I do question magnetizing screwdrivers, tho. Do you really WANT a magnet poking around next to magnetically-sensitive equipment?
Magnetic frailty is somewhat of a urban legend with computers. Consider this: one of the best places to find a powerful, rare earth magnet (four of them in fact!) is inside a HARD DRIVE. They are used as opposition to move the disk arm very fast and very precisely. Rare earth magnets are also commonly used in the stepper motor just below the platters, often in groups of 8 or 10.
(can you think of anywhere that would be MORE sensitive to magnetic fields?) Of course they do a very good job of containing and routing the flux, but still, well, you get the point.
Some of the dialog that went back and forth between me an an engineer at Oxford Semiconductor (makers of the popular "911" firewire chipset)...
It was indeed the board that was the problem. After talking with Mr Brown at OS I have checked the boards, and four of the nine 142AS boards were the older revision, including the one I sent to you. (2.0) They lack a small chip "LVC02A" which is what allows them to do LBA48. Apparently the Maxtors do > 128gb by some method other than LBA48, so they all work fine on the older boards. The newer drives that require LBA48 to do > 128gb do not work on that board because they lack the special additional chip.
and...
These boards definitely do not support 48 bit LBA. There is an absence of an 8 pin chip 74LCV02A ( it would have a 'U' reference number on the board ) that is required to support it. The fact that these boards were first purchased in 2001 also indicates that they don't support 48 bit LBA. We didn't add 48 bit LBA support to our reference design until the third calendar quarter of 2002, which is when we first had hard disks to test against that supported that feature, and it required a bridge board respin with the OXFW911.
I was product architect/lead design for 900/911, and 48 bit LBA was not specified or even being discussed in the 1997-1999 timeframe when I designed that silicon. So the external workarounds were a necessity, and 48 bit support has been added in later product families ( 911+, 912, 922, 924 etc )
Those last two paragraphs are from one of the designers of the 911 chip. I can respect that there are some highly knowledgeable and experienced people here on slashdot, but it's difficult for me to discount Mr Brown's information. He seems to be in an ideal position to speak on this subject.
As a macintosh repair tech I probably have a little different spread of toys than many PC techs, but I suspect the basics will be much the same. Some items have been added after a moment of inspiration, and have made life a LOT easier.
* A parts caddy. One is a large caddy, and is full of parts of course. Start out with one at least twice as big as you think you'll need, then add a second one later when you run out of space.
* Another parts caddy. This should be a smaller one, with 36 small drawers. DO NOT put anything in this one, it's for service. This is a huge idea. When taking apart a laptop, each step of disassembly, pull out a drawer and put the parts/screws/etc in the drawer and set it on the bench to the side. Set them down in a row as you take apart the computer. This does three important things for you. First, it makes it unlikely that you will lose a part or try to put a screw in the wrong place. Second, you now have a distinct order in which to reassemble the computer so you don't put a panel back on and then realize you have to take it back off to attach a cable. Since you can't always count on having a service manual, especially for a laptop, this is very important. Third, all the parts for each assembly step are grouped together, which also helps prevent delays in reassembly and "hmm I have parts left over...". This is good for laptops and desktops, but the biggest benefit is really anytime you really have to tear something apart.
* KVM or similar switch, to switch video between your service monitor and up to 3 other VGA sources. USB switchbox to switch your keyboard between your service machine and up to thee other computers. Four VGA/USB combo cables to run around with. Number them, and number your switchbox positions. Some people opt for the "tap shift three times" KVMs, but I personally prefer the good ol pushbuttons.
* Tools. You can never have enough. I have particular need of my precision screwdriver set from Sears. It includes philips 0, 00, and 000 which are essential for laptops. It also comes with t5-t8 and small flatheads too. I also have a larger set of long handled philips 1 and 2, plus a set of large torx wrenches for t powermac g5's.
* multimeter. Doesn't have to be an expensive one. You need to test voltage (BIOS batteries, power supplies) and continuity (is that wire good?) $15 from radio shack is fine.
* firewire card in your service machine, and firewire enclosure, opened up, on your bench. This is for quick hookup and removal of drives for testing and repair, without having to reboot your machine. Another very "big idea", this will really help you. I *strongly* recommend a Granite Digital "FireView" bridge board, it has an LCD display and menu buttons and can be used to test a drive without even hooking it to a computer - extremely helpful and costs only about $100. Hard to find good diagnostic hardware of any type for that price. This will easily save you hours of frustration trying to track down a gremlin that ends up being a flakey or failing hard drive.
* air compressor, and a place to use it. (outside) You will be thankful for this when a machine comes in that looks like it was fresh dug up out of the ground. You'll see the worst ones at least twice a month, and they will send up a huge brown cloud when you first hit them with the air. Make sure it does not have a tool oiler in line, (yes, I've seen that done to a computer, once) and it would be better still if someone knew how to empty the water drain valve occasionally.
* cables and adapters. Like USB A-to-B, USB A-to-mini, firwire 6-6, 6-4, and 6-9. Parallel, maybe even some scsi (they come in handy from time to time). Serial, old and new style. Don't forget a DVI to VGA adapter (both ways!) because you will need them.
* floppy drives. Definitely need a 1.44mb usb floppy, and should also try to have a zip-100 if at all possible. Zip 250 is optional but good. DVD burner also manditory, for data backups. Anything else probabl
Old style is LBA32, iirc. (correct me if you know better)
They only use 30 of those bits for block addressing. Not sure on the other two, probably read/write flag and something else.
2 ^ 30 = big number. It's signed, so we only can use 2^29 of it for positive numbers. There are 256 bytes per HD sector, so add another 8 to the 29 (2^8=256) and you will find 2^37 = 137,000,000,000 or so, which is 128gb, and there is your old LBA30 limit.
LBA48 adds 18 bits. That's about 262,000 times the capacity.
I know Moore's Law marches relentlessly onward, but that should keep even him busy for awhile.
That'd put the device capacity limit at what, 3.6 x 10^16, I don't know what unit is used at that point, but it's probably an odd one. And any number with 16 zeros behind it is plenty of storage for me, forever.
Explain then why do I have ATA controller cards here that don't support large drives, and yet I can replace them with newer controller cards and suddenly get large drive support?? This appears to be an open-and-shut case for ATA controllers being able to influence LBA48 compliance.
And talking of bridge boards, you can't necessarily update the software on them is foolish because close to 100% of bridge boards have flashable firmware. All 13 of my boards, from 5 different manufacturers, are flashable. I've had to flash mine to get proper support.
Four of my bridge boards are an earlier series than another group, and lack a critical IC chip on the board for LBA48 support. They CANNOT EVER do LBA48, even with the new firmware because they lack critical circuitry. If you care to argue this point, argue with the techs at Oxford Semiconductor, who explained the finer details of this to me two months ago. Clearly hardware can affect LBA48 compliance.
The only thing I have yet to figure out is how a few older maxtors (160, 180, and one particular model of 250) can operate on non-LBA48 hardware and show full size. Not even the people at Oxford could explain that one away, and Maxtor's not talking.
Remember though that there are three important factors in play here.
(1) the IDE controller chip has to have LBA48-aware firmware. This same issue applies to firewire-to-ide bridge boards in use in many firewire enclosures. I have a handful of bridge boards here that are NOT LBA48 compliant and will only detect 128gb at most. Manufacturers are still making bridge chips that are not LBA48, sadly.
(2) the software you speak of, the ATA driver in your OS, must also be LBA48. I don't see this being a problem because any OS written in the last four years has been LBA48 compliant.
(3) I know for certain that a few manufacturers are "doing their own thing" for large drive support. I have several seagates and a pair of maxtors here that don't play nicely with most bridge boards I try. Then there's a set of four maxtor 160 and 180's that for reaons I cannot explain, work perfectly fine on my NON LBA48 bridge boards. I have heard rumors that older large maxtor drives somehow get around that requirement, but I have no idea how they accomplish this.
So for laptops, we can assume that software (OS) will likely not be a problem. But what about the IDE controller chip on the logic board? And even if it is LBA48, will we see compatibility problems with some of the "creative solutions" some HD manufacturers will no doubt come up with? It's very frustrating buying a HD and having it ether (A) not detect at all, (b) detect as 0 bytes, (c) detect as a 128gb when you know better, or (d) refuse to detect the slave. Been there several times on each of those issues, it's no fun.
Here we are at the edge, at 120gb. What happens when they make a 140gb 2.5" HDD? I have had headache after headache with desktop systems and firewire enclosures that were not fully LBA48 compliant, and so they would detect 160, 180, 200, and 250gb HDs as 128gb. (or not at all...) Since no laptop drives > 128gb have yet been manufactured, I wonder if we will see this problem crop up sometime next year for out laptops?
Or has someone tried cabling a large 3.5" drive into a few laptops to see if we have a nasty surprise waiting for us?
I've got an 80 in my powerbook, and have a good 20 of it free, but y'know how things like that go... I'm sure I'll be hurting for space by start of next year. A 120 would be a nice upgrade. Anyone found a source for these new magic drives? I remember years back with my black powerbook with its "huge" 8gb drive, finding that IBM had made a massive 23 gb drive and having to search high and low to find the ONE retailer that had just TWO of them in stock. I still say I should have bought both and ebayed the other and made a killing.
If someone has found a few sources for them, can you report back on prices so we know how bad it's gonna sting? (that 23 was over $800 at the time, but worth every penny!)
The trick is to complete the cycle. It doesn't matter how easy it is to get one or two stages of the virus life cycle to run on a platform - if even one step in the cycle is impractical (or impossible) then the virus is not viable.
OK, when you start out with your initial 1 infected machine, you have a malicious app in total control of the computer. That is a given. OK, it emails a copy of itself to another user. OK, that's also a given.
Now what?
If it goes to a mac user, it sits in the user's in-box, then the user previews or reads it, it does nothing besides sit there, and maybe try to social engineer the user into saving to desktop and double clicking it. Assuming the user is stupid enough to fall for it and runs it, it can't do jack squat to the system because the OS will require the user to type their password to do anything major like modify system files, which is what all virii and trojans do. Again if the user is profoundly stupid they may actually do this, but look, this has required three steps for the user to take to spread one iteration. There are no known network exploits for OS X that allow a remote connection, drop of code, and forced execute, so mail is probably the only way to get your code into a macintosh.
Now if this were a windows PC, as soon as the email arrived, or as soon as the user previewed it, BAM! it exploits one of dozens of back doors to cause the program to execute, usually in the background, completely without the user's permission. Due to windows' total lack of internal security, the malware runs at root privledges immediately. System files are modified, the malware hides itself deep in the system where you will be extremely lucky to ever get rid of it. Now the mailer goes to work, scanning the entire HD for email addresses (ENTIRE hard drive, it can easily scan into other users' accounts and private files, unlike in OS X) and mailing out more copies of itself. Now note, this is the mail vector, one of many. Some are direct attacks that simply hack into a hole in the windows network, drop off their payload, and tell windows to run it. The horror of this is, windows actually runs it when its told to. This means we get an iteration of the spread with ZERO user interaction, and it may happen at a rate of several iterations per second. It took Code Red what, 8 minutes to infect 75% of the vulnerable machines in the WORLD.
Comparing dangers of a (theoretical) mac virus to a (commonplace) pc virus is like comparing a rubber band gun to an atomic bomb.
Remember, if you can sell 100 units at $50 each, or you can sell 95 units at $60 each, you make more money selling for a higher price. There's 5 less customers, possibly unhappy with you due to your high prices, but you will cry all the way to the bank. If you keep those 95 customers despite the bad PR from the other 5, you come out ahead. Whenever I hear people complain about a high price on an item, I can only think that person must be in the 5% that got edged out by the cost.
You could make lots of happy customers and sell 300 units at $35 each, but then you would make much less money in the end since you have such a small proffit even with the large unit count.
If you're a stockholder and the company your stock is in is making its pricing decisions to make people like YOU happy, you will see very little dividends if any, and would be a fool to buy more stock. You may even sell it. This is the stick that keeps companies from doing stupid things like that.
If they make good decisions that make more money, they pay more dividends, people buy more stock, and stock prices go up. This means the company can invest more, to sell more units, become more efficient, invest in R&D, and ultimately may make even more money, continuing the cycle. That's busiiness.
Most forms of entertainment involve paying money for a service or a product which provides distraction for awhile.
Gambling bypasses the concept of service and product, and just takes your money and leaves you with nothing. For as unproductive as most entertainment is, gambling sets a new kind of standard for "no return on investment".
One of my more favorite sayings, somewhat related... "Lottery: it's a tax for people who are bad at math." I suppose you could sub "gambling" for "lottery" and it still works fine.
One method is similar to telemerase (sp?) on DNA. The grandmother(s) you seed start out with n iterations to live, say 20. That means their children have n-1 iterations to live. (the worm is copied, with that one modification) After a worm spends say, 25 minutes trying to spread, it then falls dormant until the system clock hits a day in the future, some set date, say a week after release. If after spreading and initial activation, a child sees its n is 0, that copy skips the "spread" phase of its activity and goes immediately to sleep, to wait for the magic date to activate. This provides a throttle to spreading which requires no coordination.
The trick here of course is to determin a proper n to start with. Since the progression is geometric, it can be very tricky to determine how successful the worm will be and to pick an optimal n for a large spread but yet not a devastating high profile attack. (it would be necessary to have a reasonably accurate estimate of how many machines a given instance could infect within a given span of time) The difference between a starting n of 14 and of 15 can increase the number of infected machines by 10x or more.
I find it interesting that while several worms have targetted servers for direct attack, that none have used this as a yardstick for coordination instead. Say the worm during its spread phase pinged google. If the worm was successful, it may take google down, or at least create significant lag. The worms could see this and recignize they had reached optimal spread, and shift permanently into their payload mode. If you assume the worm would outright crash the server or force them to take it down or otherwise reject traffic, it would be an "off swtich" for the worm's spread phase and would probably work very well to throttle the worm at the correct point for best spread, depending on the choice of site used as the yardstick.
Those however are a very small minority of jobs, that I would call "standby" jobs. In those cases, the people have two primary jobs really... they have their actual working job, such as puting out fires. Then they have their standby job, which is being there when there are no fires, "just in case". Those people's hours and pay reflect that reality. They may be at the firehouse for upwards of 20 hours a day for 3-4 days of the week. If you add up all their hours, they are "working" a very long week indeed. But their pay does not show them working 60-80 hours/week. You could instead look at them being paid say $40/hr to actually put out fires, plus say $6/hr to sit on their butts watching TV most of the day. So even in that case my theory does hold.
System Administrators are somewhat in this position too, where in the best of cases they are working somewhere that is already in good condition and they are being paid primarily to "put out the fires" that occur from time to time. In that case you can also view them as making a large amount of money to actually put out the fires, and a small amount of money to be there, or to be on call. (carry a pager, etc)
So in either person's case, some unproductive time is expected due to the nature of the job, but the pay is actually correctly compensating for this because when they are being productive, the value of their work is very high. If you expect the admin to work constantly his entire day, I bet they receive a fat check at the end of the week.
It's a matter of productivity. Many jobs are productivity based pay. Look at something like a car salesman. The more cars he sells, the more money he makes. If he's feeling lazy on Monday maybe he doesn't sell any cars, but his paycheck shows it.
Now other jobs are less directly linked, like the guy in the plant assembling toy tractors. Maybe the average guy assembles 800 units / day, but you are only assembling 700 / day on average. The emoployer there has a less flexible option. He can refuse to give you a raise, or maybe even cut your pay. Or he can fire you and replace you with someone that can produce more.
So you can look at this like a negotiation of sorts. Even at 700 units/day you may still turn a proffit for the company, even if a smaller one. If the labor pool in your area can't provide any others that will produce > 700 units for the same pay, you may still be a good deal for the company, even if not as good a deal as Bob in the other line that pulls 850. In that case I'd say the company is taking advantage of Bob, or maybe Bob gets perks of some sort, on or off the record. Maybe he can show up 15 minutes late every Monday and nobody says anything. Manager doesn't flip out and yell at him if he puts on one or two wheels backwards today. etc...
The way I look at it, if you are productivity based, you are likely getting whatever you deserve, as long as your company is able to provide you witjh adequate work to do. (that's a probem I run into, lack of work) If you are getting paid by day, then your managers just have to decide which side of the line you are on as to whether you're worth keeping.
Speaking to parent's point about technology making a job easier, then yes, it is very possible that a job has become a George Jetson "press the button" job and should not pay as well. Now on the other hand if there is a higher degree of skill now involved to operate those complex remote management systems, it may balance out. If you have time on your hands, they could either make a good case for paying you less, or for giving you other additional things to do. Really, in an ideal workplace, pay would be a factor of (training required to do the job) x (hours worked productively) x (difficulty of job, like tightening bridge bolts vs pushing carts). If your job drops hours worked productively or difficulty level, something else has to adjust to compensate. More work, less pay, something.
If you find say, your job has been made easier by your example of remote management, and you are spending 2.5 of your 8 hrs a day browsing the web, you should not expect high pay, or you should expect them to find something else to do to occupy your time. It's one thing to have a little time to catch your breath and reorganize your thoughts once ot twice a day, but if you have hours of time to browse the web, you are being unproductive, and your pay should reflect that.
Just remember that if there is another fellow at the unemployment office that would be perfectly happy to do your job, do it all day long for a full 8 hrs, be just as productive per hour as you, and be paid the same as what you are getting, then you are being lazy.
The reason merchants take your signature so casually is because they have no financial responsibility. That's part of the visa and mastercard merchant agreement. If the card is approved on the swiper, the merchant is guaranteed his 97% of the take, or whatever it is for that particular card. (visa, mc, and discover are all different %)
The only responsibility the merchant has is that if he does too many fraudulent transactions percentage-wise, the card handling service he goes through may drop him, and he'll have to find another. I don't know if the card service eats the fraud or if the bank does in those cases. Either way, the merchant is always paid. It's this guarantee that makes a merchant willing to only get like 97% of the purchase price without the right to charge extra for credit purchases. (extra charges for credit purchases are against the credit card processing rules)
Another somewhat unknown fact is that if someone steals your card or through any other circumstances charges to your cc #, you can be held partly liable. The banks can make you pay up to $50 of the balance of "disputed charges". From the three or four people I've seen get their cards stolen though, the bank usually eats the $50 they could otherwise push on the consumer. I find this very odd for a bank to be generous to the tune of $50, but for some reason they do it. They probably make well over $50 in interest for most card holders during any 2 year period, so for them it's probably better to roll on the $50 and keep them using their plastic.
The first thing you need to do if your card is missing is report it lost. The $50 limit applies only to unauthorized charges made before the card is reported lost. Anything after that is entirely the responsibility of the bank.
Kitchen sink. No really, I have a ton of stuff in there.
1) 7ft cat 6 jumper 2) garmin GPS3+ 3) garmin data/power cable 4) two sharpie pens 5) antacid 6) serial to usb adapter 7) firewire 6-to-6 cable 8) cat5 crimper 9) 25pk RJ45 ends (I need to get a wire cutter too) 10) trackball 11) usb a-to-b 3ft cable 12) firewire 6-to-4 6ft cable 13) phono mini 6ft patch cable 14) wifi access point detector (the cheap variety) 15) two spare high density floppies 16) cardbus to compactflash adapter 17) checkbook 18) usb floppy drive 19) 64mb compactflash card 20) rj11 ends 21) spare set of keys 22) ipod headphones 23) $2 in quarters 24) a large CD wallet w/ 45 DVDs, 20 installer CDs, and blanks 25) two packs of screen cleaners
The program has to be able to access the data. Most commonly the only defense against this issue is to use the user's login password as the key to the data, which should not be stored in a recoverable form (i.e. well-hashed) on the hard drive.
If you be paranoid, maybe get a mac and turn on filevault. Let the forensics people cope with a 30gb AES128 encrypted image instead of your home folder.
That's a hardware raid that appears to be quite feature-packed, including RAID5, hot swap, hot rebuild, hot spare, and hot GROW. (I will believe that when I see it) $1100 plus cost of drives. Units like this were in the $2500-3500 range a year ago. Looks like a good time to get into RAID5.
I will probably be ordering one of those later this week, and plan on breaking my mirrors and stuffing five 250's in there. Should be nice.
I'm no audiophile so I can't speak for the SNR but I will have to argue the battery life. I own an original 5gb iPod that I bought used. After it was better than 4 years old, the battery was down to about 3 hours runtime, so I replaced it. (four years is longer lifespan than most cel phone and cordless phone batteries) Now it gets over 12 hours on a charge. Anyone complaining about the iPod's battery life is misinformed.
is to weed out the majority of the fools. Some of the certs serve only as a paper chain to hold back people that simply are not willing to invest any effort.
I have four certifications, for servicing Apples. They are all required for what I do, and I cannot order parts from Apple without them.
Help Desk Specialist - lets just call this one the "have you ever used a computer in your life?" test. It's that easy. Really. Knowing what a macintosh looks like is purely optional.
Portable Tech: service techniques will help, but are purely optional to pass this test. More important to know differences between the various models like which one uses PC133 and which uses PC333.
Desktop Tech: as with Portable Tech, but sprinkle in some CRT safety that you have to know. Miss even one safety question and you fail. Other than that, still a piece of cake.
Technical Coordinator: Where did THAT truck come from? I thought these were easy tests? OK this one you will have to study for if you want to pass. Don't expect the answers to be in the studyguide either. I swear they really make some of that stuff up on the test.
Those are descriptions of the intial test. The recertifications are done online and are actually quite a measurable amount more difficult. The initial tests seem to be to find out what you know. The recerts are more a case of "what new information can you find, and how FAST can you find it?" You spend several hours keeping your web browser very very busy. It helps to have a friend onhand with another machine to help hunt information down as it is timed. If the test is indeed a measure of your ability to find information, it's more of a "who you know" than "what you know", so I don't see a problem with having an assistant.
I've heard from the PC techs that certs are much the same on their side of the fence. Things like A+ are borderline "you HAVE seen a computer before?" While things like CNE are "uh oh where are my books?" There doesn't seem to be much in between the gap though. Leads me to believe that there are really only two kinds of certs - the pushovers that are there to keep out the riffraff, and the REAL certs that prove you actually know a sizeable chunk about your field.
If you connect to a swarm, you soon get a list of alll peers in the swarm. Why do they need to get log files from the servers when they could have sampled all the swarms at any time and gotten a complete list live? (AFAIK this is what they did with suprnova before it got closed, because ppl got letters from RIAA a few weeks before it was closed)
Only thing I can figure is they are technically inept and can't figure out the protocol so they have to rely on logs? Or there is some information or coalation/summary in the logs they are interested in?
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I do question magnetizing screwdrivers, tho. Do you really WANT a magnet poking around next to magnetically-sensitive equipment?
Magnetic frailty is somewhat of a urban legend with computers. Consider this: one of the best places to find a powerful, rare earth magnet (four of them in fact!) is inside a HARD DRIVE. They are used as opposition to move the disk arm very fast and very precisely. Rare earth magnets are also commonly used in the stepper motor just below the platters, often in groups of 8 or 10.
(can you think of anywhere that would be MORE sensitive to magnetic fields?) Of course they do a very good job of containing and routing the flux, but still, well, you get the point.
Some of the dialog that went back and forth between me an an engineer at Oxford Semiconductor (makers of the popular "911" firewire chipset)...
It was indeed the board that was the problem. After talking with Mr Brown at OS I have checked the boards, and four of the nine 142AS boards were the older revision, including the one I sent to you. (2.0) They lack a small chip "LVC02A" which is what allows them to do LBA48. Apparently the Maxtors do > 128gb by some method other than LBA48, so they all work fine on the older boards. The newer drives that require LBA48 to do > 128gb do not work on that board because they lack the special additional chip.
and...
These boards definitely do not support 48 bit LBA. There is an absence of an 8 pin chip 74LCV02A ( it would have a 'U' reference number on the board ) that is required to support it. The fact that these boards were first purchased in 2001 also indicates that they don't support 48 bit LBA. We didn't add 48 bit LBA support to our reference design until the third calendar quarter of 2002, which is when we first had hard disks to test against that supported that feature, and it required a bridge board respin with the OXFW911.
I was product architect/lead design for 900/911, and 48 bit LBA was not specified or even being discussed in the 1997-1999 timeframe when I designed that silicon. So the external workarounds were a necessity, and 48 bit support has been added in later product families ( 911+, 912, 922, 924 etc )
Those last two paragraphs are from one of the designers of the 911 chip. I can respect that there are some highly knowledgeable and experienced people here on slashdot, but it's difficult for me to discount Mr Brown's information. He seems to be in an ideal position to speak on this subject.
As a macintosh repair tech I probably have a little different spread of toys than many PC techs, but I suspect the basics will be much the same. Some items have been added after a moment of inspiration, and have made life a LOT easier.
* A parts caddy. One is a large caddy, and is full of parts of course. Start out with one at least twice as big as you think you'll need, then add a second one later when you run out of space.
* Another parts caddy. This should be a smaller one, with 36 small drawers. DO NOT put anything in this one, it's for service. This is a huge idea. When taking apart a laptop, each step of disassembly, pull out a drawer and put the parts/screws/etc in the drawer and set it on the bench to the side. Set them down in a row as you take apart the computer. This does three important things for you. First, it makes it unlikely that you will lose a part or try to put a screw in the wrong place. Second, you now have a distinct order in which to reassemble the computer so you don't put a panel back on and then realize you have to take it back off to attach a cable. Since you can't always count on having a service manual, especially for a laptop, this is very important. Third, all the parts for each assembly step are grouped together, which also helps prevent delays in reassembly and "hmm I have parts left over...". This is good for laptops and desktops, but the biggest benefit is really anytime you really have to tear something apart.
* KVM or similar switch, to switch video between your service monitor and up to 3 other VGA sources. USB switchbox to switch your keyboard between your service machine and up to thee other computers. Four VGA/USB combo cables to run around with. Number them, and number your switchbox positions. Some people opt for the "tap shift three times" KVMs, but I personally prefer the good ol pushbuttons.
* Tools. You can never have enough. I have particular need of my precision screwdriver set from Sears. It includes philips 0, 00, and 000 which are essential for laptops. It also comes with t5-t8 and small flatheads too. I also have a larger set of long handled philips 1 and 2, plus a set of large torx wrenches for t powermac g5's.
* multimeter. Doesn't have to be an expensive one. You need to test voltage (BIOS batteries, power supplies) and continuity (is that wire good?) $15 from radio shack is fine.
* firewire card in your service machine, and firewire enclosure, opened up, on your bench. This is for quick hookup and removal of drives for testing and repair, without having to reboot your machine. Another very "big idea", this will really help you. I *strongly* recommend a Granite Digital "FireView" bridge board, it has an LCD display and menu buttons and can be used to test a drive without even hooking it to a computer - extremely helpful and costs only about $100. Hard to find good diagnostic hardware of any type for that price. This will easily save you hours of frustration trying to track down a gremlin that ends up being a flakey or failing hard drive.
* air compressor, and a place to use it. (outside) You will be thankful for this when a machine comes in that looks like it was fresh dug up out of the ground. You'll see the worst ones at least twice a month, and they will send up a huge brown cloud when you first hit them with the air. Make sure it does not have a tool oiler in line, (yes, I've seen that done to a computer, once) and it would be better still if someone knew how to empty the water drain valve occasionally.
* cables and adapters. Like USB A-to-B, USB A-to-mini, firwire 6-6, 6-4, and 6-9. Parallel, maybe even some scsi (they come in handy from time to time). Serial, old and new style. Don't forget a DVI to VGA adapter (both ways!) because you will need them.
* floppy drives. Definitely need a 1.44mb usb floppy, and should also try to have a zip-100 if at all possible. Zip 250 is optional but good. DVD burner also manditory, for data backups. Anything else probabl
Old style is LBA32, iirc. (correct me if you know better)
They only use 30 of those bits for block addressing. Not sure on the other two, probably read/write flag and something else.
2 ^ 30 = big number. It's signed, so we only can use 2^29 of it for positive numbers. There are 256 bytes per HD sector, so add another 8 to the 29 (2^8=256) and you will find 2^37 = 137,000,000,000 or so, which is 128gb, and there is your old LBA30 limit.
LBA48 adds 18 bits. That's about 262,000 times the capacity.
I know Moore's Law marches relentlessly onward, but that should keep even him busy for awhile.
That'd put the device capacity limit at what, 3.6 x 10^16, I don't know what unit is used at that point, but it's probably an odd one. And any number with 16 zeros behind it is plenty of storage for me, forever.
Explain then why do I have ATA controller cards here that don't support large drives, and yet I can replace them with newer controller cards and suddenly get large drive support?? This appears to be an open-and-shut case for ATA controllers being able to influence LBA48 compliance.
And talking of bridge boards, you can't necessarily update the software on them is foolish because close to 100% of bridge boards have flashable firmware. All 13 of my boards, from 5 different manufacturers, are flashable. I've had to flash mine to get proper support.
Four of my bridge boards are an earlier series than another group, and lack a critical IC chip on the board for LBA48 support. They CANNOT EVER do LBA48, even with the new firmware because they lack critical circuitry. If you care to argue this point, argue with the techs at Oxford Semiconductor, who explained the finer details of this to me two months ago. Clearly hardware can affect LBA48 compliance.
The only thing I have yet to figure out is how a few older maxtors (160, 180, and one particular model of 250) can operate on non-LBA48 hardware and show full size. Not even the people at Oxford could explain that one away, and Maxtor's not talking.
that has a familiar ring to it...
you could use that baby for assasination by paper cut.
Remember though that there are three important factors in play here.
(1) the IDE controller chip has to have LBA48-aware firmware. This same issue applies to firewire-to-ide bridge boards in use in many firewire enclosures. I have a handful of bridge boards here that are NOT LBA48 compliant and will only detect 128gb at most. Manufacturers are still making bridge chips that are not LBA48, sadly.
(2) the software you speak of, the ATA driver in your OS, must also be LBA48. I don't see this being a problem because any OS written in the last four years has been LBA48 compliant.
(3) I know for certain that a few manufacturers are "doing their own thing" for large drive support. I have several seagates and a pair of maxtors here that don't play nicely with most bridge boards I try. Then there's a set of four maxtor 160 and 180's that for reaons I cannot explain, work perfectly fine on my NON LBA48 bridge boards. I have heard rumors that older large maxtor drives somehow get around that requirement, but I have no idea how they accomplish this.
So for laptops, we can assume that software (OS) will likely not be a problem. But what about the IDE controller chip on the logic board? And even if it is LBA48, will we see compatibility problems with some of the "creative solutions" some HD manufacturers will no doubt come up with? It's very frustrating buying a HD and having it ether (A) not detect at all, (b) detect as 0 bytes, (c) detect as a 128gb when you know better, or (d) refuse to detect the slave. Been there several times on each of those issues, it's no fun.
I emailed seagate asking for more specs and availaibility. Looks like he picked a very strategic time for a vacation!
I will be out of the office starting 09/10/2005 and will not return until
09/19/2005.
I will have limited access to email and voicemail. If your matter is
urgent, please contact John Paulsen at (831) 439-2499 or
john.paulsen@seagate.com
Here we are at the edge, at 120gb. What happens when they make a 140gb 2.5" HDD? I have had headache after headache with desktop systems and firewire enclosures that were not fully LBA48 compliant, and so they would detect 160, 180, 200, and 250gb HDs as 128gb. (or not at all...) Since no laptop drives > 128gb have yet been manufactured, I wonder if we will see this problem crop up sometime next year for out laptops?
Or has someone tried cabling a large 3.5" drive into a few laptops to see if we have a nasty surprise waiting for us?
I've got an 80 in my powerbook, and have a good 20 of it free, but y'know how things like that go... I'm sure I'll be hurting for space by start of next year. A 120 would be a nice upgrade. Anyone found a source for these new magic drives? I remember years back with my black powerbook with its "huge" 8gb drive, finding that IBM had made a massive 23 gb drive and having to search high and low to find the ONE retailer that had just TWO of them in stock. I still say I should have bought both and ebayed the other and made a killing.
If someone has found a few sources for them, can you report back on prices so we know how bad it's gonna sting? (that 23 was over $800 at the time, but worth every penny!)
The trick is to complete the cycle. It doesn't matter how easy it is to get one or two stages of the virus life cycle to run on a platform - if even one step in the cycle is impractical (or impossible) then the virus is not viable.
OK, when you start out with your initial 1 infected machine, you have a malicious app in total control of the computer. That is a given. OK, it emails a copy of itself to another user. OK, that's also a given.
Now what?
If it goes to a mac user, it sits in the user's in-box, then the user previews or reads it, it does nothing besides sit there, and maybe try to social engineer the user into saving to desktop and double clicking it. Assuming the user is stupid enough to fall for it and runs it, it can't do jack squat to the system because the OS will require the user to type their password to do anything major like modify system files, which is what all virii and trojans do. Again if the user is profoundly stupid they may actually do this, but look, this has required three steps for the user to take to spread one iteration. There are no known network exploits for OS X that allow a remote connection, drop of code, and forced execute, so mail is probably the only way to get your code into a macintosh.
Now if this were a windows PC, as soon as the email arrived, or as soon as the user previewed it, BAM! it exploits one of dozens of back doors to cause the program to execute, usually in the background, completely without the user's permission. Due to windows' total lack of internal security, the malware runs at root privledges immediately. System files are modified, the malware hides itself deep in the system where you will be extremely lucky to ever get rid of it. Now the mailer goes to work, scanning the entire HD for email addresses (ENTIRE hard drive, it can easily scan into other users' accounts and private files, unlike in OS X) and mailing out more copies of itself. Now note, this is the mail vector, one of many. Some are direct attacks that simply hack into a hole in the windows network, drop off their payload, and tell windows to run it. The horror of this is, windows actually runs it when its told to. This means we get an iteration of the spread with ZERO user interaction, and it may happen at a rate of several iterations per second. It took Code Red what, 8 minutes to infect 75% of the vulnerable machines in the WORLD.
Comparing dangers of a (theoretical) mac virus to a (commonplace) pc virus is like comparing a rubber band gun to an atomic bomb.
Remember, if you can sell 100 units at $50 each, or you can sell 95 units at $60 each, you make more money selling for a higher price. There's 5 less customers, possibly unhappy with you due to your high prices, but you will cry all the way to the bank. If you keep those 95 customers despite the bad PR from the other 5, you come out ahead. Whenever I hear people complain about a high price on an item, I can only think that person must be in the 5% that got edged out by the cost.
You could make lots of happy customers and sell 300 units at $35 each, but then you would make much less money in the end since you have such a small proffit even with the large unit count.
If you're a stockholder and the company your stock is in is making its pricing decisions to make people like YOU happy, you will see very little dividends if any, and would be a fool to buy more stock. You may even sell it. This is the stick that keeps companies from doing stupid things like that.
If they make good decisions that make more money, they pay more dividends, people buy more stock, and stock prices go up. This means the company can invest more, to sell more units, become more efficient, invest in R&D, and ultimately may make even more money, continuing the cycle. That's busiiness.
Most forms of entertainment involve paying money for a service or a product which provides distraction for awhile.
Gambling bypasses the concept of service and product, and just takes your money and leaves you with nothing. For as unproductive as most entertainment is, gambling sets a new kind of standard for "no return on investment".
One of my more favorite sayings, somewhat related... "Lottery: it's a tax for people who are bad at math." I suppose you could sub "gambling" for "lottery" and it still works fine.
One method is similar to telemerase (sp?) on DNA. The grandmother(s) you seed start out with n iterations to live, say 20. That means their children have n-1 iterations to live. (the worm is copied, with that one modification) After a worm spends say, 25 minutes trying to spread, it then falls dormant until the system clock hits a day in the future, some set date, say a week after release. If after spreading and initial activation, a child sees its n is 0, that copy skips the "spread" phase of its activity and goes immediately to sleep, to wait for the magic date to activate. This provides a throttle to spreading which requires no coordination.
The trick here of course is to determin a proper n to start with. Since the progression is geometric, it can be very tricky to determine how successful the worm will be and to pick an optimal n for a large spread but yet not a devastating high profile attack. (it would be necessary to have a reasonably accurate estimate of how many machines a given instance could infect within a given span of time) The difference between a starting n of 14 and of 15 can increase the number of infected machines by 10x or more.
I find it interesting that while several worms have targetted servers for direct attack, that none have used this as a yardstick for coordination instead. Say the worm during its spread phase pinged google. If the worm was successful, it may take google down, or at least create significant lag. The worms could see this and recignize they had reached optimal spread, and shift permanently into their payload mode. If you assume the worm would outright crash the server or force them to take it down or otherwise reject traffic, it would be an "off swtich" for the worm's spread phase and would probably work very well to throttle the worm at the correct point for best spread, depending on the choice of site used as the yardstick.
Those however are a very small minority of jobs, that I would call "standby" jobs. In those cases, the people have two primary jobs really... they have their actual working job, such as puting out fires. Then they have their standby job, which is being there when there are no fires, "just in case". Those people's hours and pay reflect that reality. They may be at the firehouse for upwards of 20 hours a day for 3-4 days of the week. If you add up all their hours, they are "working" a very long week indeed. But their pay does not show them working 60-80 hours/week. You could instead look at them being paid say $40/hr to actually put out fires, plus say $6/hr to sit on their butts watching TV most of the day. So even in that case my theory does hold.
System Administrators are somewhat in this position too, where in the best of cases they are working somewhere that is already in good condition and they are being paid primarily to "put out the fires" that occur from time to time. In that case you can also view them as making a large amount of money to actually put out the fires, and a small amount of money to be there, or to be on call. (carry a pager, etc)
So in either person's case, some unproductive time is expected due to the nature of the job, but the pay is actually correctly compensating for this because when they are being productive, the value of their work is very high. If you expect the admin to work constantly his entire day, I bet they receive a fat check at the end of the week.
It's a matter of productivity. Many jobs are productivity based pay. Look at something like a car salesman. The more cars he sells, the more money he makes. If he's feeling lazy on Monday maybe he doesn't sell any cars, but his paycheck shows it.
Now other jobs are less directly linked, like the guy in the plant assembling toy tractors. Maybe the average guy assembles 800 units / day, but you are only assembling 700 / day on average. The emoployer there has a less flexible option. He can refuse to give you a raise, or maybe even cut your pay. Or he can fire you and replace you with someone that can produce more.
So you can look at this like a negotiation of sorts. Even at 700 units/day you may still turn a proffit for the company, even if a smaller one. If the labor pool in your area can't provide any others that will produce > 700 units for the same pay, you may still be a good deal for the company, even if not as good a deal as Bob in the other line that pulls 850. In that case I'd say the company is taking advantage of Bob, or maybe Bob gets perks of some sort, on or off the record. Maybe he can show up 15 minutes late every Monday and nobody says anything. Manager doesn't flip out and yell at him if he puts on one or two wheels backwards today. etc...
The way I look at it, if you are productivity based, you are likely getting whatever you deserve, as long as your company is able to provide you witjh adequate work to do. (that's a probem I run into, lack of work) If you are getting paid by day, then your managers just have to decide which side of the line you are on as to whether you're worth keeping.
Speaking to parent's point about technology making a job easier, then yes, it is very possible that a job has become a George Jetson "press the button" job and should not pay as well. Now on the other hand if there is a higher degree of skill now involved to operate those complex remote management systems, it may balance out. If you have time on your hands, they could either make a good case for paying you less, or for giving you other additional things to do. Really, in an ideal workplace, pay would be a factor of (training required to do the job) x (hours worked productively) x (difficulty of job, like tightening bridge bolts vs pushing carts). If your job drops hours worked productively or difficulty level, something else has to adjust to compensate. More work, less pay, something.
If you find say, your job has been made easier by your example of remote management, and you are spending 2.5 of your 8 hrs a day browsing the web, you should not expect high pay, or you should expect them to find something else to do to occupy your time. It's one thing to have a little time to catch your breath and reorganize your thoughts once ot twice a day, but if you have hours of time to browse the web, you are being unproductive, and your pay should reflect that.
Just remember that if there is another fellow at the unemployment office that would be perfectly happy to do your job, do it all day long for a full 8 hrs, be just as productive per hour as you, and be paid the same as what you are getting, then you are being lazy.
The reason merchants take your signature so casually is because they have no financial responsibility. That's part of the visa and mastercard merchant agreement. If the card is approved on the swiper, the merchant is guaranteed his 97% of the take, or whatever it is for that particular card. (visa, mc, and discover are all different %)
The only responsibility the merchant has is that if he does too many fraudulent transactions percentage-wise, the card handling service he goes through may drop him, and he'll have to find another. I don't know if the card service eats the fraud or if the bank does in those cases. Either way, the merchant is always paid. It's this guarantee that makes a merchant willing to only get like 97% of the purchase price without the right to charge extra for credit purchases. (extra charges for credit purchases are against the credit card processing rules)
Another somewhat unknown fact is that if someone steals your card or through any other circumstances charges to your cc #, you can be held partly liable. The banks can make you pay up to $50 of the balance of "disputed charges". From the three or four people I've seen get their cards stolen though, the bank usually eats the $50 they could otherwise push on the consumer. I find this very odd for a bank to be generous to the tune of $50, but for some reason they do it. They probably make well over $50 in interest for most card holders during any 2 year period, so for them it's probably better to roll on the $50 and keep them using their plastic.
The first thing you need to do if your card is missing is report it lost. The $50 limit applies only to unauthorized charges made before the card is reported lost. Anything after that is entirely the responsibility of the bank.
Kitchen sink. No really, I have a ton of stuff in there.
1) 7ft cat 6 jumper
2) garmin GPS3+
3) garmin data/power cable
4) two sharpie pens
5) antacid
6) serial to usb adapter
7) firewire 6-to-6 cable
8) cat5 crimper
9) 25pk RJ45 ends (I need to get a wire cutter too)
10) trackball
11) usb a-to-b 3ft cable
12) firewire 6-to-4 6ft cable
13) phono mini 6ft patch cable
14) wifi access point detector (the cheap variety)
15) two spare high density floppies
16) cardbus to compactflash adapter
17) checkbook
18) usb floppy drive
19) 64mb compactflash card
20) rj11 ends
21) spare set of keys
22) ipod headphones
23) $2 in quarters
24) a large CD wallet w/ 45 DVDs, 20 installer CDs, and blanks
25) two packs of screen cleaners
oh, and 26) a powerbook.
By far the heaviest item is the CD wallet.
I saw "Mambo" and "joomba" and for some reason my mind went immediately to
Roomba.
The program has to be able to access the data. Most commonly the only defense against this issue is to use the user's login password as the key to the data, which should not be stored in a recoverable form (i.e. well-hashed) on the hard drive.
If you be paranoid, maybe get a mac and turn on filevault. Let the forensics people cope with a 30gb AES128 encrypted image instead of your home folder.
phoenix lander launch cancelled due to rising fuel costs.
You might want to check out
r e-mini.html
http://www.cooldrives.com/firewire-raid-5-enclosu
That's a hardware raid that appears to be quite feature-packed, including RAID5, hot swap, hot rebuild, hot spare, and hot GROW. (I will believe that when I see it) $1100 plus cost of drives. Units like this were in the $2500-3500 range a year ago. Looks like a good time to get into RAID5.
I will probably be ordering one of those later this week, and plan on breaking my mirrors and stuffing five 250's in there. Should be nice.
I'm no audiophile so I can't speak for the SNR but I will have to argue the battery life. I own an original 5gb iPod that I bought used. After it was better than 4 years old, the battery was down to about 3 hours runtime, so I replaced it. (four years is longer lifespan than most cel phone and cordless phone batteries) Now it gets over 12 hours on a charge. Anyone complaining about the iPod's battery life is misinformed.
is to weed out the majority of the fools. Some of the certs serve only as a paper chain to hold back people that simply are not willing to invest any effort.
I have four certifications, for servicing Apples. They are all required for what I do, and I cannot order parts from Apple without them.
Help Desk Specialist - lets just call this one the "have you ever used a computer in your life?" test. It's that easy. Really. Knowing what a macintosh looks like is purely optional.
Portable Tech: service techniques will help, but are purely optional to pass this test. More important to know differences between the various models like which one uses PC133 and which uses PC333.
Desktop Tech: as with Portable Tech, but sprinkle in some CRT safety that you have to know. Miss even one safety question and you fail. Other than that, still a piece of cake.
Technical Coordinator: Where did THAT truck come from? I thought these were easy tests? OK this one you will have to study for if you want to pass. Don't expect the answers to be in the studyguide either. I swear they really make some of that stuff up on the test.
Those are descriptions of the intial test. The recertifications are done online and are actually quite a measurable amount more difficult. The initial tests seem to be to find out what you know. The recerts are more a case of "what new information can you find, and how FAST can you find it?" You spend several hours keeping your web browser very very busy. It helps to have a friend onhand with another machine to help hunt information down as it is timed. If the test is indeed a measure of your ability to find information, it's more of a "who you know" than "what you know", so I don't see a problem with having an assistant.
I've heard from the PC techs that certs are much the same on their side of the fence. Things like A+ are borderline "you HAVE seen a computer before?" While things like CNE are "uh oh where are my books?" There doesn't seem to be much in between the gap though. Leads me to believe that there are really only two kinds of certs - the pushovers that are there to keep out the riffraff, and the REAL certs that prove you actually know a sizeable chunk about your field.
If you connect to a swarm, you soon get a list of alll peers in the swarm. Why do they need to get log files from the servers when they could have sampled all the swarms at any time and gotten a complete list live? (AFAIK this is what they did with suprnova before it got closed, because ppl got letters from RIAA a few weeks before it was closed)
Only thing I can figure is they are technically inept and can't figure out the protocol so they have to rely on logs? Or there is some information or coalation/summary in the logs they are interested in?