Ultimately since the Flash Translation Layer goes and does things under-the-hood that are not externally visible, it is hard to be sure your data were erased, and it's also hard to be sure they were not erased... Essentially since there is an opaque interface at the logical-block level and the device is internally free to behave as it chooses so long as that interface is maintained, it makes it tricky to guess how the internal implementation will behave. Plain old magnetic disks used a fairly predictable implementation of that interface so forensics goons got used to having an easy task on their plates.
When you work in the trenches with a tight-knit group of geeks sometimes it makes sense to leave a key under the mat. I have only once used my still-active credentials, and it was to shell in from home to help a former coworker in a pinch, at his request. He was half-way driving from one location in the middle of nowhere to another, a good 30 minutes from the nearest network connectivity, so he used his cell to call me and ask me to run an urgent but simple sysadmin task for him. No problem. Part of the professionalism of the job is being willing to stand by your work and your coworkers even years down the road.
If it is an individual who wrote the original game, ask them for permission. Both times I've asked, I've received permission.
If it is a faceless mega-corporation, avoid using images, music, or names from the original game, but unless they have a patent on the look-and-feel or game mechanics (never heard of the later), you can just code away.
For my platman (old Amiga game) remake for the GBA, you can get it on my web page. (www.greasybastard.com)
Also see freeciv, and any of the two-or-so decent Wing Commander Privateer remakes.
Cayuga Lake is hard to talk about as just one ecosystem, because it has such a strange set of features... It is (like all of the Finger Lakes) a collection of water in the bottom of a glacial valley. Unlike many such lakes, however, Cayuga lake is VERY deep in places (over 400 feet deep), and there are (if I recall correctly) springs or caves or something like that at the bottom in the really deep parts. That being said, it also has a decent sized shallow shelf, and a bunch of small bays and swamps where various creeks discharge. It's the shelf-like area at the south end where the cooling intake and outlet pipes are.
Much of the difficulty assessing whether the heat being pumped into the lake was going to have any negative impact or not had to do with the constant protesting by massive numbers of hysterical but scientifically illiterate hippies (if you've lived in Ithaca for a decade or more, you know who I am talking about). As sad as it is, because anything Cornell released or published was decried as bunk if it didn't damn the project, it didn't seem to matter any more what (if any) case they made to the community as a whole, so there wasn't much effort after some point to communicate anything clearly about this project. I don't blame them, it must have been like trying to piss out the sun getting those damn hippies to shut up long enough to have any sort of rational discussion.
In any case, I doubt it has done nearly the harm that the late '70s and early '80s did when the city essentially pumped any excess sewage right into the lake with minimal if any treatment. In any case, I think a heat tax would be a good idea, but only if it were absolutely universally applied (Apply it to residential, commercial, public sector, and industrial waste-heat and in some sort of a meaningful and constant form (X cents per Y million Joules)).
I have worked somewhere with rats, and we kept all food on lockdown to try and get rid of them (luckily, we ran all of our cabling through conduit, so the rats didn't gnaw any of it), but as it turned out the rats were just in the building for shelter during the winter, and their food sources were all outdoors and they had found some way in and out of the building that involved climbing the gutters and going in through an attic vent. Rats are very clever. We also had an office cat, but she did not eat nearly enough rats to make a difference.
Y'know, as somebody who has done the whole 'wearable computer' thing, just a warning: We geeks thing wearing a HMD is 'cool', most everybody else things you're a dork. (Some people even took me for a suicide bomber with my battery packs). *sigh*
That sounds good. An efficient team of X sysadmins with good procedures in place could keep, say, 20 * X heavy users happy with the state of the network/servers/etc... A team that didn't have as efficient procedure sets in place could maybe expect to keep 10-15 * X users happy. I mean, it depends on your users, what they're up to, and your setup, but it might be worth for your own reasons having a metric of efficiency (sort of like profiling code), so that if you find that you guys are spending a disproportionate amount of time on one particular type of user request it could bubble up to the top of the list of tasks to be at least somewhat automated.
This should both make the PHB's happy because they'll see you guys getting more efficient over time, and in theory that efficiency should make your jobs easier as well.
Does anybody know if there are any fully RoHS compliant laptops for sale in the United States? (for that matter, is this one RoHS?). If I understand correctly, it must be free of lead, mercury, cadmium, and PCBs for that to be so...
The whole problem with trying to answer this question, is that the question should be unasked.
The Internet (as we understand it), is really an abstraction built for the express purpose of making it so nobody has to _care_ what things look like on the physical level. That's the whole point of the seven-layered protocol stack, half of the RFC's, and the whole concept of a network of peers who can all send and receive requests and information.
I have an EOS 400D and I'm quite fond of it, although I'm still getting used to it and all of the whiz-bang features it has over my old Bronica ETR (you know, one of those old monstrosities which used that barbaric technology called *film* (Actually, aside from weight and speed concerns, I prefer shooting on film, but digital is so damn fast and convenient)).
It seems to me from playing with several camera phones, several digital cameras, and a large variety of old mechanical cameras as old as the 1930's, I've determined that a lot of the quality of a camera is in how the user can grow into the feature set. The 400D didn't provide as pristine an out of the box point-and-shoot image as the camera phone, but that is also not the focus (if you'll pardon the pun) of this model. It is really made to be a camera for people who want the fine grained manual control, and who would be very annoyed if it "knew" how to correct every shot and then was wrong just even once... They'd rather set the thing up and be sure that it's doing what they want it to, just as if it were a normal old camera shooting on film.
So, I guess this test is not really apples to apples, but it does show why a casual snapshot taker might be better off with a camera (like those phone cameras) that is designed for that purpose.
Hehehehe... Having tinkered with Asterisk, I'll second that =:-> And all of those SIP phones (Esp. Polycom's) have their own set of poorly documented flaming hoops to jump through.
I don't really _hate_ Microsoft per se, but I find that they don't really have my needs in mind (as a developer and long-time computer user). My gripes are really pretty simple:
I don't like being crammed into an unnecesarily GUI environment. I like the simplicity of scripting and automation that comes with a real command line environment.
I don't like giving up control of my computer. Microsoft is always pushing one thing after another which all take control away from me, the user, in the name of making things easier or safer or some other nonsense. Things that fall under this category are the following: DRM / Trusted Computing, Hiding of system files, Hiding of file extensions, animated toolbars, the fact that IE takes any web server error (40x, 50x, host not found, connection timed out, etc...) and puts up the same uninformative dumbed down error message up. I really want to know the details, and it hides them.
I don't like their pushing of various fad programming models in their development tools. I remember when I upgraded from Visual C++ 5 to VC6 they had taken the raw win32 calls out of the table of contents, so if you looked things up that way, you'd see the MFC way first, unless you knew the calls already, in which case the index could turn them up. When I upgraded again, they had taken the calls out of the index too, but a full text search of the help turned up some examples... There is NO EXCUSE to EVER hide documentation from users, much less DEVELOPERS. I recognize that they are trying to wean people off of win32 so they can go to a more hardware independent.net stuff, and that may be cool and all, but part of my job entails maintaining a large (30,000+ line) code base written in pretty much all straight C that uses a lot of win32 calls, and it really sucks that the best documentation on all of that is Google's translation of the chineese version of Visual C 5.x's help files.
So, yeah, basicly I have largely negative feelings about Microsoft because they don't do a terribly good job of meeting my needs, which wouldn't be such a big deal, except that as a near-monopoly they try very hard to stamp out competing systems that may actually meet my needs quite well. They aren't stamping them out to keep my dollar, they're just doing it in case any of those competing solutions actually turns out better than Windows and draws mainstream users away. As such, they are definitely pissing on my [figurative] corn flakes.
Maybe it is a serious problem, maybe not, it depends on how you look at it. I've always sort of thought of e-bay as a sealed-bid auction (a well-understood and respected auction practice where each bidder sends in a bid by some deadline, and after that deadline, all the bids are opened and the highest takes the item (or the lowest provides the service)). In my opinion this is a fairer and saner system because it keeps people from chasing a contract down to the point where they'd lose money, or chasing an item to the point where they can't afford it by throwing in bid after bid in the heat of the moment.
Since everybody who actually wants to win an ebay item snipes, it ends up being pretty close to a sealed bid auction after all. This is okay, although ebay could either do better explaining it to end users, or just outright implement a sealed-bid interface and be done with it.
I think that really does it! I (count my lucky stars) rarely have to deal with non-techies in an official work capacity, but the world still abounds with them, and they seem to divide into two categories, those who are like "Hey, wow, you can program a computer! You must be a genius!" and those who are like "so, you just tell the computer to do this, and then that, and you're done!" (those who imagine that every programming language has a "do-what-i-mean" statement.
Here is the catch. WinCE (so well named!) has better out-of-the-box driver support for all sorts of random peripherals than the PPC, ARM, and MIPS ports of Linux (last I checked). I ran across a lot of this in working on my wearable project. At the time I found that the version of PPC linux that ran on one of my boards had _very_ broken support for USB keyboard/mouse/HID devices, and the next version up broke the vendor supplied framebuffer drivers for the NTSC out. What do you do there?
I agree with the parent poster in that volume is the answer. For me, when I've got a finite amount of spare time, hardware goes "stale" with alarming speed, and all of that jazz, I'd rather use something with better out-of-the-box driver support. I ended up going back to a much less power-efficient x86 solution just so all my bloody drivers would be there.
The same goes for J. Random industrial automation project, where you have maybe ten or twenty units in the field. If they have to pay their geeks for a couple hundred hours to fix broken drivers or start from scratch for all of the standard peripherals that some $x/seat version of WinCe will take care of, it's silly. That $x/seat means a lot more when you ship thousands or even millions of the devices.
This is a real pisser because what we need the most is for the embedded HARDWARE companies to take Linux a little more seriously (this is happening, but at a snail's pace). Most of those SOC (System On a Chip) widgets (y'know, a CPU, and a handful of common IO peripherals like an LCD/CRT video controller, USB master and slave, a couple GPIO banks, and IDE/CF controller, and variety of I2C and RS232 ports rolled into one wafer) manufacturers are writing drivers for all those builtins for CE, and although you get the datasheet, it's still a lot of (tedious) work to write those same drivers for Linux.
Maybe (a temporary) hack would be if somebody could figure out a way to wrap the CE drivers for any given arch and run them under Linux. Ick! Bleh!
If my memory serves me, we pulled a similar stunt putting in a back door in some mainframe that was sold to Iran sometime in the early '80s that let us read every line of their national budget, plus a bunch of other juicy internal pencil pusher stuff. I think we even got caught at it eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately since the Flash Translation Layer goes and does things under-the-hood that are not externally visible, it is hard to be sure your data were erased, and it's also hard to be sure they were not erased... Essentially since there is an opaque interface at the logical-block level and the device is internally free to behave as it chooses so long as that interface is maintained, it makes it tricky to guess how the internal implementation will behave.
Plain old magnetic disks used a fairly predictable implementation of that interface so forensics goons got used to having an easy task on their plates.
When you work in the trenches with a tight-knit group of geeks sometimes it makes sense to leave a key under the mat. I have only once used my still-active credentials, and it was to shell in from home to help a former coworker in a pinch, at his request. He was half-way driving from one location in the middle of nowhere to another, a good 30 minutes from the nearest network connectivity, so he used his cell to call me and ask me to run an urgent but simple sysadmin task for him. No problem. Part of the professionalism of the job is being willing to stand by your work and your coworkers even years down the road.
Yet another electronic voting snafu. *sigh*
Imagine how may of these servers you could fit in the space of even a single grain of rice, let alone a standard 1U enclosure!
If it is an individual who wrote the original game, ask them for permission. Both times I've asked, I've received permission.
If it is a faceless mega-corporation, avoid using images, music, or names from the original game, but unless they have a patent on the look-and-feel or game mechanics (never heard of the later), you can just code away.
For my platman (old Amiga game) remake for the GBA, you can get it on my web page. (www.greasybastard.com)
Also see freeciv, and any of the two-or-so decent Wing Commander Privateer remakes.
That's the first thing I thought as well! Those were the days...
I like your signature.
I would advocate for Riddley Walker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker
I guess they'd better create an internal division called the National Science Foundation Watchdog, or NSFW for short...
Cayuga Lake is hard to talk about as just one ecosystem, because it has such a strange set of features... It is (like all of the Finger Lakes) a collection of water in the bottom of a glacial valley. Unlike many such lakes, however, Cayuga lake is VERY deep in places (over 400 feet deep), and there are (if I recall correctly) springs or caves or something like that at the bottom in the really deep parts. That being said, it also has a decent sized shallow shelf, and a bunch of small bays and swamps where various creeks discharge. It's the shelf-like area at the south end where the cooling intake and outlet pipes are.
Much of the difficulty assessing whether the heat being pumped into the lake was going to have any negative impact or not had to do with the constant protesting by massive numbers of hysterical but scientifically illiterate hippies (if you've lived in Ithaca for a decade or more, you know who I am talking about). As sad as it is, because anything Cornell released or published was decried as bunk if it didn't damn the project, it didn't seem to matter any more what (if any) case they made to the community as a whole, so there wasn't much effort after some point to communicate anything clearly about this project. I don't blame them, it must have been like trying to piss out the sun getting those damn hippies to shut up long enough to have any sort of rational discussion.
In any case, I doubt it has done nearly the harm that the late '70s and early '80s did when the city essentially pumped any excess sewage right into the lake with minimal if any treatment. In any case, I think a heat tax would be a good idea, but only if it were absolutely universally applied (Apply it to residential, commercial, public sector, and industrial waste-heat and in some sort of a meaningful and constant form (X cents per Y million Joules)).
I have worked somewhere with rats, and we kept all food on lockdown to try and get rid of them (luckily, we ran all of our cabling through conduit, so the rats didn't gnaw any of it), but as it turned out the rats were just in the building for shelter during the winter, and their food sources were all outdoors and they had found some way in and out of the building that involved climbing the gutters and going in through an attic vent. Rats are very clever. We also had an office cat, but she did not eat nearly enough rats to make a difference.
Y'know, as somebody who has done the whole 'wearable computer' thing, just a warning: We geeks thing wearing a HMD is 'cool', most everybody else things you're a dork. (Some people even took me for a suicide bomber with my battery packs). *sigh*
That sounds good. An efficient team of X sysadmins with good procedures in place could keep, say, 20 * X heavy users happy with the state of the network/servers/etc... A team that didn't have as efficient procedure sets in place could maybe expect to keep 10-15 * X users happy. I mean, it depends on your users, what they're up to, and your setup, but it might be worth for your own reasons having a metric of efficiency (sort of like profiling code), so that if you find that you guys are spending a disproportionate amount of time on one particular type of user request it could bubble up to the top of the list of tasks to be at least somewhat automated.
This should both make the PHB's happy because they'll see you guys getting more efficient over time, and in theory that efficiency should make your jobs easier as well.
Does anybody know if there are any fully RoHS compliant laptops for sale in the United States? (for that matter, is this one RoHS?). If I understand correctly, it must be free of lead, mercury, cadmium, and PCBs for that to be so...
Depending on who's doing the asking (i.e. if I'm on the clock, or she's cute, I'll do my best, otherwise it's "go p*ss up a rope")...
The whole problem with trying to answer this question, is that the question should be unasked.
The Internet (as we understand it), is really an abstraction built for the express purpose of making it so nobody has to _care_ what things look like on the physical level. That's the whole point of the seven-layered protocol stack, half of the RFC's, and the whole concept of a network of peers who can all send and receive requests and information.
Put that in yer pipe an' smoke it.
I have an EOS 400D and I'm quite fond of it, although I'm still getting used to it and all of the whiz-bang features it has over my old Bronica ETR (you know, one of those old monstrosities which used that barbaric technology called *film* (Actually, aside from weight and speed concerns, I prefer shooting on film, but digital is so damn fast and convenient)).
It seems to me from playing with several camera phones, several digital cameras, and a large variety of old mechanical cameras as old as the 1930's, I've determined that a lot of the quality of a camera is in how the user can grow into the feature set. The 400D didn't provide as pristine an out of the box point-and-shoot image as the camera phone, but that is also not the focus (if you'll pardon the pun) of this model. It is really made to be a camera for people who want the fine grained manual control, and who would be very annoyed if it "knew" how to correct every shot and then was wrong just even once... They'd rather set the thing up and be sure that it's doing what they want it to, just as if it were a normal old camera shooting on film.
So, I guess this test is not really apples to apples, but it does show why a casual snapshot taker might be better off with a camera (like those phone cameras) that is designed for that purpose.
Hehehehe... Having tinkered with Asterisk, I'll second that =:-> And all of those SIP phones (Esp. Polycom's) have their own set of poorly documented flaming hoops to jump through.
Nice tagline =:->
I don't really _hate_ Microsoft per se, but I find that they don't really have my needs in mind (as a developer and long-time computer user). My gripes are really pretty simple:
.net stuff, and that may be cool and all, but part of my job entails maintaining a large (30,000+ line) code base written in pretty much all straight C that uses a lot of win32 calls, and it really sucks that the best documentation on all of that is Google's translation of the chineese version of Visual C 5.x's help files.
I don't like being crammed into an unnecesarily GUI environment. I like the simplicity of scripting and automation that comes with a real command line environment.
I don't like giving up control of my computer. Microsoft is always pushing one thing after another which all take control away from me, the user, in the name of making things easier or safer or some other nonsense. Things that fall under this category are the following: DRM / Trusted Computing, Hiding of system files, Hiding of file extensions, animated toolbars, the fact that IE takes any web server error (40x, 50x, host not found, connection timed out, etc...) and puts up the same uninformative dumbed down error message up. I really want to know the details, and it hides them.
I don't like their pushing of various fad programming models in their development tools. I remember when I upgraded from Visual C++ 5 to VC6 they had taken the raw win32 calls out of the table of contents, so if you looked things up that way, you'd see the MFC way first, unless you knew the calls already, in which case the index could turn them up. When I upgraded again, they had taken the calls out of the index too, but a full text search of the help turned up some examples... There is NO EXCUSE to EVER hide documentation from users, much less DEVELOPERS. I recognize that they are trying to wean people off of win32 so they can go to a more hardware independent
So, yeah, basicly I have largely negative feelings about Microsoft because they don't do a terribly good job of meeting my needs, which wouldn't be such a big deal, except that as a near-monopoly they try very hard to stamp out competing systems that may actually meet my needs quite well. They aren't stamping them out to keep my dollar, they're just doing it in case any of those competing solutions actually turns out better than Windows and draws mainstream users away. As such, they are definitely pissing on my [figurative] corn flakes.
http://www.greasybastard.com/index.php?page=weara
Muhahahahaha!
Maybe it is a serious problem, maybe not, it depends on how you look at it. I've always sort of thought of e-bay as a sealed-bid auction (a well-understood and respected auction practice where each bidder sends in a bid by some deadline, and after that deadline, all the bids are opened and the highest takes the item (or the lowest provides the service)).
In my opinion this is a fairer and saner system because it keeps people from chasing a contract down to the point where they'd lose money, or chasing an item to the point where they can't afford it by throwing in bid after bid in the heat of the moment.
Since everybody who actually wants to win an ebay item snipes, it ends up being pretty close to a sealed bid auction after all. This is okay, although ebay could either do better explaining it to end users, or just outright implement a sealed-bid interface and be done with it.
I think that really does it! I (count my lucky stars) rarely have to deal with non-techies in an official work capacity, but the world still abounds with them, and they seem to divide into two categories, those who are like "Hey, wow, you can program a computer! You must be a genius!" and those who are like "so, you just tell the computer to do this, and then that, and you're done!" (those who imagine that every programming language has a "do-what-i-mean" statement.
Here is the catch. WinCE (so well named!) has better out-of-the-box driver support for all sorts of random peripherals than the PPC, ARM, and MIPS ports of Linux (last I checked). I ran across a lot of this in working on my wearable project. At the time I found that the version of PPC linux that ran on one of my boards had _very_ broken support for USB keyboard/mouse/HID devices, and the next version up broke the vendor supplied framebuffer drivers for the NTSC out. What do you do there?
I agree with the parent poster in that volume is the answer. For me, when I've got a finite amount of spare time, hardware goes "stale" with alarming speed, and all of that jazz, I'd rather use something with better out-of-the-box driver support. I ended up going back to a much less power-efficient x86 solution just so all my bloody drivers would be there.
The same goes for J. Random industrial automation project, where you have maybe ten or twenty units in the field. If they have to pay their geeks for a couple hundred hours to fix broken drivers or start from scratch for all of the standard peripherals that some $x/seat version of WinCe will take care of, it's silly. That $x/seat means a lot more when you ship thousands or even millions of the devices.
This is a real pisser because what we need the most is for the embedded HARDWARE companies to take Linux a little more seriously (this is happening, but at a snail's pace). Most of those SOC (System On a Chip) widgets (y'know, a CPU, and a handful of common IO peripherals like an LCD/CRT video controller, USB master and slave, a couple GPIO banks, and IDE/CF controller, and variety of I2C and RS232 ports rolled into one wafer) manufacturers are writing drivers for all those builtins for CE, and although you get the datasheet, it's still a lot of (tedious) work to write those same drivers for Linux.
Maybe (a temporary) hack would be if somebody could figure out a way to wrap the CE drivers for any given arch and run them under Linux. Ick! Bleh!
If my memory serves me, we pulled a similar stunt putting in a back door in some mainframe that was sold to Iran sometime in the early '80s that let us read every line of their national budget, plus a bunch of other juicy internal pencil pusher stuff. I think we even got caught at it eventually.