them, it became a little confusing for me. Also the cute, asldyuroioaskjehrikyur.pdf files are not very valuable either.
- do not solely use flash or have those cute flash intros to your site. Its annoying to have to load the plugin, reload the page, just to click to the next page.
- do not embed sounds into your site. I don't care if you're a music site, there is a time and place for everything, and guess what? I may be already listening to your music, and having a second copy playing is not of any value
- if your website does not work at all without javascript or plugins then your website is broken
I could keep going here, but basically 1) do not second guess me. Odds are the user is smarter than any artificial intelligence you hack together 2) do not annoy me with extra fluff that has no value to me in going to your site
Some advice please? my university work place has an expenses system which required me to use IE if I want to claim for travel expenses etc. Doesn't work on Firefox or other browsers. I have to keep IE on my computer solely for this purpose.
We had to bitch many times, and I'm not sure if they were telling the truth about the FireFox conversion or not, but they did say that they had complaints from other users.
I told them that no, in 2006, there is no need to require a certain browser at a certain resolution that would only work on a certain day of the week if you were lucky. I've done web development to include certs and SSL, and all of that, and I used the web _because of its portability_ so that I simply did not have to use some kind of other cross platform thing where I would be debugging it everywhere.
I'm sure you're experience is the same, but we are talking about simple stuff here. Radio buttons, drop boxes, and text entry. This is not new people. What I have experienced over the years when I'm told that a certain version of IE will only work is that the web design has been PBHed to hell. Anyone who has done this kind of development knows what I'm talking about. Its when you have a good prototype that needs polishing and the PHB says, "It would also be nice if it did ____". Then they become artists and UI experts and would like it to look this way and have this here, and then the thing is broken all to hell.
I've seen our special web app in action and with Mac spinny wheels when trying to do simple stuff like input text in a text box. Give me a break. I'm sure this stuff has cute javascript or whatever to "help" the user or something, but I've done a number of web stuff where it was kinda like Microsoft "wizard" like. It would incrementally guide the user towards the goal. Help them if they made a possible error (using things like partial matches in a DB or soundex searches or whatever), give them a summary before the commit happens in the DB. Provide a way to edit an entry later on. This is not anything new or different. I mean if you want to make a buggy, closed platform, insecure app. Use Oracle forms or Access over ODBC or something. With all of the gizmos and bugs in the crap, and the lack of a portability, what use is it to even target this as a web application anymore? Radio buttons, drop menus, and text fields are pretty easy to develop for in Visual Studio or some other IDE.
As I told these guys, there is no reason in 2006 to make a non-portable web application. If its that big and complex and needs X, Y, or Z, and simply cannot be something that will just work with a modern browser, then its not a web application anymore. Its a specific application, and needs to be developed as such.
I dunno, with (c)rap, it seems if you had enough equipment (sampling, drum machine, mixing) and write some rhymes...anyone can do it. Hell, I could probably do it....and if that's the case, it can't possibly be talent. Anybody can shout out phrases to a drum beat...what happened to people that can actually sing, play instruments, work in melodies and harmonies...?
As someone who is close to the music business, no its not that easy, although it seems that way. Like people that play "real instruments" there are as much or more "rappers" out there that don't make a dime off of it.
To me, the best thing that has ever hit the music world in the past 100 or so years has been the Grateful Dead. No band has been able to sell out almost every show every year for 30 years. Sure, people will say it was all of the good drugs, and yup, they helped, but even that is not a single variable to sell out almost every show you play on the order of about 100 shows a year.
My slashdot name is a hack of the Grateful Dead song, Jack Straw.
To me, the Grateful Dead perfected the concert experience. They were known for having the best sound systems in the business. They pioneered the now common time delayed towers for larger outdoor venues, and used quadraphonic sound systems in smaller indoor venues. They pioneered the "Open source" kind of mentality of allowing fans to freely record and distribute those recordings for non-commercial gain. They brought the improv of jazz and fusion into rock. They even rapped in the late 60s and maybe early 70s. Early incarnations of "US Blues" before the song was even named that, and other Pigpen songs before he died were rap-like.
I could go on for a long time on this, but my point is that nothing that gets any kind of widespread popularity is easy. No matter how simple, cheesy, or horrible that it may be.
Excellent reply to my snotty remark!! My wife is already in on that deal, unfortunately.
And an excellent reply to my snotty remark in return!
Money is weird. And a quick search for those "winning" the lottery is an easy demonstration of that.
My snotty response was actually fairly loaded. Simply giving things to people without a clear understanding and desire for people to have those things simply does not work.
Also, you're reply is very poignant as well. Its interesting how many husbands are the "bread winners", and they then are in a power struggle with their wife about what to do with what they win. I'm not in that category because I'm not a marriable type at this time, but I have seen couples where the husband literally gave their paycheck to the wife in the anticipation for fucking and spending it more wisely than he could. To conclude the anecdote, the couple is no longer together. They filed for bankruptcy before the divorce, and both are financial disasters. In an attempt to help the husband who helped me at one time in my life, I bought him a car. Wrecked in about a month, and has not moved since.
As nice as it seems to give things to people or to be the recipient of a gift, great care has to be used in ensuring that the person really deserves the gift, and that they will actually appreciate it and benefit from it. As I have heard regarding things like those "its only the price of a cup of coffee a day" charity things for benefitting unfortunate people, supposedly all of those programs are either completely corrupt, or if some of the funds do go to give them assistance, they are still not really any better off. In order to help these people, its better just to buy services or products (if they exist) from them.
I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that IE "ruined the web experience in the late 90s". They were the best game in town back then.
Being that IE did not run on my computer at the time, its impossible to even say it was the best. MS did make a token Solaris version of IE, but it failed to even install. IE was and still is a Windows only browser. They did have a token Mac version for a while, but it was horrible, and its currently unsupported, and MS officially recommends using Apple's Safari browser.
Back in the late 90s and early 00s, it was very difficult to view many websites without using Windows. Aside from a 1.5-2 year career mistake, I have been Windows free since 97 or so. I am not like this (or at least not 100%) for religious or other superstitious reasons, I am not brand loyal, I just like to use the best tool for the job, and Windows failed me in the late 90s to date, as well as Apple from the mid 80s until recently. And I'm back to being a happy Apple user again for graphics, audio, and "desktop" kind of work. I use Solaris and Linux as servers, and all of this is subject to change, but MS has not offered a working product at a reasonable price point for my personal or professional needs for years.
No, its not an exaggeration to say IE ruined the web experience. It did for me and just about everyone else who did not use IE under Windows at the time. Netscape, although it had its issues did work on all of the systems I worked with at the time. To say that something is "the best" when it is not even offered to a great number of systems out there is wrong in my book.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't tell if this post is offtopic or not because I am unclear as to what the YRO section of slashdot actually means.
So, with the context of this article, is it my right to be the victim of fraud and racketeering? Is it my right to violate copyright if I think the law is wrong? Is it my right to be a web hermit?
My point is that the YRO section seems to be confused between the controversial stuff like copyrights and patents and generic legal stuff like this article where I would imagine that few or no slashdotters would see this as being controversial or a violation of or rights or the people who are being arrested.
Of course, I did not read the article, but it seems as though these guys were bad guys and got caught for it. So, my thoughts are, gambling is bad m'kay. Getting arrested by the FBI when your being bad is bad m'kay. My rights do not appear to be violated and this does not seem like a controversial YRO article m'kay.
But I have to wonder. If high-tech medicine is actually effective--not just awe-inspiring, exciting, and, well, entertaining--why is it that with so much of the stuff, the United States ranks about #40 in infant mortality (worse than New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia)? Why is our life expectancy only 78 years when forty-seven other countries, including Aruba, Spain, and Iceland, do better?
These are social problems, not technical ones.
For example, why are there hungry, homeless people in XYXYE when there are plenty of houses and plenty of wasted food in the world?
Although myths expand beyond the US, the US is full of them.
The first myth is that "everyone is created equal". Wrong. Crack babies or those born with AIDS are not equal to those who are born to say Hilton Hotel fortunes.
Another myth is that "since everyone is created equal, its just hard work that makes different outcomes". Bzzt. Wrong. There are plenty of people that work very hard and barely make ends meat, and there are those that are pretty much slackers that do quite well. Also, see myth #1.
Back to the medical issues here in the US.
Give a calculator to someone who can't add, and they cannot mysteriously add. The same applies to doctors. In my experience, doctors are not all they are cracked up to be. Yes, there are exceptions, but your average to below average doctor is very skilled at making money and memorizing crap in med school, but any of us in the tech field knows that KSAs have to be updated constantly, and also a majority of minor medical issues will be healed merely by time. Sure the puserman/snake oil thing still works, and can be fun, but medical doctors have not spent the time and effort in prevention of health problems and maintenance of health vs say dental doctors. A quick quiz of your parent's dental health and other health issues should be suffice here.
Also here in the US, medicine is just business, and a BIG business as well. Supposedly most of those nice cars in the hospital parking lot belong to those in the subbed out billing and insurance businesses, not direct medical staff. So, even though health care seems to be expensive, your making great involuntary donations to those poor people in billing and insurance companies.
Also, American culture is filled with lazy, uneducated, and unhealthy fast food eating slobs. When my friends moved here from Japan, they were very let down at how fat and ugly we were compared to the people on TV and movies. Ah, the allure of hollywood.
I have work to do....
You do know that someone wrote the lyrics to that song.
That someone is not always the singer.
yes. There are many channels for lyrics. Some are basically stolen from random individuals who reply to small ads in the back of Rolling Stone or whatever with little to no compensation to the author. Some are fulltime lyricists like Robert Hunter or John Barlow, and they made sure they were compensated for their lyrics from the beginning.
Now, people that write "lyrics" but don't have them in songs are not lyricists, but rather poets and they have a different avenue for getting paid.
Lyrics over 99.9% of the time only work when sung in a particular song. They don't have much of a royalty value outside of that model. The web lyrics sites are only there for the token advertisement junk like much of the junk on the web. There are about something like 5 or so of them and they battle each other over google rank because none are significantly better than the other because nobody really cares about the "content". Oh, and they have more than just the token lyrics under the RIAA cartel as well.
So, under the slashdot mantra, as all other information, lyrics want to be free!
Personally, I'm waiting for them to put an anal probe up our ass and shocking us when we hear a song on the radio if we don't pay.
I don't see the problem here. Songs, by definition, have lyrics/singing in them, and people go to these sites to read the lyrics after hearing the song on the radio and they can't get the whole thing or don't understand some words, or because looking at the lyrics is different than having them sung to you. People hit these sites after a quick google search and they either click on the first one or the one that that gives them the fewest spyware or whatever.
AFAIK, there is not "Official" RIAA compliant version available whatsoever, but these people feel "they are above the law!" and just want to pull access to these sites, even though the song is the canonical source. Its rare, and no business model whatsoever for someone to pay to read lyrics to songs on the web without having the song.
This reminds me of the baseball outfits claiming all our data belongs to us with the web stats sites and/or books. Does anyone else see a similarity between these two, and does anyone know the status of the baseball stats?
It's really fast, despite being in userspace
:)
Yeah, I guess this was funny, but being a stickler for details and an ubergeek, this is what I would do:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda1 bs=size_of_cache_on_hd
urandom is of course more predictable than an infinite set of zeros. Also, the bs= parameter is MUCH faster than doing it one character at a time (the default for dd). YMMV, with the size of bs but the cache size on the disk seems reasonable to me, maybe a little less, but something greater than 1 byte at a time.
Also, I was being silly with the predictable part, but also using dd is almost exclusively in kernel space, not userspace (hence, the need to be root). I hope the parent was being funny there as well.
Good luck in destroying your drive more efficiently
A given distro can now come with a handy Windows InstallShield Wizard and INSTALL UNDER WINDOWS and BOOT/SHARE the same partition.
Is this new?
I may be delusional, but I thought there was a way years ago via loadlin.exe and something like umsdos filesystems under linux, and booting and sharing between the two was theoretically possible. I never tried it, but I vaguely remember such a thing.
Also, InstallShield is a good brand name, but from what I remember in working with it, and using it, it was not a panacea. Any recent Linux distro that installs linux today is pretty straight forward. Put CD in CD-ROM, boot from CD, hit return and answer some basic questions. About the same or easier than Windows from what I remember.
If you think that the possession of the Administrator password means that you should have unfettered access to every scrap of data on the network, you need to see a psychiatrist about your delusions.
Patient: Doc, I need a pill to help with a delusion I persistently have, but cannot stop.
Doc: What kind of delusion is this?
Patient: Well, I have the Administrator password, and I believe I should have unfettered access to every scrap of data on the network at work.
Doc: Interesting. In a general sense, when you are in a power position similar to this, do you believe that you have unrestricted and absolute access to everyone you may have power over?
Patient: No. Its limited to when I'm at work and with those under me when they want privacy and security. Thats it.
Doc: Interesting. Well, we have a number of medications that can help with this kind of problem, but unfortunately none are FDA approved yet. I know a psychologist who is pretty good at helping those to cope with narcissism, delusions of grandeur, paranoia, and the "good ol boy" complex.
Patient: Doc, I've got work to do. I've got this damned constitution that keeps me from doing my job, and over 200 million people don't approve of how I do my job. I simply need to try harder to convince these 200 million people that they are wrong. I am right, and I need to just keep avoiding that damn constitution until everyone forgets about that silly thing. I know I'm right, its just that everyone else is wrong, and I only have 1 1/2 years to either ride out this job, or even better, make it so I can stay in this job, but again, that damn constitution gets in the way.
Doc: I'm sorry. There is absolutely nothing I can do for you at this time. Please see the receptionist on your way out, Mr. Bush.
Just change the definition of death by adding the word "irreversably" before ceased, and you'll be fine.
And if the suspended animation thing does not work???
Ah, just wrongful death eh?
If you are being sued, and a lawyer protects you from the lawsuit, and the lawyer gets his or her fees paid for having accomplished something good, why is that a bad thing? I don't get it.
Lawyer fees are basically charity for those who have the spare time in their lives to know the rules of society.
Its rare that they do anything positive or negative, but they always have their hand out, and they get paid both when they are right or wrong.
Remember lawyers, like doctors, are the only people that are allowed to charge to practice what they do.
However, this case is landmark in that it is the first time the RIAA has been told to stop doing what they are doing and that they were publicly punished for their behavior. A precedent has been set, and maybe now they will swallow their pride and now give us what we want. We want to spend the same amount on music, but we simply want more of it.
And patenting their protocol here in the States would have what effect in China? Please share, as I seem to have forgetten and am in need of a reminder.
It would go against the Chinese business plan.
Make cheap crap and sell it to Americans.
China now makes most of the 50$ and less DVD players, and they gladly pay the 20$ or so license fee (or whatever you want to call it) for the DVD label and whatnot so they can sell it to cheap Americans.
In other words, it usually pays to go along with the rules, even if you do not agree with them or think they don't apply to you.
Acutally there is a whole host of companies even Fortune 500 companies running Windows 98. Dumb, yeah but cheap for the companies. Money wins over common sense far too often.
Yeah, every Fortune 500 company is at the top of companies because they are dumb. That is why smart people like me don't and won't work for Fortune 500 companies with their stupidity and all of that money and crap.
Feel free to insert opinions here. I'm interested how others think corporate America will respond.
If it ain't broke, why should I "upgrade" and then break it?
There are POS devices that still used DOS, Win 98, Win 95, and some that use paper tape without even carbon copies of that tape.
The factory would be in a position to
- create the needed replacement parts themselves
- pay the original creator to fix the problem
- pay some new person to fix the problem
- abandon some or all of the systems and retrofit something else in its place
Now, you might say "ok, but if the engine had failed, wouldn't any engine work as long as it had a shaft outout and spun the same direction at the same speed?"
Probably, with some work. I assure you, i cannot go and put my BMW's engine in my Audi and have it all just "work".
So, how did we answer these questions? Or at least we try?
Open standards and interchangeable parts.
Sure there is always going to be some degree of customization because the standards or interchangeable parts will never satisfy every situation and every case, but an engine swap would be impossible if it were not for standard hex nut sizes, and things like that.
Computers are still new, and they are becoming more commodity and interchangeable over time. For the most part, you can have the hardware and software of your choice and share things like the web, email, pictures, music, movies, etc. Tons of stuff.
Now, there are custom apps or environments that do not always conform to standards because there is not one, nor is there enough of a market to create one. And that is where you pick an environment, for good/bad/indifferent, block it off from the outside world, and then DON'T TOUCH IT.
Its like the whole cathedral and bazaar debate. My thesis is that its better to make information like this that arguably belongs to the public anyway and let them archive it and maintain it for everybody.
I'm a big Grateful Dead fan even though Jerry Garcia will be dead 11 years on the 9th of next month. I have been collecting "tapes" of recordings of their concerts for almost 20 years now. And you know what? It works. Even though it may not appear on the date that I want it, by having thousands of monkeys out there uploading and downloading the crap over and over again for me, I can always get the show that I want, and the quality always gets better because new recordings get "found" over time. Its beautiful.
Clearly, the US government sucks at maintaining data storage either just in the sense of keeping it around as in these tapes, or at keeping their secret data secret. So, what's my libertarian hippie answer?
Give our data to us, and let us determine what is worth keeping and what is not. Human nature has its own built in "forgetter" of stuff that is worth forgetting, and the ability to remember what is worth remembering. By having free redundancy of the data out there, then the likelihood that any one source will disappear is next to zero.
Quick! Convert them to HD-DVD, er, Blu-Ray, er...
Funny, but this brings up the debate about distribution, copyright, and file sharing.
Just think. If these recordings were digitally transferred and uploaded somewhere like http://archive.org/ (which I believe they belong), then we would have access to these things basically forever in the best quality that they could be.
As Linus has said, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
Well, times have changed and p2p is arguably better than ftp.
Not only are ehtical issues having to be addressed, but legal ones as well.
IANAL, but from the article, "brain activity has ceased", which as I understand it is the legal and medical definition of human death.
With the recent news like the Kevorkian issue, what is being alive or dead legally or ethically today?
No, this is training for gorilla warfare. Maybe you meant guerrilla warfare?
Wow. I'm a spelling nightmare, and never thought about it not being gorilla vs guerrilla even though they are not complete homonyms, I just never thought about it.
Maybe that is why I got the funny mod. Out of my own ignorance, and the moderators being nice to me.
The sad thing is that a simple Google search of "gorilla warfare" asks if you meant "guerrilla warfare". Google knows all.
Oh and BTW, Windows updates are signed, so even if someone managed to crack into it the packages would not install.
In 2000 or so, someone convinced Versign to give them a Microsoft certificate. Is it that guy who broke into the machine and signed the updates?
Soldier of Fortune
Training for real warfare -- gorilla warfare.
Cut your hair and get a job, hippy :-P
Done.
If you say the Grateful Dead are the best thing to happen to music in the past 100 years, I say they've an awful lot of competition.
Sure, I'm into most all of those bands. I don't like the "jam band" label, and am not as much into the derived bands, but aside from the improv and jamming, the only real influence the Dead have left is the format of live concerts into orchestrated sets, which even the Dead didn't solidify until the late 70s.
Its not just the music, but the concert experience that they had that I should have qualified better. Their studio albums were average at best, but when the Dead got the first and second sets stable from the late 70s to the end of their career, well that was brilliant. And like I said their career is second to none in their appeal over 30 years the way they would retire songs, bring them back, and introduce new songs, and modify/keep fresh the old ones.
I saw a Rush concert on cable a couple of months ago, and WOW! The way they have freshened up their music is amazing. Teases and loosening up their anal retentiveness blew me away.
I'm still upset that Jerry is dead. The last time I saw them in 95, one of the last shows before Jerry died, I knew it was over, or at least it was for me, and then I got the news that Jerry was dead, and poof, so was the Grateful Dead.
RIP buddy. We still miss you.
It would be nice if web developers got off of a few kicks here and there.
- do not "help" me when I'm inputting a form. I've had javascript that took me forever to guess what the hell they wanted for correct stuff _as I typed_ into a form. It was especially difficult for an email address. A UI hint here. If the user has to get into a battle with the application to decide the best way for them to behave in order to get some kind of agreement with the application, then the application is broken. Word, yes, I'm thinking of you. Don't make me go into a ritual to write a simple paragraph like I used to. Don't go back and reformat the shit for me, and make me type a certain way so you will not correct it incorrectly. The email form I wrestled with at one time, was blank or had a red X by it that changed to a green check as I typed. I use disposable email addresses on the web, and I didn't know if it was parsing to see if I was using the website name as part of the email address or what. It ended up that all I had to do was just keep typing and not watch the X change back and forth between the check and it eventually liked my email address. All it had to do was leave me alone and tell me to fix it if there was something wrong after I hit return. Thanks. Data entry 101.
- do not "help" me by opening up new window after window after window after window after window. Sure, my browser tells me when its going to happen, but its a pain in the ass to have to look on each link, and then use a click modifier instead of just clicking on the simple link. I'm a big boy, I know how to open up a new window, I just rarely do it because it does not benefit me (I use tabs).
- do not burry links in onClick javascript stuff and show the link as '#'. do not burry the links in a javascript thingy either. NEVER assume that I have a plugin installed, especially for something simple like a PDF. Believe it or not, but I may want to download such a thing for future reference, and having it buried in a javascript popup to a dynamic database generation of a PDF document is simply not cool. I simply could not download my bank statement last night because of this.
- do not make every single freely available downloadable document with the same name or one that makes no human sense. I've seen places where every PDF document was named something like Document.pdf After having 10 or so of them, it became a little confusing for me. Also the cute, asldyuroioaskjehrikyur.pdf files are not very valuable either.
- do not solely use flash or have those cute flash intros to your site. Its annoying to have to load the plugin, reload the page, just to click to the next page.
- do not embed sounds into your site. I don't care if you're a music site, there is a time and place for everything, and guess what? I may be already listening to your music, and having a second copy playing is not of any value
- if your website does not work at all without javascript or plugins then your website is broken
I could keep going here, but basically 1) do not second guess me. Odds are the user is smarter than any artificial intelligence you hack together 2) do not annoy me with extra fluff that has no value to me in going to your site
Some advice please? my university work place has an expenses system which required me to use IE if I want to claim for travel expenses etc. Doesn't work on Firefox or other browsers. I have to keep IE on my computer solely for this purpose.
We had to bitch many times, and I'm not sure if they were telling the truth about the FireFox conversion or not, but they did say that they had complaints from other users.
I told them that no, in 2006, there is no need to require a certain browser at a certain resolution that would only work on a certain day of the week if you were lucky. I've done web development to include certs and SSL, and all of that, and I used the web _because of its portability_ so that I simply did not have to use some kind of other cross platform thing where I would be debugging it everywhere.
I'm sure you're experience is the same, but we are talking about simple stuff here. Radio buttons, drop boxes, and text entry. This is not new people. What I have experienced over the years when I'm told that a certain version of IE will only work is that the web design has been PBHed to hell. Anyone who has done this kind of development knows what I'm talking about. Its when you have a good prototype that needs polishing and the PHB says, "It would also be nice if it did ____". Then they become artists and UI experts and would like it to look this way and have this here, and then the thing is broken all to hell.
I've seen our special web app in action and with Mac spinny wheels when trying to do simple stuff like input text in a text box. Give me a break. I'm sure this stuff has cute javascript or whatever to "help" the user or something, but I've done a number of web stuff where it was kinda like Microsoft "wizard" like. It would incrementally guide the user towards the goal. Help them if they made a possible error (using things like partial matches in a DB or soundex searches or whatever), give them a summary before the commit happens in the DB. Provide a way to edit an entry later on. This is not anything new or different. I mean if you want to make a buggy, closed platform, insecure app. Use Oracle forms or Access over ODBC or something. With all of the gizmos and bugs in the crap, and the lack of a portability, what use is it to even target this as a web application anymore? Radio buttons, drop menus, and text fields are pretty easy to develop for in Visual Studio or some other IDE.
As I told these guys, there is no reason in 2006 to make a non-portable web application. If its that big and complex and needs X, Y, or Z, and simply cannot be something that will just work with a modern browser, then its not a web application anymore. Its a specific application, and needs to be developed as such.
I dunno, with (c)rap, it seems if you had enough equipment (sampling, drum machine, mixing) and write some rhymes...anyone can do it. Hell, I could probably do it....and if that's the case, it can't possibly be talent. Anybody can shout out phrases to a drum beat...what happened to people that can actually sing, play instruments, work in melodies and harmonies...?
As someone who is close to the music business, no its not that easy, although it seems that way. Like people that play "real instruments" there are as much or more "rappers" out there that don't make a dime off of it.
To me, the best thing that has ever hit the music world in the past 100 or so years has been the Grateful Dead. No band has been able to sell out almost every show every year for 30 years. Sure, people will say it was all of the good drugs, and yup, they helped, but even that is not a single variable to sell out almost every show you play on the order of about 100 shows a year.
My slashdot name is a hack of the Grateful Dead song, Jack Straw.
To me, the Grateful Dead perfected the concert experience. They were known for having the best sound systems in the business. They pioneered the now common time delayed towers for larger outdoor venues, and used quadraphonic sound systems in smaller indoor venues. They pioneered the "Open source" kind of mentality of allowing fans to freely record and distribute those recordings for non-commercial gain. They brought the improv of jazz and fusion into rock. They even rapped in the late 60s and maybe early 70s. Early incarnations of "US Blues" before the song was even named that, and other Pigpen songs before he died were rap-like.
I could go on for a long time on this, but my point is that nothing that gets any kind of widespread popularity is easy. No matter how simple, cheesy, or horrible that it may be.
Excellent reply to my snotty remark!! My wife is already in on that deal, unfortunately.
And an excellent reply to my snotty remark in return!
Money is weird. And a quick search for those "winning" the lottery is an easy demonstration of that.
My snotty response was actually fairly loaded. Simply giving things to people without a clear understanding and desire for people to have those things simply does not work.
Also, you're reply is very poignant as well. Its interesting how many husbands are the "bread winners", and they then are in a power struggle with their wife about what to do with what they win. I'm not in that category because I'm not a marriable type at this time, but I have seen couples where the husband literally gave their paycheck to the wife in the anticipation for fucking and spending it more wisely than he could. To conclude the anecdote, the couple is no longer together. They filed for bankruptcy before the divorce, and both are financial disasters. In an attempt to help the husband who helped me at one time in my life, I bought him a car. Wrecked in about a month, and has not moved since.
As nice as it seems to give things to people or to be the recipient of a gift, great care has to be used in ensuring that the person really deserves the gift, and that they will actually appreciate it and benefit from it. As I have heard regarding things like those "its only the price of a cup of coffee a day" charity things for benefitting unfortunate people, supposedly all of those programs are either completely corrupt, or if some of the funds do go to give them assistance, they are still not really any better off. In order to help these people, its better just to buy services or products (if they exist) from them.
I'm off of my soapbox now.
I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that IE "ruined the web experience in the late 90s". They were the best game in town back then.
Being that IE did not run on my computer at the time, its impossible to even say it was the best. MS did make a token Solaris version of IE, but it failed to even install. IE was and still is a Windows only browser. They did have a token Mac version for a while, but it was horrible, and its currently unsupported, and MS officially recommends using Apple's Safari browser.
Back in the late 90s and early 00s, it was very difficult to view many websites without using Windows. Aside from a 1.5-2 year career mistake, I have been Windows free since 97 or so. I am not like this (or at least not 100%) for religious or other superstitious reasons, I am not brand loyal, I just like to use the best tool for the job, and Windows failed me in the late 90s to date, as well as Apple from the mid 80s until recently. And I'm back to being a happy Apple user again for graphics, audio, and "desktop" kind of work. I use Solaris and Linux as servers, and all of this is subject to change, but MS has not offered a working product at a reasonable price point for my personal or professional needs for years.
No, its not an exaggeration to say IE ruined the web experience. It did for me and just about everyone else who did not use IE under Windows at the time. Netscape, although it had its issues did work on all of the systems I worked with at the time. To say that something is "the best" when it is not even offered to a great number of systems out there is wrong in my book.