I didn't mean when you have an ambulance handy, I meant an alternative for when you have only yourself handy.
I've used atropine as an emergency anti-inflammatory following a mystery bite or sting (might have been a scorpion) -- injected all around the area -- and the swelling, which was moving so fast you could watch it grow, shrank at the same pace. It was quite amazing to watch.
I'm curious about something -- in an emergency, could you use injectable epinephrine and some sort of nebulizer?
What about atropine?
[I used to keep epinephrine on hand for the livestock, and for spider bites etc., but the extremely short shelf life wasn't worth it. Conversely atropine keeps forever and works nearly as well against those bites/stings that cause rapid swelling. -- I have some dated 1991 that still works just fine.]
I've run into an amazing lot of people who think "reformat" is identical to "factory-fresh" and don't understand that the OS is a separate beastie, or that they just FDISK'd their recovery partition, and that's why it doesn't work. Some of these folks have been grandpas, others college students.
And what happens when the HD develops a bad spot in the middle of the hidden UEFI partition?
I'm wondering if we're headed back to the era of the access-dongle, so you get a dongle with your new computer, just like you get a key with your new car.
[Cue mutterings about how if the dongle isn't write-protected, all sorts of nasty effects could ensue.]
Is there any reason you can't physically hand them a key (ie. a suitably-loaded and write-protected USB flash stick) the same way you'd hand them keys to their new car?
Programmer friend o'mine used to work at Symantec, back in the DOS5/6 era. As he tells it, what happened was this: Microsoft waltzed in, said in so many words "GIVE us your utilities so we can include them in DOS6, or we'll make sure they won't run on it," and wound up licensing 'em for pennies on the dollar. (I vaguely recall it was in the mid-5-figures, which was nothing for lic. fee for something that would sell millions of copies.) Anyway, that was the point where Symantec started the slide from a good company to total horseshit (in part because all of a sudden they had no product to sell, since M$ was basically giving it away with DOS6). Symantec management decided that since they'd been deprived of other resources, extortion was a good business model to copy, and from there it went downhill to the unreliable mishmash we know today.
I'm wondering if your "front dead" syndrome is a variant of what I called Conner syndrome -- if the drive sat unused for a few months, it would forget how to boot. (Sit idle long enough and it would lose all the data, too.) Saw this in some of those rebadges marketed as Seagates too, after Seagate ate Conner. The older ones could be fixed by applying FDISK and "Mark Active" but post-Seagate that stopped working. Anyway I take this to mean the "front" of these drives was unstable, or exposed to magnetic noise, or some such issue.
I think the oldest utility I still regularly use is dated 1985, so I'm a poor one to ask whether folks might have old tools on hand or not.:)
Teac brand floppies, if you can find 'em. They're FAR more reliable than any other brand, and are much more likely to be able to read a tired diskette. (Look on the back of the drive for the brand label.)
I have some Teac FDDs still in use that are around 20 years old.
No, it's not. I tested this rather extensively back in the Olden Days and found the "alignment" theory was a load of hooey.
What mattered is that the floppy had to be formatted so the OS could read it. Most FORMAT utilities wrote either a DOS3 or DOS5 boot sector. However, DOS5's boot sector was not backward-compatible, and an OS that expected DOS3 would report a DOS5-formatted floppy as NFG.
How'd I first notice this? At the time I had two fairly ancient systems, one ran DOS3.2, the other ran DOS 6.0 (which uses a DOS5.0 boot sector). The DOS6 system could ALWAYS read disks formatted on the DOS3 system, but the DOS3 system couldn't read ANY disks formatted on the DOS6 system... UNLESS they were formatted by XTreeGold, which produced a DOS3 boot sector. Then the very same disks, written in the very same drives, were perfectly readable on either machine.... *and* ANY other machine running DOS3.x or later.
And if I booted the DOS3 machine from a DOS6 boot disk, it could then magically read the very same floppies it had rejected when it booted from its normal DOS3.2.
I tried all sorts of cross-checks among different systems and several types of both 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, including some whose owners complained of "alignment" issues, and found it was 100% consistent -- what mattered was not the drive or the disk, but how it was formatted (DOS3 or DOS5 boot sector) and what OS the machine was booted to.
You might be looking at a Windows bug. WinXP in particular had this stupid notion that it had to write volume tracking on floppies with EVERY read (unless write-protected, of course). This caused that floppy to become unreadable, behaving like a bad disk, on any other machine.
More info from a friend who researched the problem and generated a fix (after I applied this fix, my floppies magically stopped "dying")
===== Volume Tracking is a method that Windows uses to ID a floppy disk. A unique hex number is written to the OEM-Name field in the bootsector, eight bytes starting at offset 03h. The system then uses this number to determine if the disk in the drive has changed. Write protect will stop it during a read but nothing will stop it during a write except some entries in the registry here:
The key entries tell the system to compare certain bytes in the bootsector with the binary values in the key to determine whether or not to use Volume Tracking. If a match is found, Volume Tracking is NOT used.
Here is how the keys work. The first two numbers are a 16-bit offset into the bootsector with the high and low bytes reversed, keeping with Intel's method of storing 16-bit numbers. The remaining numbers are the values used for the compare.
Most bootsectors has a couple of things in common. First, the last two bytes are called the signature bytes and are usually 55h AAh. Second, the third byte at offset 02h is usually an NOP instruction, 90h. Almost all bootsectors have one or both of these things in common. The following two binary entries will cover these. The name given to the keys can be anything.
MS Sucks FE 01 55 AA
MS Suckz 02 00 90
During my research I found only 2 bootsectors that will not be covered by the above entries, PC-DOS 1.00 and DR Concurrent DOS 3.20. PC-DOS 1.00 has a date in the bootsector starting at offset 09h, 7-May-81. DR Concurrent DOS 3.20 has the value of 00h at offset 02h instead of 90h. The following two entries will cover these.
MS Blowz 09 00 37 2D 4D 61 79 2D 38 31
MS Blows 02 00 00
The included.reg files will insert the keys for you. Just double-click or right-click and select "Merge". You must restart for the entries to take effect.
Windows 3.1/NT4 and earlier do not use Volume Tracking. ======
[I don't know if there's a similar bug in other OSs, but if they do an equivalent function I expect it produces similar results, ie. spurious 'dead' floppies.]
I had something similar happen with copying data off a dying hard disk... left Norton Ghost 5.x running as long as it took (and sometimes it spent an hour or so on a single sector) and eventually recovered ALL of it. IIRC the largest number of retries was somewhere around 1400. It took two days for about 8GB worth.
What gave Spinrite a bad name wasn't that it didn't work... it's that it was originally designed for floppies and MFM/RLL drives, but it took Gibson several years to admit that the old version was destroying data on IDE drives (and per some reports, rendering those IDE drives inoperable).
My personal experience with recovering well-aged and seriously-cranky floppies was that the best tool was a very old version of Norton Disk Doctor, and temporarily writing the recovered data to a RAMdisk. I'm not sure why that last point made a difference, but it did -- might have been something to do with the speed of the write operation. Out of the whole pile (enough to fill a CD, and some literally old enough to vote) I think I had one incomplete and one fail.
Assuming it was payable over 40 years, with zero interest, that's still almost $17,000/year (or at current interest rates, about four times that across 40 years, call it $65k/year). I'm guessing that most people, with such a debt dumped on them before they even get to the career lifestage, would be financially better off to go on the dole and not even attempt to pay it, nor try to make a living (let alone save for retirement).
For comparison, for the crime of assault, California state law allows a penalty of up to $1000 for ordinary assault, or up to $10000 for assault on a police officer with injury resulting.
Likely so, at least after the first case got dragged in front of the state supreme court (which as I vaguely recall was what it took WRT some other extralegal enforcement).
BTW what was that remark someone posted (can't find it now) about that you can be arrested for declining to be scanned/searched and simply walking away from the airport? Isn't that arrest for NO crime?
My solution: Let people who have CCW permits fly with their weapons, perhaps at a discount, with the understanding that they *are* the in-flight security. That way you get a group that probably has at least as much weapons training as the average air marshal, generally feels a duty to protect, and is on the spot, at the most minimal or even NO cost, and with no loss of Constitutional rights or freedoms.
I'm wondering how this works in states that have an existing law against private entities performing law-enforcement type jobs.
And don't forget, the privatized entity has to make a profit, so as someone above succinctly put it, is motivated both to cut corners and increase its market.
No, I don't. I used to live in the Fargo ND area, I know what a *real* flood looks like. But so much of the flood plain is developed now, that never should have been, and it's really too late to go back and do something different. But if we could -- well, we could be smarter about it.
BTW I live at the top of a ridge in the middle of the desert, and FEMA says my house (but none of the surrounding area) is on a "flood plain". Meanwhile, they've delisted the dry lake bed and riverbed that this year weren't so dry. Makes you wonder...
So go ahead and build the warehouses, the barge docks, etc, along the flood plain. Stuff that can get flooded with minimal structural damage (if you choose to keep rice or paper in your riverside warehouse, don't say we didn't warn you). But don't build the residentials there.
Side thought... I'm wondering what a little beeswax rubbed on the keys would do for those typewriter samples.
Of course, now we have printers that put an ID on every sheet produced...
As to the sale of my eyeballs, I don't really care when it's my anonymous eyeballs as part of the general mass of product. However, I *do* care when it's Reziac's eyeballs being singled out, by name and whatever else personal identification... Perhaps for an innocuous purpose today, but as the Stasi did indeed demonstrate, for what purpose tomorrow??
And that old-fashioned customizable toolbar goes back at least as far as Word4 (among other apps), running on Win3.1. If something persists that long in a supposedly user-driven environment, maybe there's some logic to keeping it, eh??
"There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
As a related question -- if someone intends to hold public office, why should they have any expectation of "private ownership" of any speeches they give that are directly related to either holding or pursuing that *public* office?
Seems to me that private ownership of public political speeches effectively allows politics to happen behind closed doors, and we have more than enough of that already.
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I didn't mean when you have an ambulance handy, I meant an alternative for when you have only yourself handy.
I've used atropine as an emergency anti-inflammatory following a mystery bite or sting (might have been a scorpion) -- injected all around the area -- and the swelling, which was moving so fast you could watch it grow, shrank at the same pace. It was quite amazing to watch.
I'm curious about something -- in an emergency, could you use injectable epinephrine and some sort of nebulizer?
What about atropine?
[I used to keep epinephrine on hand for the livestock, and for spider bites etc., but the extremely short shelf life wasn't worth it. Conversely atropine keeps forever and works nearly as well against those bites/stings that cause rapid swelling. -- I have some dated 1991 that still works just fine.]
I've run into an amazing lot of people who think "reformat" is identical to "factory-fresh" and don't understand that the OS is a separate beastie, or that they just FDISK'd their recovery partition, and that's why it doesn't work. Some of these folks have been grandpas, others college students.
And what happens when the HD develops a bad spot in the middle of the hidden UEFI partition?
I'm wondering if we're headed back to the era of the access-dongle, so you get a dongle with your new computer, just like you get a key with your new car.
[Cue mutterings about how if the dongle isn't write-protected, all sorts of nasty effects could ensue.]
It looked to me from some of the comments (yes, I RTFA, and the FLinkedFromCommentA too) that at least part of UEFI can be on the HD itself.
So, what happens if your HD, or its data channel, is defective?? Strikes me as an unrecoverable situation.
Is there any reason you can't physically hand them a key (ie. a suitably-loaded and write-protected USB flash stick) the same way you'd hand them keys to their new car?
Programmer friend o'mine used to work at Symantec, back in the DOS5/6 era. As he tells it, what happened was this: Microsoft waltzed in, said in so many words "GIVE us your utilities so we can include them in DOS6, or we'll make sure they won't run on it," and wound up licensing 'em for pennies on the dollar. (I vaguely recall it was in the mid-5-figures, which was nothing for lic. fee for something that would sell millions of copies.) Anyway, that was the point where Symantec started the slide from a good company to total horseshit (in part because all of a sudden they had no product to sell, since M$ was basically giving it away with DOS6). Symantec management decided that since they'd been deprived of other resources, extortion was a good business model to copy, and from there it went downhill to the unreliable mishmash we know today.
I'm wondering if your "front dead" syndrome is a variant of what I called Conner syndrome -- if the drive sat unused for a few months, it would forget how to boot. (Sit idle long enough and it would lose all the data, too.) Saw this in some of those rebadges marketed as Seagates too, after Seagate ate Conner. The older ones could be fixed by applying FDISK and "Mark Active" but post-Seagate that stopped working. Anyway I take this to mean the "front" of these drives was unstable, or exposed to magnetic noise, or some such issue.
I think the oldest utility I still regularly use is dated 1985, so I'm a poor one to ask whether folks might have old tools on hand or not. :)
Teac brand floppies, if you can find 'em. They're FAR more reliable than any other brand, and are much more likely to be able to read a tired diskette. (Look on the back of the drive for the brand label.)
I have some Teac FDDs still in use that are around 20 years old.
No, it's not. I tested this rather extensively back in the Olden Days and found the "alignment" theory was a load of hooey.
What mattered is that the floppy had to be formatted so the OS could read it. Most FORMAT utilities wrote either a DOS3 or DOS5 boot sector. However, DOS5's boot sector was not backward-compatible, and an OS that expected DOS3 would report a DOS5-formatted floppy as NFG.
How'd I first notice this? At the time I had two fairly ancient systems, one ran DOS3.2, the other ran DOS 6.0 (which uses a DOS5.0 boot sector). The DOS6 system could ALWAYS read disks formatted on the DOS3 system, but the DOS3 system couldn't read ANY disks formatted on the DOS6 system... UNLESS they were formatted by XTreeGold, which produced a DOS3 boot sector. Then the very same disks, written in the very same drives, were perfectly readable on either machine.... *and* ANY other machine running DOS3.x or later.
And if I booted the DOS3 machine from a DOS6 boot disk, it could then magically read the very same floppies it had rejected when it booted from its normal DOS3.2.
I tried all sorts of cross-checks among different systems and several types of both 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, including some whose owners complained of "alignment" issues, and found it was 100% consistent -- what mattered was not the drive or the disk, but how it was formatted (DOS3 or DOS5 boot sector) and what OS the machine was booted to.
You might be looking at a Windows bug. WinXP in particular had this stupid notion that it had to write volume tracking on floppies with EVERY read (unless write-protected, of course). This caused that floppy to become unreadable, behaving like a bad disk, on any other machine.
More info from a friend who researched the problem and generated a fix (after I applied this fix, my floppies magically stopped "dying")
=====
Volume Tracking is a method that Windows uses to ID a floppy disk. A unique hex number is written to the OEM-Name field in the bootsector, eight bytes starting at offset 03h. The system then uses this number to determine if the disk in the drive has changed. Write protect will stop it during a read but nothing will stop it during a write except some entries in the registry here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NoVolTrack
The key entries tell the system to compare certain bytes in the bootsector with the binary values in the key to determine whether or not to use Volume Tracking. If a match is found, Volume Tracking is NOT used.
Here is how the keys work. The first two numbers are a 16-bit offset into the bootsector with the high and low bytes reversed, keeping with Intel's method of storing 16-bit numbers. The remaining numbers are the values used for the compare.
Most bootsectors has a couple of things in common. First, the last two bytes are called the signature bytes and are usually 55h AAh. Second, the third byte at offset 02h is usually an NOP instruction, 90h. Almost all bootsectors have one or both of these things in common. The following two binary entries will cover these. The name given to the keys can be anything.
MS Sucks FE 01 55 AA
MS Suckz 02 00 90
During my research I found only 2 bootsectors that will not be covered by the above entries, PC-DOS 1.00 and DR Concurrent DOS 3.20. PC-DOS 1.00 has a date in the bootsector starting at offset 09h, 7-May-81. DR Concurrent DOS 3.20 has the value of 00h at offset 02h instead of 90h. The following two entries will cover these.
MS Blowz 09 00 37 2D 4D 61 79 2D 38 31
MS Blows 02 00 00
The included .reg files will insert the keys for you.
Just double-click or right-click and select "Merge".
You must restart for the entries to take effect.
NoVolTrack9x.reg - Windows 9x/ME
======
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NoVolTrack]
"MS Sucks"=hex:fe,01,55,aa
"MS Suckz"=hex:02,00,90
"MS Blows"=hex:02,00,00
"MS Blowz"=hex:09,00,37,2d,4d,61,79,2d,38,31
NoVolTrack2k.reg - Windows 2k/XP/2k3
=====
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NoVolTrack]
"MS Sucks"=hex:fe,01,55,aa
"MS Suckz"=hex:02,00,90
"MS Blows"=hex:02,00,00
"MS Blowz"=hex:09,00,37,2d,4d,61,79,2d,38,31
Windows 3.1/NT4 and earlier do not use Volume Tracking.
======
[I don't know if there's a similar bug in other OSs, but if they do an equivalent function I expect it produces similar results, ie. spurious 'dead' floppies.]
I had something similar happen with copying data off a dying hard disk... left Norton Ghost 5.x running as long as it took (and sometimes it spent an hour or so on a single sector) and eventually recovered ALL of it. IIRC the largest number of retries was somewhere around 1400. It took two days for about 8GB worth.
What gave Spinrite a bad name wasn't that it didn't work... it's that it was originally designed for floppies and MFM/RLL drives, but it took Gibson several years to admit that the old version was destroying data on IDE drives (and per some reports, rendering those IDE drives inoperable).
My personal experience with recovering well-aged and seriously-cranky floppies was that the best tool was a very old version of Norton Disk Doctor, and temporarily writing the recovered data to a RAMdisk. I'm not sure why that last point made a difference, but it did -- might have been something to do with the speed of the write operation. Out of the whole pile (enough to fill a CD, and some literally old enough to vote) I think I had one incomplete and one fail.
Also tried NDD's ancestor Mace, but no joy there.
Assuming it was payable over 40 years, with zero interest, that's still almost $17,000/year (or at current interest rates, about four times that across 40 years, call it $65k/year). I'm guessing that most people, with such a debt dumped on them before they even get to the career lifestage, would be financially better off to go on the dole and not even attempt to pay it, nor try to make a living (let alone save for retirement).
For comparison, for the crime of assault, California state law allows a penalty of up to $1000 for ordinary assault, or up to $10000 for assault on a police officer with injury resulting.
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=pen&group=00001-01000&file=240-248
Likely so, at least after the first case got dragged in front of the state supreme court (which as I vaguely recall was what it took WRT some other extralegal enforcement).
BTW what was that remark someone posted (can't find it now) about that you can be arrested for declining to be scanned/searched and simply walking away from the airport? Isn't that arrest for NO crime?
My solution: Let people who have CCW permits fly with their weapons, perhaps at a discount, with the understanding that they *are* the in-flight security. That way you get a group that probably has at least as much weapons training as the average air marshal, generally feels a duty to protect, and is on the spot, at the most minimal or even NO cost, and with no loss of Constitutional rights or freedoms.
I'm wondering how this works in states that have an existing law against private entities performing law-enforcement type jobs.
And don't forget, the privatized entity has to make a profit, so as someone above succinctly put it, is motivated both to cut corners and increase its market.
Five minutes, actually.
No, I don't. I used to live in the Fargo ND area, I know what a *real* flood looks like. But so much of the flood plain is developed now, that never should have been, and it's really too late to go back and do something different. But if we could -- well, we could be smarter about it.
BTW I live at the top of a ridge in the middle of the desert, and FEMA says my house (but none of the surrounding area) is on a "flood plain". Meanwhile, they've delisted the dry lake bed and riverbed that this year weren't so dry. Makes you wonder...
So go ahead and build the warehouses, the barge docks, etc, along the flood plain. Stuff that can get flooded with minimal structural damage (if you choose to keep rice or paper in your riverside warehouse, don't say we didn't warn you). But don't build the residentials there.
Side thought... I'm wondering what a little beeswax rubbed on the keys would do for those typewriter samples.
Of course, now we have printers that put an ID on every sheet produced...
As to the sale of my eyeballs, I don't really care when it's my anonymous eyeballs as part of the general mass of product. However, I *do* care when it's Reziac's eyeballs being singled out, by name and whatever else personal identification... Perhaps for an innocuous purpose today, but as the Stasi did indeed demonstrate, for what purpose tomorrow??
I'm wondering just how the hell I do phone support for that thing and my visually-impaired clients.
And that old-fashioned customizable toolbar goes back at least as far as Word4 (among other apps), running on Win3.1. If something persists that long in a supposedly user-driven environment, maybe there's some logic to keeping it, eh??
Ribbons, bah.
"There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
-- Booker T Washington, Up From Slavery (1911)
As a related question -- if someone intends to hold public office, why should they have any expectation of "private ownership" of any speeches they give that are directly related to either holding or pursuing that *public* office?
Seems to me that private ownership of public political speeches effectively allows politics to happen behind closed doors, and we have more than enough of that already.