My guess is that the 'classified' method of blanking a drive includes writing data multiple times, with a pause (weeks, months?) between. to allow magnetic data to 'bleed' into the borders. -- then, as someone mentioned, run it through a degausser to suck the platter dry and do a low-level format.
(I'm guessing, here) --
Not a big problem... If it's a one time pad, you rewrite the pad everytime you rewrite the data. That way, both sides always get 'random' writes.. Even if the data doesn't change, you can't tell, because both sides get re-randomized. You need both sides to know what's going on.
The nice thing is that, since both drives are always getting 'random' data, a couple of extra passes of 'random' data might make it real hard to figure out which pass was the 'real' random data. Randomly switching which side gets the 'pad' and which the data-modified 'pad' may make analysis even harder.
A prototype of this 'secure' filesystem could probably be done up in a couple of hours by modifying a software-raid driver. If i cared enough about my own security, I might do it myself.
I'd patent this idea, but it's now been published --
And they still haven't fixed it! What I hate most is the way filename completion won't work with of=/really/long/path/here/and/really-freaking-long
-filename.ext I gotta type the whole shit out.
If you know how path expansion works in UN*X, a '*' expansion would be looking in your current (home?) directory for a subdirectory named 'of='. The unix shell does not know (or care) about what the command being called expects. That's why most UN*X commands do something like '-i filename'. That way the filename stands alone, and shell 'glob' expansion will work properly.
If you want to avoid the whole problem, then you can replace
That way, the filename is standalone and shell glob completion will work properly
In my early Unix days, I wondered why dd even had the if= and of= parameters, since < and > do the same things. I think it's so that people who get used to all of the other var=value params for dd stopped bugging the writers for a way of naming the input and output files that was consistent with the rest of dd's options. Perhaps we should update the man pages to reflect that.
--
Night vision mostly occurs with the 'blue' receptors. Red, besides being as far away from the blue as possible, wouldn't normally fire under low light conditions. That way, you don't eat up the retinal resources normally used for night vision when you use red light. Green, is also a non-night vision color, but it probably 'bleeds' into the blue receptors a bit more (which some people may find useful for looking at some things). --
Certainly the planetary ecology doesn't care. If you produce Hydrogen from natural gas, the by-product is going to be CO2 (unless you can produce hydrogen, oxygen and pure carbon). In other words, CO2 is still being produced. It's just hidden from the consumer.
This actually produces an 'out of sight - out of mind' problem. If people don't see the polution that their vehicle/energy use is causing, they consider it 'clean'. This might lead to them using more ('clean') energy and then we get bushwacked when the CO2 that's being (remotely) produced still messes up our environment and contributes to the global warning that we're trying to stop (beyond the localized city pollution). --
It was late enough in the history of the net that most people had moved to 1200 baud by then. This is still slow enough to take a while to download a large (and useless) message -- or worse yet, a bunch of them.
It should also be remembered that this was back when most home users were happy to have a 60 Meg hard drive Most server disks were probably in the range of a couple hundred megabytes. Not much spare space for spam postings. Given the relatively lower volume of the usenet back then, a series of spam postings could be problematic for some smaller sites. -- forcing the expiration or rejection of many 'real' postings. --
Now if only they would send infinite supplies of can-cooked spiced pink meat to the
nasty kind of spammers...
For spammers who actually like spam (the meat), that might be encouragement.
I remember originally liking spam, but it needed careful treatment to get a really good tasting meal (this may be why a spam meal in pacific rim countries is rather expensive). Over time, I found it far easier to make a good-tasting meal out of "real" meat. Now I don't eat beef or pork at all.
--
The way that spam became a usenet term only starts with the Monty Python sketch. What happened (a long time!) after the sketch is that some unhappy bugger decided to get annoying on the net (I don't remember the specifics of his complaint).
He sent dozens of messages crossposted to many newsgroups with the text consisting of the extended version of the spam song
(spam spam spam.... ) {hundreds of lines of it!)
Originally, spamming really only referred to massive, crossposted postings on the usenet. Various names like UCE (Unwanted Commercial Email) / UBE (Unsolicited Bulk Email) were the techinical term for the email 'spam', but Spam is far easier to say and remember (and more fun).
People seem to have settled on spam (to Hormels mild consternation). --
Re:A couple of quotes from the History Channel's s
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 1
" Well of course it was a sneak attack, you don't exactly call the enemy up and let them know you're coming."
According to the rules of war/diplomacy, you actually tell them that you're comming, just now where, when and how. THe rrules of the time were that you had to give so many hours notice in a declaration of war before your first strike.. (I don't remember the exact ammount of time. It was 2,6 or 8 hours). Given that the Pearl attack took place at 8AM on a Sunday in Hawaii, the notice would have been given at an early hour on a Sunday morning in Washington.....
Waking up the proper people, and getting the news out early on a Sunday morning was a problem that the japenese depended on. As I remember it, Pearl Harbour depicts the notice of war sitting on some (sleeping) bigwig's desk in Hawaii as the attack starts.
The Japanese crew of Tora! Tora! Tora! made a big thing of the fact that (oops!) the attack took place 5 minutes too early for it to be outside the quiet period between the declaration and the first 'legal' attack. Being sticklers for formalities, they seemed to consider this a big 'no-no'. --
'Nazi' has a very specific target. Because the original Nazis were white, it was not politically possible to simply refer to anybody 'white' as a Nazi.. Instead, Nazi became more attached to an 'attitude'.
Nazi doesn't even apply to all Germans in WWII. The name
Nazi
only really applied to those who chose to join the Nazi party. In the war, the 'Nazi' army were the SS, who had a different uniform (and a different attitude) than the regular army. (I think that 'brownshirt' was the nickname for the regular army). As such, most people of German blood are able to walk away from the Nazi name -- even historically.
On the other hane, Nip is (and was) used as a racial and racist slur. People are called 'nip' for no reason *other* than being Japanese (or at least vaguely japanese-looking). Non-orientals are *rarely* called 'nip'. for *any* reason.
Koreans are especially injured by being called 'nip'. Historically, Koreans have far more reason to be angry at the japanese than americans. Unfortunately, many people who use the 'nip' moniker use it on anybody who looks oriental.
Thus 'nazi' is a moniker which which is usually "earned", while 'nip' is endured by anybody who is born to certain parents.
--
As far as spectators at the launch pad, I never claimed that NASA didn't shoot someone into space. It is the moon landing that is of interest here,
not the launching of rockets, and there is still no proof other than a lot of hearsay, most of it (funnily enough) originating from NASA itself.
It would be easy enough to determine this for once and for all..... look at the (purported) videos of the astronauts on the moon. Sometimes they kick up dirt as they jump around. Calculate what the path of that dust would be.. It's supposedly in a vaccum, so it should follow a very newtonian curve --- but much more shallow than on the earth.
I think that later flights had two cameras (one video and one film) so you might even be able to use the stereo effect to pinpoint moving objects very accurately).
This is actually verifiable physics. They might be able to fake a moon parabolic curve for something like the golf ball (one astronaut supposedly took a golf ball to the moon and holds the record for the longest shot because of the lighter gravity), but the computation power didn't exist back then to do it to the moving pictures of dust that the astronauts kicked up. One way or the other, THAT should prove which sphere those astronauts were on. --
Hence in a very distant future, Earth
will have permanent dark and light sides.
Well, it would if it weren't for the compensating tidal effect of the moon pulling on the earth as it orbits. Given that the effect of the moon is stronger, my guess is that we'd end up with one side of the earth following the moon first... then the two would slow down until the earth had one side following the moon.
Hmm... then the two would slow down as a lockstep pair, until the moon fell into the earth....
This, of course, presumes that the ocean doesn't evaporate first.
--
-germs develop resistances. This includes bacteria, and probably chemical agents like this one. Evolution is slow, but persistent. If a resistance is possible, it will probably be developed. The result is tougher germs.
This is why I shudder every time I see those anti-bacterial soaps in grocery stores. I call it 'genetic training'. These things don't really get rid of germs. They get rid of most of them. The ones that are left are quite possibly somewhat resistant to the antibiotic in the soap.
Worse yet, you have mostly-sterile space in which these things can grow with little competition. (nature HATES a vacuum). After a couple hundred cycles like this, if there's any resistant mutation available, or possible in the set, it's likely to triumph in such an environment.
Now that these germs have been effectively 'trained' to survive the antibiotic, if/when you actually need an antibiotic, it's effectiveness is going to be reduced or even negated. In our race to have a 'safe' world, we're generating a world in which our safety mechanisms are ineffective.
The interesting thing is that there are some people who surmise that our race to generate a germ-free world is contributing to an increase in the incidence of asthma and alergies in children. The thought is that our immune system essentially gets 'bored' and reacts to whatever happens to be vailable. If that happens to generate an auto-immune response, that's just too bad.
Given that we've grown up for millions of years in a completely non-sterile environment, the no - enemy - means - something's - wrong logic seems plausable to me. --
It can happen. In second year university, my assembly Language course was required course. I'd already been doing lots of assembly work, and my TA knew me because I'd helped him a number of times. When he walked in to the first class and saw me sitting at a desk, he exclaimed
"What the hell are You doing here!?"
I chose my section of class because the professor in question was used to a different processor (intel) than I was (IBM 370) and which the course was based on (this was the early '80s). Both my professor and my TA used me as an in-class resource.
Now, it's not that these people weren't good. They were good (especially the professor). It's just that I'd already gotten a lot of experience in that area on my own. I guess that another way of putting it would be that I was the weird one, not them. In an environment where there weren't such hardwired rules as to who could teach what, I probably could have ended up teaching, or at least TAing) the coures. --
People advocating the use of these tests to determine the lives of millions of students seem to be studiously ignoring the fact that the companies providing these tests all but ship them with cover letters saying "PLEASE don't do that!.
If you read the prequel article, some testing executives have justified providing tests into such an environment with the well known refrain that "If I didn't do it, someone else would". Despite such attitude some of them have still refused to bid on some of the projects because they were just SO indefensible. Unfortunately, the larger the contract, the less likely that a company capabable of handling it will walk away because it's being used rong. When President Bush offers a half-billion dollar RFQ my guess is that company executives would be under serious pressure from "the shareholders" to not stand up and say
Consider, please that all of these errors are from someone who claims that his state has had these tests for "many years". I think that this bodes ill for the value of these tests to the educational system.
I've got some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that instituting standardized testing has caused a 20% decrease in the quality of education that students have been recieving.
The good news is that we've been able to measure that drop very accurately.
I think that it'll depend on whether or not IBM pays him for his 30 days of public service. If they do, then he really gets of scott free (his 'work' is just a little bit unusual, but he probably gets a lot of choice as to what he does). For IBM, it just adds a couple thousand dollars to the advertising bill ($cheap).
In 1993, 800 people got arrested for blocking a logging road to protest the provinces logging decisions. Some of them were sentenced to community service -- and spent that time doing volunteer work for environmental organizations.
It's entirely possible that this guy could end up doing his 'community service' for an IBM-sponsored "community project".
--
Some relatively simple work could be done to clip stuff that it's relatively easy to determine isn't visible. The rest would be sent to the driver to figure out by Z-buffering (or whatever). This would, at least, minimize the value of a see-through driver.
I would point out here, that it would be quite possible for a reasonably skilled programmer to put transparency into any open source driver. I think that about the only thing stopping it from happening is that most programmers with the skill wouldn't want to put up with the kind of public censure that Asus has suffered through over these drivers.
Making it easy for the script-kiddie types to cheat is, well, silly. --
The GPL may, or may not, be a contract. However, some of the wording of the UCITA seems like a well aimed backhand swipe at the GPL. If the courts (years from now) determine the GPL to be a shrink-wrap contract -- or future laws explicitly designate it as such, then the GPL would be caught up in (and possibly voided by) the related language in the UCITA.
In my mind, the possible threat that the UCTIA poses to the entire Free Software industry/movement is reason enough to oppose it (though not the only reason).
I'm not willing to leave my rights to the vagraties of some random sequence of future judges' decisions.(especially given the apparent hostility of some judges to the free software movement (e.g. 2600 decision)). --
The GPL 'license' isn't technically a binding 'agreement' of any sort on the end-user. It's a statement by the author that he retains copyright. The GPL says that you may not copy the code in violation of normal copyright rules unless you also keep the resulting source free.
To look at it another way, you're promising to not sue them for violating your copyright as long as they follow the rules of the GPL.
And yes, there is a 'payment' for using your code -- that payment is access to the derivative works under the same conditions. When they distribute your code in breach of the GPL, they're deriving you of payment for the benefits of using your code.
For people who think that code isn't worth anything, this is actually what Microsoft is complaining about when they attack the GPL as a threat to their Intellectual Property. They want to use the GPL code, but they don't want to 'pay the price' of it's use. They think that the price is 'too high'. In other words, the bastion of IP wants to get a free ride on the backs of other peoples intellectual property, blood, sweat and tears.
hard disks
My first unix system was a Radio Shack Model 16 box (first one in Edmonton -- I used to work at the Radio Shack Computer Store). It had dual 8" double sided drives that stored 1 Meg each. The hard drive was an external 14inch, 9Megabyte drive (originally rated for 8, but it had far fewer bad blocks than they expected). I was contracted to get Xenix to run without the hard drive. I managed to get it to boot one one floppy (including swap) with the second floppy drive mountable for storage (and extra programs).
For those of you wondering why, the Hard disk cost $5,000 (that's 1980 dollars).
A REAL floppy disk
I also worked at an IBM Mainframe shop, where some data was still stored on 12" floppy drives... If you want to know where the name for floppy disks came from, imagane the case material used in a 5.25" disk being used for something the size of an old LP. Now that's floppy.
Punch cards
About 1979, a friend's dad ran across an interesting problem. Someone at Boeing Timesharing had managed to 'drop' a HUGE stack of computer punch cards. I'm talking a trunk load of these things. They still needed them in card format, and sorted, but it was near the lifetime of Punched cards, and a card punch that could survive that sort of bulk punching attached to a computer that could sort that much data was rare.
The most cost effective solution turned out to be shipping the cards to Edmonton where they were read into the University Of Alberta mainframe (which was available for commercial use -- another story in itself), sorted in memory, punched back out and the new deck shipped back to Seattle (I think). I got told the story when he showed me the original (unsorted) card deck (OK: Pile) in a back room.
Still thinking the old way
A story off the early net... In the early '80s a programmer was asked to write an EMACS macro that could sort the lines of a file according to columbs 72-80. The person who asked him to do it seemed pretty pissed that the functionality wasn't already in emacs.
He dutifully wrote the sort function, and then he found out what it was wanted for...
In the days of punched cards, your card deck would contain sequence numbers in columns 72-80. This was so that when (not if) you dropped your card deck you could simply runit through a mechanical card sorter, and get your deck back in the proper order. These sequence numbers were usually done in increments of 100 or 1000 so that you had room to insert new 'lines' into your program without having to resequence the whole deck. 'Modern' Card punch keyboards could be programmed to sequence cards automagically as you typed them. Language standards (Fortran, Cobol, etc.) were also designed around this necessity.
It seems that the old fogey was so used to punched cards and sequence numbers that he couldn't think of any other way to do this.
When the guy wanted to move a couple of lines in the file he would change the sequence numbers and then call the Emacs mscro to sort the file. He never bothered asking if EMACS had a 'move lines' command. --
If you've got lots and lots of data (most of which you're not going to be looking at for a long time), then there's still not much that can beat tape. Pop in a tape drive, dump the stuff down, and then put the tape someplace safe. Repeat a few times, and then toss the tape and replace it with a new one.
Most of my old video is still on tape. It needs to be transferred (to refresh it), but other than that, I haven't looked at most of it for years.
I backup my data to tape on a regular basis. Usually by the time the tape format is bacoming obsolete, Disk drive storage has advanced to the point where I can load the whole tape onto a disk and include it in my next backup.
That's how I get around the obsolesence problem.
(you might also want to read my earlier post about how most of the data I have on my disk doesn't really need to be backed up).
--
(I actually remember in 1979 when I thought that 30 pages (120K) of mainframe disk storage would be lots... A year later I was at 10 times that, and
the storage curve had started.)
The two primary purposes of backups
are storage extension and disaster recovery. Ever growing disk sizes have pretty much obviated the storage extension problem. The remaining purpose is disaster recovery..
My home directory is 'only' 2 Gigabytes. Out of that, my mail spool is about 150 Meg (I routinely go through and delete the 50MB video attachments). my text directory is about 40 meg and my public_html directory is about 159 meg (but that includes about 100 meg worth of RedHat extracts.
That makes up about 95% of the data that I have that is not recoverable by other means (i.e. the rest is source, binaries, data, etc. culled off the net, digitized pictures, etc.). (other unrecoverable stuff would be things like PGP keys and a few meg of source code).
After compression, most of my really important - to - backup data could almost fit on an old ZIP disk. I can back that up and save it in a safe deposit box in the bank once every few months, in case of a house fire. If my computer gets stolen or melts down (in a fire), I can recover the other stuff by scouring the net.
I really don't need to backup my redhat sources, random captured videos, etc. I can, at worst, repurchase those using insurance money in the case of a disaster (that's what insurance is for). Yes it'll take time, but I should be able to recover the stuff that I really need. Of course, the REAL hope is that I won't ever actually need the disaster recovery features (that's what the insurance company bets on).
If you only back up the stuff that it would be a real tragedy to loose, I think that you'll find that your backup needs drop dramatically.
--
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that the 'classified' method of blanking a drive includes writing data multiple times, with a pause (weeks, months?) between. to allow magnetic data to 'bleed' into the borders. -- then, as someone mentioned, run it through a degausser to suck the platter dry and do a low-level format.
(I'm guessing, here)
--
The nice thing is that, since both drives are always getting 'random' data, a couple of extra passes of 'random' data might make it real hard to figure out which pass was the 'real' random data. Randomly switching which side gets the 'pad' and which the data-modified 'pad' may make analysis even harder.
A prototype of this 'secure' filesystem could probably be done up in a couple of hours by modifying a software-raid driver. If i cared enough about my own security, I might do it myself.
I'd patent this idea, but it's now been published
--
If you know how path expansion works in UN*X, a '*' expansion would be looking in your current (home?) directory for a subdirectory named 'of='. The unix shell does not know (or care) about what the command being called expects. That's why most UN*X commands do something like '-i filename'. That way the filename stands alone, and shell 'glob' expansion will work properly.
If you want to avoid the whole problem, then you can replace
dd various_options if=/some/long/pathname of=/some/other/long/pathname
with
dd various_options < /some/long/pathname > /some/other/long/pathname
That way, the filename is standalone and shell glob completion will work properly
In my early Unix days, I wondered why dd even had the if= and of= parameters, since < and > do the same things. I think it's so that people who get used to all of the other var=value params for dd stopped bugging the writers for a way of naming the input and output files that was consistent with the rest of dd's options. Perhaps we should update the man pages to reflect that.
--
Night vision mostly occurs with the 'blue' receptors. Red, besides being as far away from the blue as possible, wouldn't normally fire under low light conditions. That way, you don't eat up the retinal resources normally used for night vision when you use red light. Green, is also a non-night vision color, but it probably 'bleeds' into the blue receptors a bit more (which some people may find useful for looking at some things).
--
This actually produces an 'out of sight - out of mind' problem. If people don't see the polution that their vehicle/energy use is causing, they consider it 'clean'. This might lead to them using more ('clean') energy and then we get bushwacked when the CO2 that's being (remotely) produced still messes up our environment and contributes to the global warning that we're trying to stop (beyond the localized city pollution).
--
It should also be remembered that this was back when most home users were happy to have a 60 Meg hard drive Most server disks were probably in the range of a couple hundred megabytes. Not much spare space for spam postings. Given the relatively lower volume of the usenet back then, a series of spam postings could be problematic for some smaller sites. -- forcing the expiration or rejection of many 'real' postings.
--
For spammers who actually like spam (the meat), that might be encouragement.
I remember originally liking spam, but it needed careful treatment to get a really good tasting meal (this may be why a spam meal in pacific rim countries is rather expensive). Over time, I found it far easier to make a good-tasting meal out of "real" meat. Now I don't eat beef or pork at all.
--
(spam spam spam.... ) {hundreds of lines of it!)
Originally, spamming really only referred to massive, crossposted postings on the usenet. Various names like UCE (Unwanted Commercial Email) / UBE (Unsolicited Bulk Email) were the techinical term for the email 'spam', but Spam is far easier to say and remember (and more fun). People seem to have settled on spam (to Hormels mild consternation).
--
According to the rules of war/diplomacy, you actually tell them that you're comming, just now where, when and how. THe rrules of the time were that you had to give so many hours notice in a declaration of war before your first strike.. (I don't remember the exact ammount of time. It was 2,6 or 8 hours). Given that the Pearl attack took place at 8AM on a Sunday in Hawaii, the notice would have been given at an early hour on a Sunday morning in Washington. ....
Waking up the proper people, and getting the news out early on a Sunday morning was a problem that the japenese depended on. As I remember it, Pearl Harbour depicts the notice of war sitting on some (sleeping) bigwig's desk in Hawaii as the attack starts.
The Japanese crew of Tora! Tora! Tora! made a big thing of the fact that (oops!) the attack took place 5 minutes too early for it to be outside the quiet period between the declaration and the first 'legal' attack. Being sticklers for formalities, they seemed to consider this a big 'no-no'.
--
Nazi doesn't even apply to all Germans in WWII. The name Nazi only really applied to those who chose to join the Nazi party. In the war, the 'Nazi' army were the SS, who had a different uniform (and a different attitude) than the regular army. (I think that 'brownshirt' was the nickname for the regular army). As such, most people of German blood are able to walk away from the Nazi name -- even historically.
On the other hane, Nip is (and was) used as a racial and racist slur. People are called 'nip' for no reason *other* than being Japanese (or at least vaguely japanese-looking). Non-orientals are *rarely* called 'nip'. for *any* reason.
Koreans are especially injured by being called 'nip'. Historically, Koreans have far more reason to be angry at the japanese than americans. Unfortunately, many people who use the 'nip' moniker use it on anybody who looks oriental.
Thus 'nazi' is a moniker which which is usually "earned", while 'nip' is endured by anybody who is born to certain parents.
--
It would be easy enough to determine this for once and for all..... look at the (purported) videos of the astronauts on the moon. Sometimes they kick up dirt as they jump around. Calculate what the path of that dust would be.. It's supposedly in a vaccum, so it should follow a very newtonian curve --- but much more shallow than on the earth.
I think that later flights had two cameras (one video and one film) so you might even be able to use the stereo effect to pinpoint moving objects very accurately).
This is actually verifiable physics. They might be able to fake a moon parabolic curve for something like the golf ball (one astronaut supposedly took a golf ball to the moon and holds the record for the longest shot because of the lighter gravity), but the computation power didn't exist back then to do it to the moving pictures of dust that the astronauts kicked up. One way or the other, THAT should prove which sphere those astronauts were on.
--
Well, it would if it weren't for the compensating tidal effect of the moon pulling on the earth as it orbits. Given that the effect of the moon is stronger, my guess is that we'd end up with one side of the earth following the moon first... then the two would slow down until the earth had one side following the moon.
Hmm... then the two would slow down as a lockstep pair, until the moon fell into the earth....
This, of course, presumes that the ocean doesn't evaporate first.
--
This is why I shudder every time I see those anti-bacterial soaps in grocery stores. I call it 'genetic training'. These things don't really get rid of germs. They get rid of most of them. The ones that are left are quite possibly somewhat resistant to the antibiotic in the soap.
Worse yet, you have mostly-sterile space in which these things can grow with little competition. (nature HATES a vacuum). After a couple hundred cycles like this, if there's any resistant mutation available, or possible in the set, it's likely to triumph in such an environment.
Now that these germs have been effectively 'trained' to survive the antibiotic, if/when you actually need an antibiotic, it's effectiveness is going to be reduced or even negated. In our race to have a 'safe' world, we're generating a world in which our safety mechanisms are ineffective.
The interesting thing is that there are some people who surmise that our race to generate a germ-free world is contributing to an increase in the incidence of asthma and alergies in children. The thought is that our immune system essentially gets 'bored' and reacts to whatever happens to be vailable. If that happens to generate an auto-immune response, that's just too bad.
Given that we've grown up for millions of years in a completely non-sterile environment, the no - enemy - means - something's - wrong logic seems plausable to me.
--
"What the hell are You doing here!?"
I chose my section of class because the professor in question was used to a different processor (intel) than I was (IBM 370) and which the course was based on (this was the early '80s). Both my professor and my TA used me as an in-class resource.
Now, it's not that these people weren't good. They were good (especially the professor). It's just that I'd already gotten a lot of experience in that area on my own. I guess that another way of putting it would be that I was the weird one, not them. In an environment where there weren't such hardwired rules as to who could teach what, I probably could have ended up teaching, or at least TAing) the coures.
--
If you read the prequel article, some testing executives have justified providing tests into such an environment with the well known refrain that "If I didn't do it, someone else would". Despite such attitude some of them have still refused to bid on some of the projects because they were just SO indefensible.
Unfortunately, the larger the contract, the less likely that a company capabable of handling it will walk away because it's being used rong. When President Bush offers a half-billion dollar RFQ my guess is that company executives would be under serious pressure from "the shareholders" to not stand up and say
"This is insane!"
--
--
"The legal system is about rules, not justice."
-- retired lawyer
--
In 1993, 800 people got arrested for blocking a logging road to protest the provinces logging decisions. Some of them were sentenced to community service -- and spent that time doing volunteer work for environmental organizations.
It's entirely possible that this guy could end up doing his 'community service' for an IBM-sponsored "community project".
--
I would point out here, that it would be quite possible for a reasonably skilled programmer to put transparency into any open source driver. I think that about the only thing stopping it from happening is that most programmers with the skill wouldn't want to put up with the kind of public censure that Asus has suffered through over these drivers.
Making it easy for the script-kiddie types to cheat is, well, silly.
--
In my mind, the possible threat that the UCTIA poses to the entire Free Software industry/movement is reason enough to oppose it (though not the only reason).
I'm not willing to leave my rights to the vagraties of some random sequence of future judges' decisions.(especially given the apparent hostility of some judges to the free software movement (e.g. 2600 decision)).
--
To look at it another way, you're promising to not sue them for violating your copyright as long as they follow the rules of the GPL.
And yes, there is a 'payment' for using your code -- that payment is access to the derivative works under the same conditions. When they distribute your code in breach of the GPL, they're deriving you of payment for the benefits of using your code.
For people who think that code isn't worth anything, this is actually what Microsoft is complaining about when they attack the GPL as a threat to their Intellectual Property. They want to use the GPL code, but they don't want to 'pay the price' of it's use. They think that the price is 'too high'. In other words, the bastion of IP wants to get a free ride on the backs of other peoples intellectual property, blood, sweat and tears.
IANAL I just like to talk like one.
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hard disks
My first unix system was a Radio Shack Model 16 box (first one in Edmonton -- I used to work at the Radio Shack Computer Store). It had dual 8" double sided drives that stored 1 Meg each. The hard drive was an external 14inch, 9Megabyte drive (originally rated for 8, but it had far fewer bad blocks than they expected). I was contracted to get Xenix to run without the hard drive. I managed to get it to boot one one floppy (including swap) with the second floppy drive mountable for storage (and extra programs).
For those of you wondering why, the Hard disk cost $5,000 (that's 1980 dollars).
A REAL floppy disk
I also worked at an IBM Mainframe shop, where some data was still stored on 12" floppy drives... If you want to know where the name for floppy disks came from, imagane the case material used in a 5.25" disk being used for something the size of an old LP. Now that's floppy.
Punch cards About 1979, a friend's dad ran across an interesting problem. Someone at Boeing Timesharing had managed to 'drop' a HUGE stack of computer punch cards. I'm talking a trunk load of these things. They still needed them in card format, and sorted, but it was near the lifetime of Punched cards, and a card punch that could survive that sort of bulk punching attached to a computer that could sort that much data was rare.
The most cost effective solution turned out to be shipping the cards to Edmonton where they were read into the University Of Alberta mainframe (which was available for commercial use -- another story in itself), sorted in memory, punched back out and the new deck shipped back to Seattle (I think). I got told the story when he showed me the original (unsorted) card deck (OK: Pile) in a back room.
Still thinking the old way
A story off the early net... In the early '80s a programmer was asked to write an EMACS macro that could sort the lines of a file according to columbs 72-80. The person who asked him to do it seemed pretty pissed that the functionality wasn't already in emacs.
He dutifully wrote the sort function, and then he found out what it was wanted for...
In the days of punched cards, your card deck would contain sequence numbers in columns 72-80. This was so that when (not if) you dropped your card deck you could simply runit through a mechanical card sorter, and get your deck back in the proper order. These sequence numbers were usually done in increments of 100 or 1000 so that you had room to insert new 'lines' into your program without having to resequence the whole deck. 'Modern' Card punch keyboards could be programmed to sequence cards automagically as you typed them. Language standards (Fortran, Cobol, etc.) were also designed around this necessity.
It seems that the old fogey was so used to punched cards and sequence numbers that he couldn't think of any other way to do this. When the guy wanted to move a couple of lines in the file he would change the sequence numbers and then call the Emacs mscro to sort the file. He never bothered asking if EMACS had a 'move lines' command.
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Most of my old video is still on tape. It needs to be transferred (to refresh it), but other than that, I haven't looked at most of it for years.
I backup my data to tape on a regular basis. Usually by the time the tape format is bacoming obsolete, Disk drive storage has advanced to the point where I can load the whole tape onto a disk and include it in my next backup. That's how I get around the obsolesence problem.
(you might also want to read my earlier post about how most of the data I have on my disk doesn't really need to be backed up).
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The two primary purposes of backups are storage extension and disaster recovery. Ever growing disk sizes have pretty much obviated the storage extension problem. The remaining purpose is disaster recovery..
My home directory is 'only' 2 Gigabytes. Out of that, my mail spool is about 150 Meg (I routinely go through and delete the 50MB video attachments). my text directory is about 40 meg and my public_html directory is about 159 meg (but that includes about 100 meg worth of RedHat extracts.
That makes up about 95% of the data that I have that is not recoverable by other means (i.e. the rest is source, binaries, data, etc. culled off the net, digitized pictures, etc.). (other unrecoverable stuff would be things like PGP keys and a few meg of source code).
After compression, most of my really important - to - backup data could almost fit on an old ZIP disk. I can back that up and save it in a safe deposit box in the bank once every few months, in case of a house fire. If my computer gets stolen or melts down (in a fire), I can recover the other stuff by scouring the net.
I really don't need to backup my redhat sources, random captured videos, etc. I can, at worst, repurchase those using insurance money in the case of a disaster (that's what insurance is for). Yes it'll take time, but I should be able to recover the stuff that I really need. Of course, the REAL hope is that I won't ever actually need the disaster recovery features (that's what the insurance company bets on).
If you only back up the stuff that it would be a real tragedy to loose, I think that you'll find that your backup needs drop dramatically.
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Then they charge you with using a cellphone while driving.
Oh. You didn't pay for a copy of that law, did you?
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