dban should be find then. If time is a constraint then you just need 4 random passes over the drive. Personally I like the Gutman wipe with the 27 voodoo passes. Of course it doesn't work on any spare sectors, but assuming there isn't anything that fits on a sector that is critical that should be fine.
You mean like DBAN? One of the problem with "utilities" is they require the drive to function in order for you to wipe it. And some times you can get a drive working again by just replacing some of the electronics typically found on the bottom of the drive. Taking the platters and putting them on an equivalent drive is probably also somewhat doable. Really though, when your drive no longer spins you have to resort to physical destruction of the platters - and you really do need to be thorough.
Provided you have some way of detecting the flood I don't know why not.
I do some stuff similar already in my server room, although it certainly isn't as high tech as this. Generally I just use the PC speaker to beep some codes when some semi-severe problems occur. I wouldn't have the machines doing this on a regular basis mind you, because as others have stated it can get really old quick. With a quick script you should be able to monitor everything from temperature to network attacks. One I have beeps a code when the one of our servers gets close to full on the available seats for our accounting server. All of my servers beep out a theme when they're up and running as some of them don't have monitors connected so I'd like to know when/if they're up. IBM servers are twice as loud for some reason, but that's good because I can hear it in the next room.
In FreeBSD you can do all sorts of interesting stuff with/dev/speaker (you may need to load it in boot.conf). See the man page for spkrtest to get some interesting melodies. In linux you should be able to do the same thing with the "beep" program.
And what is this open standard? XML? SQL? We also have apps that use SQL that are so tangled in table schema logic that we can't migrate those applications either. The point isn't that it's binary, the point is that it's there but no one can be bothered to migrate it. I could read/write the file just fine in perl/ruby/whatever, so in this case XML and other format isn't going to help. Simply put there IS no standard when you make in-house applications where there is no equivalent. And there are a lot of them out there.
That's not always the case. Where I work we have some legacy programs that write their own file formats. It's just binary stuff. We have all the source code from the guy who wrote it too. And it's reams and reams of uncommented qbasic. So are we going to pay some guy thousands to write some updated version in C#? We could also use a different application, but then that's not really a legacy issue if we're willing to abandon the program. No the key here is that it's not worth our time and money to futz with something that already works fine - and that's exactly the sweet spot Microsoft adores. The simple fact is we're more willing to use old versions of windows rather than upgrade the program, and I believe Microsoft is fully aware of that situation because it's not an uncommon opinion.
They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates,
Oh really? Now I can't say as far as Intel, but AMD has been very focused on power consumption for a very long time now. All of their literature is filled with benchmarks of power-per-watt and total power savings in the data center, etc. If AMD doesn't care about power consumption, then why would they specifically go to pains to offer CPU versions that are even MORE aggressive in their power saving if you pay a bit more for them? And with all of their power saving innovation and dedication what do they get? Intel now outperforms them and everyone jumps the ship and goes over to the Intel side (despite the fact that the lower power versions of AMD's CPU still use less power when the final weight with the chipset is done).
You know why they care about what performance the average consumer sees? Because that's all consumers care about. If it were otherwise you wouldn't be seeing your lights dim when your graphics card goes into high gear. Where are the "power conscious" versions of these graphics cores?
I've got a lot of Athons, and Athlon XP's running where I work. Some burn out but that's often because of their environment and due to the fact that the fan that comes with the heatsink for the OEM version is garbage almost guaranteed to burn out after a year in high dust environments. The Pentium 4 is history, even Intel admits it was on the wrong track. If you want more longevity, then get a robust heatsink fan (undervolted) and underclock your CPU. You DO underclock your CPU right?
Actually that wouldn't be to hard. Get two of the brightest flashlights you can find, then stick them right up to your eye sockets. Wherever you look it should be the same blinding light.
Well there are two things to consider about Japan. First of all the xbox360 is considered a non-threat by both Nintendo and Sony there. The second thing is that the Japanese don't really have Christmas per say. In Japan Christmas is sort of this abstract santa thing that's popular for people to go on dates and exchange small gifts. In the U.S./Canada it's a materialistic hysteria. People go in to DEBT over Christmas. Getting the console on the market for Christmas is critical not only because of consumer demand, but also because of the buzz generated over it and also because consumer spending severely drops off after the season.
It's not that Japan isn't that big, it's just timing for the U.S. launch is critical.
There's also a nice gem of a quote in the user comments in the BBC article.
since Sony has messed about with the European launch date, I have flown all the way to Japan to get my hands on one.
To myself I think - it must be nice to be able to afford to buy a PS3. Must be nice to be able to afford to go to Japan. Lots of things to see there like districts in Tokyo, shrines, Japanese food. Yeah, interesting that you'd just fly to Japan, get a PS3 then fly home. I'd probably sell the thing, but if you have enough money to fly to Japan for no reason other than to buy a game console, you obviously don't need the money!
This is probably on the fast track to killing both if one or the other isn't decided. If you look at the costs at ramping up production of bluray or hd-dvd it's not worth it. Current facilities that produce DVD's took millions to tool. Unless the consumers actually put their weight behind one, these places are probably just going to keep pressing DVDs. Which in turn means less selection in titles, which reduces the demand for the format and keeps economies of scale from taking effect.
I'm pretty sure the "damage" that is claimed for a downloaded song because digital means you can hand off exact copies into infinity. Which means there could be a theoretical infinite loss to a music company. The reality is that even if you put songs up on kazaa I'd be surprised that it would be downloaded more than say 20 times by other peers. At $750, a 70c download would mean it had been downloaded 1070 times. I doubt anyone has ever handed out a song that much.
I think with the current scare over CO2 everyone is forgetting the fact that we're still dumping much more hazardous crap into the air. We need to reduce CO2 of course, but would you rather have much more toxic crap floating around in the atmosphere or just CO2 - and I guess that will be the big question. I'm hoping that people will realize that many of these chemicals that break down into CO2 are probably harmful to plants (contributing to acid rain) which reduces the vegetation's ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Maybe what they need are "tag moderators". Like the moderation system, some people are elected to be allowed to tag. Then everyone is allowed to meta-moderate those tags.
Unfortunately with the move to 64 bit multi-core cpus, they still have some slack. I recall people saying that the windows 2000 codebase was far to large for anyone to manage. Then they tacked even more crap on with XP. And now Vista... Hardware wise I think they can go for another 1-2 iterations. Management wise... I'm not sure. And I think that's where the entire thing is going to collapse if they haven't figured this out. Windows will become too much code to manage at some point, and I think it's getting pretty close now.
Think that might piss off the stores that would expect to sell the PS3 a little? People still need the games so that would be extra cash for the stores. I'm pretty sure just selling them from the factory occurred to Sony, but distributing them in the regular channels is probably akin to an act of good will towards their distribution chains. And at this point Sony needs all the good will it can get so the entire ship doesn't sink.
Re:Perl Out, Ruby In - Thank God
on
The Ruby Way
·
· Score: 1
And that's half the problem. Everything documentation-wise you dig up on the web is RAILS centric. And "no worse than PHP" does not make it good. Look at the cgi documentation again (as I'm WELL versed in that example now). You have "how to get a variable", and how to "upload a file". Notice how they don't present you with any examples of textfields AND a file at the same time? I don't need to know how ruby works, I already know that - but I'm finding myself digging through the source code of these libraries to figure out what they're actually doing because they are not working as expected.
Anyone with prior programing experience can learn rails within a day or two. Hate to tell you this but the ruby world is a lot bigger than rails (Not that I find rails documentation to be so awesome either, but it has improved). Less than 10% of the work I do with ruby has anything to do with rails.
Re:Perl Out, Ruby In - Thank God
on
The Ruby Way
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ruby at it's core is a nice language. I started migrating from Perl (after deciding I didn't like Perl6) about 2 years ago. I just recently became serious about it within the last few months. I think at this point Ruby's main weakness is in it's libraries. I came up with some deficiencies in dbi, but mostly got it working.
Then I started working with cgi.rb . Didn't have any problems until I tried uploading files. What kind of data do you get back? That sort of depends on if your script receives a GET or POST, and if the post is over or under 10k. Also fun trying to detect those objects because it will toss you back something like a Tempfile object even though you haven't "required" it. I was actually really amazed (and pissed) that such garbage could be included as a core library - especially for a language that is supposed to make your life so easy.
Ruby has a lot of work in the library department, and a HELL of a lot of work in the documentation department.
You don't really need to heat all the water from a cold start either. If you look at any modern facility that requires large volumes of hot water, you see that incoming water is preheated by outgoing water flow. I don't recall the numbers where I work but I think the water temperature goes up around 60% closer to the target temp. Aside from that isn't everyone always bitching about the thermal waste (water) from nuclear power plants? Not only that but if you look at something like the Toronto project that heat exchanges with lake Ontario to cool buildings, there are other options to make the process much more efficient.
It also uses different ports so is quite blockable at a firewall. Not that I'd want to do that since I TOTALLY trust microsoft with a nice repository of all registered windows copies all in one place.
I'm thinking that eventually the system will have to correct itself. Everyone is already terrified of lawsuits in all shapes or forms coming from all directions. This overhead will eventually come down to a social overhead in the U.S. that will be unsustainable. Everyone knows that in any lawsuits it's the lawyers that win because they make so much money. However lawyers don't really produce anything, and more often than not they aren't even in the avenue of upholding actual law, they've become the enforcement of the inefficient red tape that is suffocating this country to begin with. When the country goes into the ground because of excess debts among other things, it's the lawyers who will probably ride us into the ground and still be on top. But that's life I guess, I mean what defenses do you have against people who manipulate the law?
This is a very stark contrast to Gentoo's "bleeding edge" approach.
Gentoo isn't as bleeding edge as it used to be. I'm still using KDE 3.5.2 on gentoo's stable branch. When darwinports is beating your release cycle, that says a lot. Gentoo is fairly up to date, but it's been slowly dragging more and more in its release cycle. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you like stability.
I'm taking it that you don't admin a firewall, or don't watch the logging? It's still floating around, and I think to myself every couple days "I can't believe it's still around". At this point it's like the background radiation from the big bang, but it's still there. Don't forget there's a lot of places (ala south america) that have machines which are poorly administered, the administrators couldn't tell you if they had blaster or not assuming they even know what it is and will probably have the virus until the physical machine death.
Actually I read a study on menopause that actually referred to the same thing. I mean why have we evolved so that at some point women DON'T produce offspring? Now granted there are a lot of personal reasons a woman shouldn't have children at a point - huge increase in risks to the mother AND offspring, but what does evolution care about that? If 1 in 1000 produces an extra kid that would be a benefit correct?
But for some reason women do go through menopause. And the general theory provided in remote locations tended to lean to the theory that there is indeed some benefit to grandparents. For instance a village with a few elderly has a sort of history storage bank of how to deal with uncommon scenarios - extreme drought and such, which short term generations may not have had to deal with.
Granted it's just a theory but it does seem plausable.
I'm at the same point. I just cleared out about 1200+ spam mails from an account that I haven't checked in 10 days. And I have a hard time justifying jacking the SA threshold above 4 but at that level it only catches about 15% of the spam:/
As another slashdot poster gave me the idea of creating different addresses. I'm just going to have one core address that I give out to NO ONE, and create forwarding addresses that filter out everything except for what I signed up for. Like, shutterfly@mydomain.com only accepts mail from shutterfly, then forwards it to my main address.
The main problem is that I will have to be vigilant in making sure I never send mail FROM the core address. It's a sad freaking state of the internet for those who remember the days when you got NO spam.
Slashdot Mirror
dban should be find then. If time is a constraint then you just need 4 random passes over the drive. Personally I like the Gutman wipe with the 27 voodoo passes. Of course it doesn't work on any spare sectors, but assuming there isn't anything that fits on a sector that is critical that should be fine.
You mean like DBAN? One of the problem with "utilities" is they require the drive to function in order for you to wipe it. And some times you can get a drive working again by just replacing some of the electronics typically found on the bottom of the drive. Taking the platters and putting them on an equivalent drive is probably also somewhat doable. Really though, when your drive no longer spins you have to resort to physical destruction of the platters - and you really do need to be thorough.
Provided you have some way of detecting the flood I don't know why not.
/dev/speaker (you may need to load it in boot.conf). See the man page for spkrtest to get some interesting melodies. In linux you should be able to do the same thing with the "beep" program.
I do some stuff similar already in my server room, although it certainly isn't as high tech as this. Generally I just use the PC speaker to beep some codes when some semi-severe problems occur. I wouldn't have the machines doing this on a regular basis mind you, because as others have stated it can get really old quick. With a quick script you should be able to monitor everything from temperature to network attacks. One I have beeps a code when the one of our servers gets close to full on the available seats for our accounting server. All of my servers beep out a theme when they're up and running as some of them don't have monitors connected so I'd like to know when/if they're up. IBM servers are twice as loud for some reason, but that's good because I can hear it in the next room.
In FreeBSD you can do all sorts of interesting stuff with
And what is this open standard? XML? SQL? We also have apps that use SQL that are so tangled in table schema logic that we can't migrate those applications either. The point isn't that it's binary, the point is that it's there but no one can be bothered to migrate it. I could read/write the file just fine in perl/ruby/whatever, so in this case XML and other format isn't going to help. Simply put there IS no standard when you make in-house applications where there is no equivalent. And there are a lot of them out there.
That's not always the case. Where I work we have some legacy programs that write their own file formats. It's just binary stuff. We have all the source code from the guy who wrote it too. And it's reams and reams of uncommented qbasic. So are we going to pay some guy thousands to write some updated version in C#? We could also use a different application, but then that's not really a legacy issue if we're willing to abandon the program. No the key here is that it's not worth our time and money to futz with something that already works fine - and that's exactly the sweet spot Microsoft adores. The simple fact is we're more willing to use old versions of windows rather than upgrade the program, and I believe Microsoft is fully aware of that situation because it's not an uncommon opinion.
They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates,
Oh really? Now I can't say as far as Intel, but AMD has been very focused on power consumption for a very long time now. All of their literature is filled with benchmarks of power-per-watt and total power savings in the data center, etc. If AMD doesn't care about power consumption, then why would they specifically go to pains to offer CPU versions that are even MORE aggressive in their power saving if you pay a bit more for them? And with all of their power saving innovation and dedication what do they get? Intel now outperforms them and everyone jumps the ship and goes over to the Intel side (despite the fact that the lower power versions of AMD's CPU still use less power when the final weight with the chipset is done).
You know why they care about what performance the average consumer sees? Because that's all consumers care about. If it were otherwise you wouldn't be seeing your lights dim when your graphics card goes into high gear. Where are the "power conscious" versions of these graphics cores?
I've got a lot of Athons, and Athlon XP's running where I work. Some burn out but that's often because of their environment and due to the fact that the fan that comes with the heatsink for the OEM version is garbage almost guaranteed to burn out after a year in high dust environments. The Pentium 4 is history, even Intel admits it was on the wrong track. If you want more longevity, then get a robust heatsink fan (undervolted) and underclock your CPU. You DO underclock your CPU right?
Actually that wouldn't be to hard. Get two of the brightest flashlights you can find, then stick them right up to your eye sockets. Wherever you look it should be the same blinding light.
Well there are two things to consider about Japan. First of all the xbox360 is considered a non-threat by both Nintendo and Sony there. The second thing is that the Japanese don't really have Christmas per say. In Japan Christmas is sort of this abstract santa thing that's popular for people to go on dates and exchange small gifts. In the U.S./Canada it's a materialistic hysteria. People go in to DEBT over Christmas. Getting the console on the market for Christmas is critical not only because of consumer demand, but also because of the buzz generated over it and also because consumer spending severely drops off after the season.
It's not that Japan isn't that big, it's just timing for the U.S. launch is critical.
There's also a nice gem of a quote in the user comments in the BBC article.
since Sony has messed about with the European launch date, I have flown all the way to Japan to get my hands on one.
To myself I think - it must be nice to be able to afford to buy a PS3. Must be nice to be able to afford to go to Japan. Lots of things to see there like districts in Tokyo, shrines, Japanese food. Yeah, interesting that you'd just fly to Japan, get a PS3 then fly home. I'd probably sell the thing, but if you have enough money to fly to Japan for no reason other than to buy a game console, you obviously don't need the money!
This is probably on the fast track to killing both if one or the other isn't decided. If you look at the costs at ramping up production of bluray or hd-dvd it's not worth it. Current facilities that produce DVD's took millions to tool. Unless the consumers actually put their weight behind one, these places are probably just going to keep pressing DVDs. Which in turn means less selection in titles, which reduces the demand for the format and keeps economies of scale from taking effect.
I'm pretty sure the "damage" that is claimed for a downloaded song because digital means you can hand off exact copies into infinity. Which means there could be a theoretical infinite loss to a music company. The reality is that even if you put songs up on kazaa I'd be surprised that it would be downloaded more than say 20 times by other peers. At $750, a 70c download would mean it had been downloaded 1070 times. I doubt anyone has ever handed out a song that much.
I think with the current scare over CO2 everyone is forgetting the fact that we're still dumping much more hazardous crap into the air. We need to reduce CO2 of course, but would you rather have much more toxic crap floating around in the atmosphere or just CO2 - and I guess that will be the big question. I'm hoping that people will realize that many of these chemicals that break down into CO2 are probably harmful to plants (contributing to acid rain) which reduces the vegetation's ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Maybe what they need are "tag moderators". Like the moderation system, some people are elected to be allowed to tag. Then everyone is allowed to meta-moderate those tags.
Unfortunately with the move to 64 bit multi-core cpus, they still have some slack. I recall people saying that the windows 2000 codebase was far to large for anyone to manage. Then they tacked even more crap on with XP. And now Vista... Hardware wise I think they can go for another 1-2 iterations. Management wise... I'm not sure. And I think that's where the entire thing is going to collapse if they haven't figured this out. Windows will become too much code to manage at some point, and I think it's getting pretty close now.
Think that might piss off the stores that would expect to sell the PS3 a little? People still need the games so that would be extra cash for the stores. I'm pretty sure just selling them from the factory occurred to Sony, but distributing them in the regular channels is probably akin to an act of good will towards their distribution chains. And at this point Sony needs all the good will it can get so the entire ship doesn't sink.
And that's half the problem. Everything documentation-wise you dig up on the web is RAILS centric. And "no worse than PHP" does not make it good. Look at the cgi documentation again (as I'm WELL versed in that example now). You have "how to get a variable", and how to "upload a file". Notice how they don't present you with any examples of textfields AND a file at the same time? I don't need to know how ruby works, I already know that - but I'm finding myself digging through the source code of these libraries to figure out what they're actually doing because they are not working as expected.
Anyone with prior programing experience can learn rails within a day or two. Hate to tell you this but the ruby world is a lot bigger than rails (Not that I find rails documentation to be so awesome either, but it has improved). Less than 10% of the work I do with ruby has anything to do with rails.
Ruby at it's core is a nice language. I started migrating from Perl (after deciding I didn't like Perl6) about 2 years ago. I just recently became serious about it within the last few months. I think at this point Ruby's main weakness is in it's libraries. I came up with some deficiencies in dbi, but mostly got it working.
Then I started working with cgi.rb . Didn't have any problems until I tried uploading files. What kind of data do you get back? That sort of depends on if your script receives a GET or POST, and if the post is over or under 10k. Also fun trying to detect those objects because it will toss you back something like a Tempfile object even though you haven't "required" it. I was actually really amazed (and pissed) that such garbage could be included as a core library - especially for a language that is supposed to make your life so easy.
Ruby has a lot of work in the library department, and a HELL of a lot of work in the documentation department.
You don't really need to heat all the water from a cold start either. If you look at any modern facility that requires large volumes of hot water, you see that incoming water is preheated by outgoing water flow. I don't recall the numbers where I work but I think the water temperature goes up around 60% closer to the target temp. Aside from that isn't everyone always bitching about the thermal waste (water) from nuclear power plants? Not only that but if you look at something like the Toronto project that heat exchanges with lake Ontario to cool buildings, there are other options to make the process much more efficient.
It also uses different ports so is quite blockable at a firewall. Not that I'd want to do that since I TOTALLY trust microsoft with a nice repository of all registered windows copies all in one place.
I'm thinking that eventually the system will have to correct itself. Everyone is already terrified of lawsuits in all shapes or forms coming from all directions. This overhead will eventually come down to a social overhead in the U.S. that will be unsustainable. Everyone knows that in any lawsuits it's the lawyers that win because they make so much money. However lawyers don't really produce anything, and more often than not they aren't even in the avenue of upholding actual law, they've become the enforcement of the inefficient red tape that is suffocating this country to begin with. When the country goes into the ground because of excess debts among other things, it's the lawyers who will probably ride us into the ground and still be on top. But that's life I guess, I mean what defenses do you have against people who manipulate the law?
This is a very stark contrast to Gentoo's "bleeding edge" approach.
Gentoo isn't as bleeding edge as it used to be. I'm still using KDE 3.5.2 on gentoo's stable branch. When darwinports is beating your release cycle, that says a lot. Gentoo is fairly up to date, but it's been slowly dragging more and more in its release cycle. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you like stability.
I'm taking it that you don't admin a firewall, or don't watch the logging? It's still floating around, and I think to myself every couple days "I can't believe it's still around". At this point it's like the background radiation from the big bang, but it's still there. Don't forget there's a lot of places (ala south america) that have machines which are poorly administered, the administrators couldn't tell you if they had blaster or not assuming they even know what it is and will probably have the virus until the physical machine death.
Actually I read a study on menopause that actually referred to the same thing. I mean why have we evolved so that at some point women DON'T produce offspring? Now granted there are a lot of personal reasons a woman shouldn't have children at a point - huge increase in risks to the mother AND offspring, but what does evolution care about that? If 1 in 1000 produces an extra kid that would be a benefit correct?
But for some reason women do go through menopause. And the general theory provided in remote locations tended to lean to the theory that there is indeed some benefit to grandparents. For instance a village with a few elderly has a sort of history storage bank of how to deal with uncommon scenarios - extreme drought and such, which short term generations may not have had to deal with.
Granted it's just a theory but it does seem plausable.
Wasn't that the whole idea behind the pentium 4? =)
I'm at the same point. I just cleared out about 1200+ spam mails from an account that I haven't checked in 10 days. And I have a hard time justifying jacking the SA threshold above 4 but at that level it only catches about 15% of the spam :/
As another slashdot poster gave me the idea of creating different addresses. I'm just going to have one core address that I give out to NO ONE, and create forwarding addresses that filter out everything except for what I signed up for. Like, shutterfly@mydomain.com only accepts mail from shutterfly, then forwards it to my main address.
The main problem is that I will have to be vigilant in making sure I never send mail FROM the core address. It's a sad freaking state of the internet for those who remember the days when you got NO spam.