Take it apart and play with the magnets or something.
If someone will be using the drive, running destructive write badblocks would be a good idea to test the drive's integrity. If you don't particularly care about the drive's integrity, writing zeroes to all of the drive will make it more trouble than it's worth to recover anything from it.
find out how they were erased so we could find out how not to do it, and where they were not successful in recovering info to go back to those companies to find out how they did wipe that info properly.
Most likely it's very simple. The disks they recovered info from were not overwritten and the disks they couldn't recover information from were overwritten. A format that operates mostly in read-mode will leave most of the information intact on the disk. I have even FDISK'd, messed around with varying partitioning schemes, reformatting, and to my surprise eventually winding up with the original contents of a partition still readable.
Something as simple as dd if=/dev/zero of=/def/hda and let it run until it's finished would be adequate to put the disks into their "couldn't recover information from" category. Still for the few bucks a used drive is worth it seems kinda stupid not to just pull them and pile them up somewhere. This from someone who has a pretty cavalier attitude toward security.
but when I took the course, my lab partner conked out on me, so I ended writing the kernel myself, but that was okay since I had written multitasking kernels twice before, one in MACHINE LANGUAGE (no, not that wimpy symbolic-assembler stuff!) for a Commodore-128
Delicious! Beats 2 cards of EBCDIC machine language to bootstrap a hex loader written in hex.
Single-tasking, tape-based. I had the source to IBM's 8k Assembler but quickly dropped it and wrote my own from scratch. It takes very little difference of opinion in how things should be put together to make the other stuff totally useless for copying stuff from.
"Yes, I corrected myself. It was 6 man-years, not six real-time years. But in that time they wrote the complete operating system, a C compiler, and all the utilities. In his posting, Brown says the GNU C compiler is now 110,000 lines of code. Maybe the Coherent compiler was half that, or 60,000 lines of code. The MINIX utilities were about 30,000 lines of code and covered about the same ground as Coherent did. Add a 10,000 line kernel to this and it looks like the three Coherent programmers wrote 100,000 lines of code in 6 man-years. That is a productivity of 16,000 lines per man-year. In that light I don't see why it is plausible for Canadian students to produce 16,000 lines a year but not plausible for Finnish students to produce 10,000 lines a year. It is just as cold in Finland as in Canada so programmers are never tempted to go outside." [Emphasis added] 16,000 lines a year (production grade) 10,000 lines a year (hacker grade) Methinks the good professor (Sorry about that) severely understates the case.
That's not a fault of Windows that's your responsibility for allowing your friends to use your machine with an account that has permissions to do such things.
I think that's the best argument for Linux over Microsoft Windows that I've ever seen.
Andy's first rebuttal included enough name-dropping and obscure significant facts about UNIX to establish himself as someone "in the know" and Brown as incompetent.
It is important to note that Andy Tanenbaum has not switched from anti-Linux to pro-Linux. Andy has not shifted his position at all. Andy is not clobbering Brown for a hatchet job on Linux. Andy is clobbering Brown for an incompetent hatchet job on Linux.
"Only a German company would want to put a piece of software where one program controls every aspect of the organization."
It takes extreme organization and skill to pull it off. Done well and completely, it is extremely effective. Done less than perfectly, the imperfections are automated with predictable results.
My impression is that SAP can make or break a company. It would be interesting, in a morbid sense, to watch the combination of Microsoft and SAP. You can automate what you understand. Automation is never a viable substitute for understanding. At the level of SAP it has some real teeth.
Linus writing Linux was woven into the fabric of history by the fates.
Me, I don't believe in magic or fates or whatever, BUT. Methinks that's the only effective way to describe it.
Time, circumstances, whatever. You grab a tiger by the tail and hang on for the ride.
It will be very interesting to see how all this plays out. Microsoft is in a panic because they're fixin to be writ out of the script. Whether to allow XPSP2 on pirated machines? That the question is worthy of debate is enough to ensure that Microsoft will continue to be plagued by worms and viruses.
Is this the best M$ can buy? Considering that you're looking at the Closed Source model in action against the Open Source model, I think the answer is YES. And it does reflect on Microsoft's competence and the competence of Microsoft's software.
What's interesting is that a lot of stuff coming out of the woodwork is from people who are most certainly NOT fans of Linux.
Dennis Ritchie in a posting to alt.folklore.computers "... didn't allow us to look at their source.
I concluded two things:
First, that it was very hard to believe that Coherent and its basic applications were not created without considerable study of the OS code and details of its applications.
Second, that looking at various corners convinced me that I couldn't find anything that was copied. It might have been that some parts were written with our source nearby, but at least the effort had been made to rewrite. If it came to it, I could never honestly testify that my opinion was that what they generated was irreproducible from the manual."
"The GNU team contributed their GCC compiler, a complicated product with over 110,000 lines of code to the Linux project."
GNU team -- what is that? I'm sure there are several teams doing something with GNU software but I doubt the existence of any single entity known as the GNU team.
contributed -- How? When? By whom? It was available and it was used persuant to its licensing terms. There was no "contribution".
their -- Assumes an ownership contrary to the terms of the GPL. Like "You are breathing my air."
complicated -- He got one right!
product -- Again assumes an ownership contrary to the terms of the GPL.
to the Linux project. -- At the time gcc was first used, there was no "Linux" or "Linux project". If it had a name it was called something like FREAX IIRC.
"but Linus' sloppiness about attribution is no reason to assert that Linus didn't write Linux(8)." Consider what is required for unsloppy attribution. Research and trace all ideas back to their original sources, and don't forget the minor Greek philosophers. Few if any actually measure up to that standard. It's also quite plausible that Linus reinvented almost everything without knowledge of or access to the previous inventions. "I'd agree that 'inventor' is not necessarily the right word." That's a bit like the sculptor who quipped that he just removed the stuff that wasn't the persona of the statue. Invention is done, but the overall process is more like discovery.
"How much 'inspiration' did Linus get from Minix?" First, the fact that it exists. Second, that if he wants to play Unix on a 80386 he's gonna have to do it himself. The problem with copying from Minix is that anything copied brings a bunch of baggage along with itself. The wrong baggage. So it's easier to redo everything with the "right" baggage.
If you intend to survive, that's the way to do it. You need multiple backups, and they need to be cheap.
First rule of backups is that when you need them, something is not the way it should be and any scheme that assumes everything is normal is quite likely to fail. This means you want any failures of the backup systems to be as independent as possible of failures in the main systems.
Second rule of backups is that every backup except the one that matters was a complete waste of time. Backups need to be cheap and easy.
Multiple bad backups is survivable. Single good backup, if it shares a flaw with main system, can be extremely reliable except when it is needed.
Your's looks quite good. The only thing I'd be tempted to add is: take an old clunker and a large IDE drive, mirror everything to it, write the date on it, and bury in in the bottom of a closet.
if the margins and cost of product are driven down, that means the market could actually grow for the product
That is what has happened. Very early mainframes. Somebody in a position to know (Chairman of IBM?) claimed there was a world market for at most 5 of them.
When the VALUE exceeds the COST, the market grows. Part gradually, part in fits and starts.
Equilibrium is somewhere around marginal value equals marginal cost. Sounds simple until you look at "whose" value and "whose" cost.
Hmmmm,...then perhaps they should look at why projects forks? If they can manage to spot things that might lead to a fork early on, they can adress it in a way that benefits everyone as well as avoids forks. Assume that I have some significant new and wonderful improvement to MySQL, coded debugged and tested. Other than minor issues with the name MySQL, forking is essentially trivial. I fork and it's now me and a few others versus MySQL AB and the rest of the world. Bad odds. I can try to keep updating to try to keep up, but I wind up paying MySQL AB to cherry-pick my improvements and assume ownership of my hard work. The proprietary MySQL will not suffer much compared to the MySQL AB maintained GPL versions. Disclaimer. The above is fictional (but I'm sure it has happened). I use MySQL. I happen to agree with their philosophy. MySQL is NOT a poor man's Oracle. Completely different set of priorities, with the result being that MySQL is probably more "Enterprise-Ready" than Oracle.
There seems to be a tendency to associate GPL with cheap rip-off. While a lot of it is that, methinks the real value is in software at the high end, which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. Consider IBM's involvement. IBM and cheap rip-off do NOT belong together. (That's Microsoft's turf;)
Sun has the problem that it has to establish Java sufficiently for it to stand on its own before it lets go. It's a cruel world out there.
Off course, that also requires whoever is responsible for the code to be able to work with others... This may really be Open Sources secret weapon. It helps of course, but it doesn't really have any such requirement to function tolerably well.
"Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property? Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?"
Slashdot Mirror
Something to do with dumpster-diving?
Seriously, if you don't bother to stop these large security breaches, why even bother with anything else?
Take it apart and play with the magnets or something.
If someone will be using the drive, running destructive write badblocks would be a good idea to test the drive's integrity. If you don't particularly care about the drive's integrity, writing zeroes to all of the drive will make it more trouble than it's worth to recover anything from it.
find out how they were erased so we could find out how not to do it, and where they were not successful in recovering info to go back to those companies to find out how they did wipe that info properly.
Most likely it's very simple. The disks they recovered info from were not overwritten and the disks they couldn't recover information from were overwritten. A format that operates mostly in read-mode will leave most of the information intact on the disk. I have even FDISK'd, messed around with varying partitioning schemes, reformatting, and to my surprise eventually winding up with the original contents of a partition still readable.
Something as simple as
dd if=/dev/zero of=/def/hda
and let it run until it's finished would be adequate to put the disks into their "couldn't recover information from" category. Still for the few bucks a used drive is worth it seems kinda stupid not to just pull them and pile them up somewhere. This from someone who has a pretty cavalier attitude toward security.
And Enron's goal was what?
And Worldcom?
Seems like businesses that make a profit to stay in business tend to survive a lot longer.
I hope by complex and a little ingenious you were being ironic...
Complex and a little ingenious for Microsoft?
but when I took the course, my lab partner conked out on me, so I ended writing the kernel myself, but that was okay since I had written multitasking kernels twice before, one in MACHINE LANGUAGE (no, not that wimpy symbolic-assembler stuff!) for a Commodore-128
Delicious!
Beats 2 cards of EBCDIC machine language to bootstrap a hex loader written in hex.
Single-tasking, tape-based. I had the source to IBM's 8k Assembler but quickly dropped it and wrote my own from scratch. It takes very little difference of opinion in how things should be put together to make the other stuff totally useless for copying stuff from.
"Yes, I corrected myself. It was 6 man-years, not six real-time years. But in that time they wrote the complete operating system, a C compiler, and all the utilities. In his posting, Brown says the GNU C compiler is now 110,000 lines of code. Maybe the Coherent compiler was half that, or 60,000 lines of code. The MINIX utilities were about 30,000 lines of code and covered about the same ground as Coherent did. Add a 10,000 line kernel to this and it looks like the three Coherent programmers wrote 100,000 lines of code in 6 man-years. That is a productivity of 16,000 lines per man-year. In that light I don't see why it is plausible for Canadian students to produce 16,000 lines a year but not plausible for Finnish students to produce 10,000 lines a year. It is just as cold in Finland as in Canada so programmers are never tempted to go outside." [Emphasis added]
16,000 lines a year (production grade)
10,000 lines a year (hacker grade)
Methinks the good professor (Sorry about that) severely understates the case.
That's not a fault of Windows that's your responsibility for allowing your friends to use your machine with an account that has permissions to do such things.
I think that's the best argument for Linux over Microsoft Windows that I've ever seen.
Completely unnecessary elitism.
Match a Ferrari against a Yugo.
No need for facts, elitism does nicely.
(If you need facts and are willing to dig for them, they are there;)
You miss my point. Which is, we are playing into Ken Brown's hands.
I would disagree. Silence is often taken as implied assent.
(That's probably why Dennis Ritchie's reply to Brown, from an extremely unlikely source for anything pro-Linux;)
you are a "heavyweight" like Andy Tanenbaum.
Andy's first rebuttal included enough name-dropping and obscure significant facts about UNIX to establish himself as someone "in the know" and Brown as incompetent.
It is important to note that Andy Tanenbaum has not switched from anti-Linux to pro-Linux. Andy has not shifted his position at all. Andy is not clobbering Brown for a hatchet job on Linux. Andy is clobbering Brown for an incompetent hatchet job on Linux.
Personally I think Andy is making better copy.
Writing an OS is even harder than writing a compiler by an order of magnitude
...
Personally, I'd guess it to be the other way around.
Of course when you start adding essential utilities,
People aren't reassured by that - they are reassured by a single entity that goes about its business with self confidence.
Yep, Microsoft would rather have worms than public squables.
"They are honorable men."
Keep repeating it and people start to wonder.
I think the real problem is that spammers aren't likely to look at how you've configured spiders to handle your site.
Hmmmm, is there any way to indicate that indicated stuff has negative value in computing anything useful? Build booby traps. Catch boobies.
"Only a German company would want to put a piece of software where one program controls every aspect of the organization."
It takes extreme organization and skill to pull it off. Done well and completely, it is extremely effective. Done less than perfectly, the imperfections are automated with predictable results.
My impression is that SAP can make or break a company. It would be interesting, in a morbid sense, to watch the combination of Microsoft and SAP. You can automate what you understand. Automation is never a viable substitute for understanding. At the level of SAP it has some real teeth.
You're making my point. Open Source can and does cope. Closed Source belongs to whomever owns it and there's nothing anybody else can do about it.
Linus writing Linux was woven into the fabric of history by the fates.
Me, I don't believe in magic or fates or whatever, BUT.
Methinks that's the only effective way to describe it.
Time, circumstances, whatever. You grab a tiger by the tail and hang on for the ride.
It will be very interesting to see how all this plays out. Microsoft is in a panic because they're fixin to be writ out of the script. Whether to allow XPSP2 on pirated machines? That the question is worthy of debate is enough to ensure that Microsoft will continue to be plagued by worms and viruses.
Is this the best M$ can buy?
Considering that you're looking at the Closed Source model in action against the Open Source model, I think the answer is YES. And it does reflect on Microsoft's competence and the competence of Microsoft's software.
What's interesting is that a lot of stuff coming out of the woodwork is from people who are most certainly NOT fans of Linux.
Dennis Ritchie in a posting to alt.folklore.computers
"... didn't allow us to look at their source.
I concluded two things:
First, that it was very hard to believe that Coherent and its basic
applications were not created without considerable study of the
OS code and details of its applications.
Second, that looking at various corners convinced me that I couldn't
find anything that was copied. It might have been that some parts were
written with our source nearby, but at least the effort had been
made to rewrite. If it came to it, I could never honestly testify
that my opinion was that what they generated was irreproducible from
the manual."
"The GNU team contributed their GCC compiler, a complicated product with over 110,000 lines of code to the Linux project."
GNU team -- what is that? I'm sure there are several teams doing something with GNU software but I doubt the existence of any single entity known as the GNU team.
contributed -- How? When? By whom? It was available and it was used persuant to its licensing terms. There was no "contribution".
their -- Assumes an ownership contrary to the terms of the GPL. Like "You are breathing my air."
complicated -- He got one right!
product -- Again assumes an ownership contrary to the terms of the GPL.
to the Linux project. -- At the time gcc was first used, there was no "Linux" or "Linux project". If it had a name it was called something like FREAX IIRC.
"but Linus' sloppiness about attribution is no reason to assert that Linus didn't write Linux(8)."
Consider what is required for unsloppy attribution. Research and trace all ideas back to their original sources, and don't forget the minor Greek philosophers. Few if any actually measure up to that standard. It's also quite plausible that Linus reinvented almost everything without knowledge of or access to the previous inventions.
"I'd agree that 'inventor' is not necessarily the right word."
That's a bit like the sculptor who quipped that he just removed the stuff that wasn't the persona of the statue. Invention is done, but the overall process is more like discovery.
"How much 'inspiration' did Linus get from Minix?"
First, the fact that it exists. Second, that if he wants to play Unix on a 80386 he's gonna have to do it himself. The problem with copying from Minix is that anything copied brings a bunch of baggage along with itself. The wrong baggage. So it's easier to redo everything with the "right" baggage.
If you intend to survive, that's the way to do it.
You need multiple backups, and they need to be cheap.
First rule of backups is that when you need them, something is not the way it should be and any scheme that assumes everything is normal is quite likely to fail. This means you want any failures of the backup systems to be as independent as possible of failures in the main systems.
Second rule of backups is that every backup except the one that matters was a complete waste of time. Backups need to be cheap and easy.
Multiple bad backups is survivable. Single good backup, if it shares a flaw with main system, can be extremely reliable except when it is needed.
Your's looks quite good.
The only thing I'd be tempted to add is: take an old clunker and a large IDE drive, mirror everything to it, write the date on it, and bury in in the bottom of a closet.
if the margins and cost of product are driven down, that means the market could actually grow for the product
That is what has happened.
Very early mainframes. Somebody in a position to know (Chairman of IBM?) claimed there was a world market for at most 5 of them.
When the VALUE exceeds the COST, the market grows. Part gradually, part in fits and starts.
Equilibrium is somewhere around marginal value equals marginal cost.
Sounds simple until you look at "whose" value and "whose" cost.
Hmmmm, ...then perhaps they should look at why projects forks? If they can manage to spot things that might lead to a fork early on, they can adress it in a way that benefits everyone as well as avoids forks.
Assume that I have some significant new and wonderful improvement to MySQL, coded debugged and tested. Other than minor issues with the name MySQL, forking is essentially trivial. I fork and it's now me and a few others versus MySQL AB and the rest of the world. Bad odds. I can try to keep updating to try to keep up, but I wind up paying MySQL AB to cherry-pick my improvements and assume ownership of my hard work. The proprietary MySQL will not suffer much compared to the MySQL AB maintained GPL versions.
Disclaimer. The above is fictional (but I'm sure it has happened). I use MySQL. I happen to agree with their philosophy. MySQL is NOT a poor man's Oracle. Completely different set of priorities, with the result being that MySQL is probably more "Enterprise-Ready" than Oracle.
There seems to be a tendency to associate GPL with cheap rip-off. While a lot of it is that, methinks the real value is in software at the high end, which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. Consider IBM's involvement. IBM and cheap rip-off do NOT belong together. (That's Microsoft's turf;)
Sun has the problem that it has to establish Java sufficiently for it to stand on its own before it lets go. It's a cruel world out there.
Off course, that also requires whoever is responsible for the code to be able to work with others...
This may really be Open Sources secret weapon. It helps of course, but it doesn't really have any such requirement to function tolerably well.
More likely:
"Widespread network breakdowns caused by unpatchable Microsoft Windows computers."
"Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property? Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?"
Hmmmmmm.