It's not difficult to get any decent steel knife sharp as a razor. Any knife sharpener can do it. The trick is to have a blade that will retain that sharpness for a while. A very cheap knife will lose its sharpness after slicing the first half of a cucumber, better knives last for cutting half a dozen steaks out of raw meat and professional knives need only one re-sharpening per cooking session. If you seldomly prepare larger meals, any _decent_ knife is enough, no matter what the ads are telling. If you earn a living preparing meals, it's an entirely different matter, though. You'd probably go crazy with knives and sharpening stones through the course of a day:)
One more thing for households: -do not clean your good knives in a dishwasher, stainless steel cannot retain edges well enough, so good knives are invariably more prone to stains. -rinse immediately after using them, especially after cutting fruits. A sharp edge is an infinitely thin part of metal that is not really resistant to even mild acids. Avoid spilling Coca Cola on them for the same reason:). Using different knives for meat, vegetables and fruits is recommended: meat needs sharpness and doesn't contain acids to eat away the blade - fruits may or may not need incredible sharpness, so you could do with a more stain-resistant knife (less sharp) or a smaller knife made of less resistant steel (sharp but cheap = expendable) -don't store them in a drawer or box, use a magnetic holding bar mounted on a wall or a wooden "quiver" instead. Many hard tools with vulnerable edges thrown together damage each other when their container is moved. , -don't sharpen them too much, but sharpen them regularly. The sharp edge isn't simply sheared off through usage, it's folded to the side instead. A sharpening stone brings it up again and hones off wear. If you don't sharpen it, microscopic cracks form and increase edge corrosion plus you need more force driving the knife through the material, increasing shear stress on the folded edge, eventually tearing off parts of it.
then they'll froze in horror: UPC/EAN barcodes use symbol "6" as a designator for stop, end and block separator. That way "6" is never used as a numerical part or "payload" in the code - it exists only in the coded stripe form: (6)block1(6)block2(6)
As todays barcodes consist of 2 blocks, practically every barcode carries the "6-6-6" on it.
Same thing: the inventors tried to avoid any "six"="sex"-references and "*666*"-occurances. Of course this means every product bears the mark of the beast as described in the bible meaning the end is near.
No joke, try to find a human-readable number 6 on a barcode:)
...then tell me: who is going to buy your products or services?
It's like many fishermen living off one limited supply of fish in a lake: for each fisherman, it maybe better to bring home as much fish as they can. For all fishermen combined this would mean a dire future.
This miraculous thought is summarized under "Shadow of the future" in philosophical theories. - "Exploiting good for one and for short terms, exploiting disastrous for all and for long terms."
100% efficient production from all producers mean 0% profit margins...
Imagine you are exceptionally competent and exceptionally lucky and you are the last one whose job is being exported: any ideas of how you'll sell anything you produce?
Free markets only work on scarce resources - often heard but true. And the employment market is anything but scarce, as potential employees are abundant in every known profession.
Every job could be exported to low paid, but highly qualified people of the third world. If these countries cannot build up a high level of income and prosperity, meaning high wages in relation to consumer goods prices, they will never be able to buy any of the goods the first world is buying today. So you can exhaust your market if you don't build up high level incomes to sustain your businesses in a decade from now.
You should see a difference between real efficiency and simple economic vampirism (aka greed).
Take for example the sport shoe market: nearly 95% of all sneakers from nike et al. are made in very poor countries, in low paid sweatshops - manufactured and transported for maybe 4-10 dollars a pair, sold for 100 and more. This cannot be sustained forever, sooner or later either your sweatshops revolt and demand higher wages (won't happen anytime soon) or your target consumers have no more money to spend. (assuming other industries take a similar approach in business practices)
Plug that usb stick in, wait 3 secs, mount/dev/usbX/mnt/usb-disk and you're set. Do all file transfer work, then umount/mnt/usb-disk and remove that thing.
I used a properly patched Redhat 9 and it worked extremely easy. I used a no-name generic usb-stick with the lowest price tag I could find.
The only quirk was a "device busy"-bug that occured sometimes so the filesystem could not be cleanly unmounted. This was because some subsystems of Nautilus or any other filemananger component did not release the filesystem lock properly when closing its windows and the force-unmount had no effect.
It was annoying, since the usb-mass-storage driver is at kernel level and the usb-device still existed after "forcefully" removing that damn key from the slot and requiring a reboot when one wished to use that key again.
However, none of these problems occured when using console access only on this usb-stick (pure console or text-mode filemanager, mc etc.) so I guess it's not the usb-part of the system that is buggy.
The German Autobahn is unlimited at numerous sections. You can actually drive as fast as your car can go, as fast your bravery and the traffic situation can sustain. This covers about 30-40% of all Autobahn-km and there are sections where the road is virtually a free racing track because of very low traffic. (Especially the newly built Autobahns in rural parts of former east Germany, most notably the infamous "A20" 150km north of Berlin)
This is commonly seen as the German equivalent to "keep and bear arms", at least in risk vs. fun/freedom ratio. Except it's not written in the constitution and does not protect our civil liberties:)
Propaganda aside, the government regularly tries but fails on public outrage to generally limit Autobahn-speeds so we hope this will be here for some time to come...
Cut a fitting piece of duct tape (or transparent plastic tape, found in any office on the northern hemisphere). Put it under the mouse, on the feet, with one stripe covering two feet (x-axis), one above, one below the center and there you go ready for high speed mousing with full accuracy.
And here's the catch: if it accumulates junk from the desk and loses that comfortable feel, add another layer of tape or replace the original tape. You can easily stack more than a dozen layers without a notable difference in mouse feeling. That way you always have a perfectly sliding mouse.
Hardcore gamers go even further: they use the tape and silicone or PTFE-spray (teflon) in small doses - works WONDERS, I tell you...
Here's the clickable German link and here's the translation:
The explanations for the blackout in the USA and Canada were rather incomplete: Lightning supposedly struck a powerplant at the Niagara falls. Following this, the electrical grid collapsed in numerous states.
Nationwide, the connections of a powerplant to the power grid are controlled by a central Grid-Center, to prevent these failures. Normally, it ensures that single regions are quickly disconnected in case of emergency [short circuit, lightning strike etc.] so that the other powerplants can continue as normal. But this time, any protections failed. Resulting from this, the load on the other plants increased, so that they in turn were disconnected as well due to overload, leaving parts of the US without power. Why the measures to prevent a complete failure not worked is still unclear.
Our investigations [Heinz Heise Verlag, publisher of security and IT-news] uncovered the following coincidence: The failed Niagara plant belongs to National Grid USA. This power company is mentioned as a reference customer by Northern Dynamics. This firm calls themselves the "Home of the OPC Experts" and offer a range of products that use OPC for communication with control- and measurement-systems.
OPC stands for "OLE for Process Control" and uses Microsoft's COM/DCOM-Model. This is exactly the technology with the security hole exploited by the W32.Blaster-worm. In a subnet with the worm active, (as enduser got to know at their desktop PCs rebooting regularly) the DCOM-interface fails on unpatched systems and therefore the OPC-system is unavailable, too.
OPC is used for the coupling of so-called SCADA-systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), that are employed by power plants. Process data is exchanged between a data center and one or more telemetric sensors. [...]
Because National Grid USA was unavailable for a statement, we can't help but ask the following questions:
- What is the exact usage of OPC at National Grid USA?
- Were there problems with OPC at the time of the blackout? If yes, do they are connected with the W32.Blaster-worm?
Further references mentioned by the "OPCExperts" Northern Dynamics are among others General Electric, Siemens, ABB and the european center for nuclear research (CERN). All this requires investigations.
Now it will be digital media content. Insignificant little commodities expose a serious flaw in the system and after some pressure, the "consumer" freak out and begin to fight for their individual rights. Where's the difference? Hope it happens sooner than later. Will we have a CD-Party lately?
They escape one matrix after the other, but since there is no end, they could also stop trying to escape. The motto "stop trying, do it" (or "stop wanting, you have everything") may be realised, when one of the matrices is like paradise. It is not real, it is an illusion like everything else, but life is 100% comfortable there, so you could not improve anything by escaping further outward. This would coincide with the buddhist spirit in these films, since it's all revolving around not wanting too much and just being "in the right world and be happy with it". So in the end, one might find out, that the whole human history is just not real and the only thing the humans can do is head back to paradise.
Compare this to the movie "Dark City" - they even got a character playing a role resembling the architect in it. And they break the containment of their minds just to realise that they are just on a kind of plane in space heading nowhere. But since they can alter the reality in that container, they make up an ultra-comfortable kind of illusion and start enjoying it.
Perhaps this is the message the Wachowski Bros. would like to bring us: Even if we cannot improve our world more, it could be a hell of a festival or everything else we ever dream of.
Methinks these layered Matrices that resemble an onion skin could be more of a kind of security system.
Overly philosophically speaking, it may be, that the machines have no possibility to really innovate. (Which is why they just copied the 20th century for the "inner" matrix...) It could be, that because they have no soul, they are unable to get ahead their creators, the humans. (Slightly shown by Morpheus, who told Neo, that he could beat them all because they are restricted by fundamental physics.)
So if the machines have no real chance of keeping the humans captured, IF these humans really want to escape. (Fitting in to the notion of the film, that everything is possible if we believe in it) the layers of the matrix are like a rendundant system. The humans can break out of every matrix if they just try hard enough, so it is only logical to implement a kind of fall-back-option for this 1% escapists. The "next" matrix seems like the real world to those and so you break their will to escape further, just because they think they've already done so. It gives you some time to catch these before they find out the "real" depth of the "rabbit hole".
If each matrix catches 99% of the population, you only need x matrices to catch all and to reduce escape probabilities to near-zero. Plus, it adds the ability to bend the outer matrices in case of an emergency or updates without touching the inner ones much like the layer models of our computer models. (Think of OSI-layers)
This was thought before in one of the famous StarTrek - Next Generation episodes called "Ship in a bottle" where the Enterprise crew creates a virtual Enterprise with a virtual holodeck within another virtual holodeck of another virtual Enterprise (all within the "real" holodeck of course) to fool Moriarty.
And it was reality some centuries ago when cities and castles were surrounded by walls. The biggest ones had multiple walls around them, one to slow attackers down and one to kill the slowed invaders down one by one. Rich castles had then multiple "walled cells" of space within the inner wall, so any attacker had to breach wall after wall to get to the kings chamber or water reservoir. If they did not forget to close the "Kerkaporta", they'd be safe...
The incredibly sophisticated mp3-technology fits 15h of music onto a single cd-r. Pretty neat, isn't it?:) - And these players are truly affordable right now (at least here in Europe) and still going down in price, I cannot imagine why anyone with a pc/mac at home would want anything else to have in his car. Sound quality is not an issue here, since a) the car engine is way too loud for real hi-fi sound or b) you could pump up the bitrate if you got an hybrid/electro car:)
15h of music with album or disc-wide random play and instant song change. Any old 6 or 10 cd disc changer looks medieval compared to this. Heck, and they even got new MP3-CD Changers!, so you can have 10x 15h of music. On CD-RW if you like, so crappy always-skip songs can be replaced by something better.
I'm aware of the possibility to build tiny notebook HDs into car stereos. But I strongly dislike the notion of having an oh so delicate component in my car that is very sensible to sudden shocks, in fact instantly and totally ruined if something goes wrong - we got potholes the size of texas here on our streets in Germany and it's going worse every winter. Besides, they got a hefty price tag and I don't have any ideas about how to transfer x GB of mp3's to my car other than carrying home the whole unit and hook it on the network. So it has no acceptable price / damageability or usability-ratio (if my friends are driving with me and got their favorite cd, it couldn't be played) - so I recommend MP3-CD players. Ok, they are not quite techy, don't run on linux and don't (yet?) play.ogg-files. But they are certainly more sturdy than a brittle harddisk and with a price starting from as low as 110euros / ~110 usd at our favority discounter (no-name, but incl. id3-tag support, antiskip and "hibernate"-mode to start the exact second where you left) nothing can beat it as yet.
Megalomaniac as I am, I can't wait to see MP3-DVD players emerging. They are already building car stereos with cd-rom components, hence the problem with some copy protection schemes with them, so a DVD-version could be feasible. ~50h of mp3-music on one disc, not even counting the possible savings thanks to more advanced audio codecs. Holy shit, just dare to think of 10x MP3-DVD changers... (again, mostly traditional technology put together with already available extras) - Ok, now you can go on complaining about crappy FM radio. With even my simple 15h 1-cd setup I got more variety than most of the "contemporary pop"-stations - with an 10x mp3-DVD-changer I'd beat any radio station variety anytime.
"In this case, we're talking about compensation for the damage the Anti Piracy Group claims its members have suffered. It's the courts that decide the amount of compensation to be paid due to copyright infringement, not the victim." said Martin von Haller Groenbaek, a Danish attorney specialising in IT law. - emphasis mine -
I would hold on to this point. While the MPAA/RIAA can hack, whack or kill any copyright-offending citizen in the USA without needing to bypass stupid anachronistic hurdles placed by the nostalgic constitution, such as legal defense, courts, a fair judge or even a hearing of the suspect, its not the same in other places of the world.
Accept this or face a massive bill for compensation of headaches reading your presumably totally wrong reply!:) - If you find self-defense actions like this acceptable, fine. But don't expect the world to be a better place afterwards. Be prepared for MS suing you to death because of compensation fees for bad-mouthing their cashcow-product. Hehe
This reminds me of that cool game Syndicate, We aren't that far away anymore (Of course it was pirated, but sadly it didn't run under anything but pure DOS)
linux offers excellent software raid technology at no cost
while most raid controllers/mobo-chips allow only raid 0/1, linux allows for 0,1,5,0+1 in all standard distributions.
I would recommend raid 5 for all personal uses, as its efficiency is considerably higher than mirroring. (and 100% secure for one failed drive, though)
I did that last month, got myself a cheap mobo with integrated ide-raid (for the purpose of 2 additional IDE-channels, so that one failed drive won't stop the system & better performance through 3 different udma-100 connections) - and then 3 identical drives, together with an intermediate cheap duron. (~1GHz). while the desktop pc stays untouched and free from 3 additional heat sources (and on your OS of choice) while the important data is safe on the raid server, accessible over the lan. of course there is a tradeoff between transfer speed (100mbit is not much) and security, but in a personal environment, the typical bulk data is videos, mp3's and backup data, those can be handled with ease when using 100mbit ethernet. - one can even start his programs from there, half-life as an example takes longer to load on an 500MHz athlon with local drive than on an xp1800+ from the network share, but for performance sake, its no real alternative to local storage.
but after all, you get a backup solution for less than 300$/, that can store a lot of music/video data, with comfortable interface and you'll never have to worry about backup anymore. if a drive fails: shutdown the server, whine a bit, replace the drive, power up again and move on to work/fun, while the raid-subsystem resyncs the new drive (data stays accesible throughout that process, just with a performance decrease for ~2 hours till the drive is fully synced).
for more speed or capacity, take larger disks instead of the proposed 80gb (but that were the most cost/capicity-efficient models at the moment) or use gigabit ethernet.
and for the paranoid or criminal users: add an usb-keychain disc containing a 10mb keyfile for encryption of the disc array. if police/MIB/"they" come to seize the property, take away the small usb-plug and hide it...
possible sitation: I own the original, but I keep losing, I'm getting totally 0wned by everyone except grandma.
the question: is it because I have lousy gaming skills or because my cd-rom does not support the particular isses of that particular copy protection?
the comments above suggest, that secuROM et al have the habit of breaking the game for the legitimate owners. for games like NWN or UT2003, you at least notice there's something fishy with your original you paid for. with FADE it's hard to tell. such schemes stink. policeware is crap. scam one person and he will not buy something from you again. repeat until customers=0. exit().
2 cds in the package, equally usable for multiplayer, two of us had them, we were 4, so everyone was happy, we played till the mouses died. then the extra mission set came out, only one cd, allowing only the one with the cd in the drive to play the extra maps, units, music... but no one wanted to buy 4 cds at ~15$ each for a game that we already played in excess. cd burners weren't cheap or avail at that time (dunno), harddisk-space was limited (most had 560mb hd or smaller). so we shared the cd over the lan and used the network drive via game.exe -cd x:\ - that worked, but we had to start the game (not the actual match) at different times, so that the cdrom does not stutter back and forth trying to serve 4 concurrent read attempts. every game start loaded some small files and had to be in synch, so we were out of luck there, but albeit slow, it worked. then someone got his 1gig drive and could make a full backup. but the game was uninteresting quite before that time.
the best one we made was the drive-sharing trick used to get the quake full version. a friend of us had bought the game but wouldnt let us have a copy:) - but he was kind enough to install the shareware-version on one pc. the sw-version was on the original cd and you know what's coming: while one of us kept the owner busy, installed and played the shareware for testing, i silently sat behind my pc, pretending to make something inconspicous while windows copied the original full version quake off the shared cd-rom. since quake had a long only-hd activity unpacking-setup, nobody noticed any slowdown in cd-access.
no much hack, but when we were kids, we were happy like nothing.:)
the demo actually contains four full sized maps. two for deathmatch/team deathmatch, one for bombing run and one for ctf. hey, and these are four rather large maps with a lot of textures. and they couldn't cut down on size, complexity or texture diversity, since it would not represent the real game for the über-hardware folks.
muahaha, that is the best crack that i have ever heard of. if that really works, the people that added the copy protection should be fired immediately.
that is not called tax here, its called "sewage disposal fee". its collected via the fresh water supply, so if you consume 1 cubic metre fresh water, the water works makes you pay 5 eur for that AND 7.5 eur for the removal of said fresh water afterwards. so one counter for the water is sufficient to bill both.
but the worst thing is: the county officials here are flying the cities, making photos of the buildings and then calculate the area of sealed soil. for all square meters of sealed soil the owner must pay sewage fees for the RAINWATER that flows in the sewage system. so you pay sewage fee once as a part of your actually used fresh water AND for the amount of rainwater you direct of your roof into the sewage. if you collect the rain water into small tanks to water your plants you have to PROVE that to the officials.
If one of my friends wants to buy a new SUV from Ford and I manage to make him believe that these SUVs do horrors to our environment and he buys a Bike instead,
I have caused ONE person to not buy a car from Ford, and Ford has been damaged by EXACTLY that one car. QED.
There is a small but significant difference between stealing a car or grape and copying a cd causing a lost sale.
Difference:
Cars and grapes are physical products, they are (more or less) rare and you cause direct damage to the former owner of the grape or the car.
CDs and DVDs represent virtual goods, they are available in unlimited numbers (almost, as they need a physical representation i.e. acrylic in case of the cds). As this is not about plain old shoplifting of cds, you do not steal a physical object. You could cause (at max) one lost sale. You do not hurt anyones wallet, you just prevent someone from making money.
So you do not steal a thing, you are an obstacle in the way of the profit. Thats a big difference I think.
Preventing some company from making money is at the same level as loitering drunk before the supermarket begging for money - it scares the customers away or like protesting before the shell/ford/GM building demanding the end of SUVs and global warmth caused by CO2 - scares customers away.
So please don't be too serious about "stealing" when you mean "copying". you only affect potential sales, in the end its a lot like greenpeace does with car, fuel and fur sales. If they scare all the potential car buyers about the ecological desaster of SUVs, ford doesn't sell that much explorers, causing them to stumble over the R&D costs of it.
there are two possibilities for your own programs with palladium (or any other OS-level DRM)
a) you need a license or a security certificate from microsoft, verisign etc. to run an.exe compiled by YOU on YOUR computer.
not very likely, as users will rage in protest. no one can ever sell an OS that does restrict the usage of own self-programmed.exe's. never. old programs programmed before the OS-level DRM would not work, and "protection" from ALL my own programs is ridiculous and will not be reality.
as a) is useless, we come to
b) all programs compiled on host computer are allowed to run..exe's from someone else have to be validated with a license, but those programmed and compiled on this host are allowed. the maximum level a DRM-system could ever go. problem here: deCSS code is publicly available. no matter how hard MPAA strives, one cannot remove a 2KB textfile from the whole world. crackers will start publishing their programs in source code. maybe they obfuscate it, so the code can hardly be "stolen" by the other warez-groups, and every windows-user has an open-source GCC-port and just compiles the evil programs he downloaded in source code off the net. result: every user can execute every piece of code on its own system. users share illegal code instead of illegal binaries. DRM is useless.
given fast, automated compilers and some getting used-to one probably won't notice any significant difference between downloading dvdripper.exe and dvdripper.c.zip anymore. so what's the point of OS-level DRM?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to dismiss point 2):
:)
:). Using different knives for meat, vegetables and fruits is recommended: meat needs sharpness and doesn't contain acids to eat away the blade - fruits may or may not need incredible sharpness, so you could do with a more stain-resistant knife (less sharp) or a smaller knife made of less resistant steel (sharp but cheap = expendable)
Knife hardness == edge retaining
It's not difficult to get any decent steel knife sharp as a razor. Any knife sharpener can do it. The trick is to have a blade that will retain that sharpness for a while. A very cheap knife will lose its sharpness after slicing the first half of a cucumber, better knives last for cutting half a dozen steaks out of raw meat and professional knives need only one re-sharpening per cooking session. If you seldomly prepare larger meals, any _decent_ knife is enough, no matter what the ads are telling. If you earn a living preparing meals, it's an entirely different matter, though. You'd probably go crazy with knives and sharpening stones through the course of a day
One more thing for households:
-do not clean your good knives in a dishwasher, stainless steel cannot retain edges well enough, so good knives are invariably more prone to stains.
-rinse immediately after using them, especially after cutting fruits. A sharp edge is an infinitely thin part of metal that is not really resistant to even mild acids. Avoid spilling Coca Cola on them for the same reason
-don't store them in a drawer or box, use a magnetic holding bar mounted on a wall or a wooden "quiver" instead. Many hard tools with vulnerable edges thrown together damage each other when their container is moved. ,
-don't sharpen them too much, but sharpen them regularly. The sharp edge isn't simply sheared off through usage, it's folded to the side instead. A sharpening stone brings it up again and hones off wear. If you don't sharpen it, microscopic cracks form and increase edge corrosion plus you need more force driving the knife through the material, increasing shear stress on the folded edge, eventually tearing off parts of it.
then they'll froze in horror: UPC/EAN barcodes use symbol "6" as a designator for stop, end and block separator. That way "6" is never used as a numerical part or "payload" in the code - it exists only in the coded stripe form: (6)block1(6)block2(6)
:)
:)
As todays barcodes consist of 2 blocks, practically every barcode carries the "6-6-6" on it.
Same thing: the inventors tried to avoid any "six"="sex"-references and "*666*"-occurances. Of course this means every product bears the mark of the beast as described in the bible meaning the end is near.
No joke, try to find a human-readable number 6 on a barcode
Harrr harr the end is nigh!!!1!!!11
...then tell me: who is going to buy your products or services?
It's like many fishermen living off one limited supply of fish in a lake: for each fisherman, it maybe better to bring home as much fish as they can. For all fishermen combined this would mean a dire future.
This miraculous thought is summarized under "Shadow of the future" in philosophical theories. - "Exploiting good for one and for short terms, exploiting disastrous for all and for long terms."
100% efficient production from all producers mean 0% profit margins...
Imagine you are exceptionally competent and exceptionally lucky and you are the last one whose job is being exported: any ideas of how you'll sell anything you produce?
Free markets only work on scarce resources - often heard but true. And the employment market is anything but scarce, as potential employees are abundant in every known profession.
Every job could be exported to low paid, but highly qualified people of the third world. If these countries cannot build up a high level of income and prosperity, meaning high wages in relation to consumer goods prices, they will never be able to buy any of the goods the first world is buying today. So you can exhaust your market if you don't build up high level incomes to sustain your businesses in a decade from now.
You should see a difference between real efficiency and simple economic vampirism (aka greed).
Take for example the sport shoe market: nearly 95% of all sneakers from nike et al. are made in very poor countries, in low paid sweatshops - manufactured and transported for maybe 4-10 dollars a pair, sold for 100 and more. This cannot be sustained forever, sooner or later either your sweatshops revolt and demand higher wages (won't happen anytime soon) or your target consumers have no more money to spend. (assuming other industries take a similar approach in business practices)
av.com search for kernel note: sponsored sites first, half of the sites CRAP
google search note: 20% crap, no sponsored links
msn.com search note: 100% crap, kernel.org does NOT show up - useless
search msn.DE (!) note: 60% crap, but kernel.org is FIRST entry. - political corrections are only made in the us-website
Plug that usb stick in, wait 3 secs, mount /dev/usbX /mnt/usb-disk and you're set. Do all file transfer work, then umount /mnt/usb-disk and remove that thing.
I used a properly patched Redhat 9 and it worked extremely easy. I used a no-name generic usb-stick with the lowest price tag I could find.
The only quirk was a "device busy"-bug that occured sometimes so the filesystem could not be cleanly unmounted. This was because some subsystems of Nautilus or any other filemananger component did not release the filesystem lock properly when closing its windows and the force-unmount had no effect.
It was annoying, since the usb-mass-storage driver is at kernel level and the usb-device still existed after "forcefully" removing that damn key from the slot and requiring a reboot when one wished to use that key again.
However, none of these problems occured when using console access only on this usb-stick (pure console or text-mode filemanager, mc etc.) so I guess it's not the usb-part of the system that is buggy.
The German Autobahn is unlimited at numerous sections. You can actually drive as fast as your car can go, as fast your bravery and the traffic situation can sustain. This covers about 30-40% of all Autobahn-km and there are sections where the road is virtually a free racing track because of very low traffic. (Especially the newly built Autobahns in rural parts of former east Germany, most notably the infamous "A20" 150km north of Berlin)
:)
This is commonly seen as the German equivalent to "keep and bear arms", at least in risk vs. fun/freedom ratio. Except it's not written in the constitution and does not protect our civil liberties
Propaganda aside, the government regularly tries but fails on public outrage to generally limit Autobahn-speeds so we hope this will be here for some time to come...
Cut a fitting piece of duct tape (or transparent plastic tape, found in any office on the northern hemisphere). Put it under the mouse, on the feet, with one stripe covering two feet (x-axis), one above, one below the center and there you go ready for high speed mousing with full accuracy.
And here's the catch: if it accumulates junk from the desk and loses that comfortable feel, add another layer of tape or replace the original tape. You can easily stack more than a dozen layers without a notable difference in mouse feeling. That way you always have a perfectly sliding mouse.
Hardcore gamers go even further: they use the tape and silicone or PTFE-spray (teflon) in small doses - works WONDERS, I tell you...
Here's the clickable German link and here's the translation:
The explanations for the blackout in the USA and Canada were rather incomplete: Lightning supposedly struck a powerplant at the Niagara falls. Following this, the electrical grid collapsed in numerous states.
Nationwide, the connections of a powerplant to the power grid are controlled by a central Grid-Center, to prevent these failures. Normally, it ensures that single regions are quickly disconnected in case of emergency [short circuit, lightning strike etc.] so that the other powerplants can continue as normal. But this time, any protections failed. Resulting from this, the load on the other plants increased, so that they in turn were disconnected as well due to overload, leaving parts of the US without power. Why the measures to prevent a complete failure not worked is still unclear.
Our investigations [Heinz Heise Verlag, publisher of security and IT-news] uncovered the following coincidence: The failed Niagara plant belongs to National Grid USA. This power company is mentioned as a reference customer by Northern Dynamics. This firm calls themselves the "Home of the OPC Experts" and offer a range of products that use OPC for communication with control- and measurement-systems.
OPC stands for "OLE for Process Control" and uses Microsoft's COM/DCOM-Model. This is exactly the technology with the security hole exploited by the W32.Blaster-worm. In a subnet with the worm active, (as enduser got to know at their desktop PCs rebooting regularly) the DCOM-interface fails on unpatched systems and therefore the OPC-system is unavailable, too.
OPC is used for the coupling of so-called SCADA-systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), that are employed by power plants. Process data is exchanged between a data center and one or more telemetric sensors. [...]
Because National Grid USA was unavailable for a statement, we can't help but ask the following questions:
- What is the exact usage of OPC at National Grid USA?
- Were there problems with OPC at the time of the blackout? If yes, do they are connected with the W32.Blaster-worm?
Further references mentioned by the "OPCExperts" Northern Dynamics are among others General Electric, Siemens, ABB and the european center for nuclear research (CERN). All this requires investigations.
Now it will be digital media content. Insignificant little commodities expose a serious flaw in the system and after some pressure, the "consumer" freak out and begin to fight for their individual rights. Where's the difference? Hope it happens sooner than later. Will we have a CD-Party lately?
They escape one matrix after the other, but since there is no end, they could also stop trying to escape. The motto "stop trying, do it" (or "stop wanting, you have everything") may be realised, when one of the matrices is like paradise. It is not real, it is an illusion like everything else, but life is 100% comfortable there, so you could not improve anything by escaping further outward. This would coincide with the buddhist spirit in these films, since it's all revolving around not wanting too much and just being "in the right world and be happy with it". So in the end, one might find out, that the whole human history is just not real and the only thing the humans can do is head back to paradise.
Compare this to the movie "Dark City" - they even got a character playing a role resembling the architect in it. And they break the containment of their minds just to realise that they are just on a kind of plane in space heading nowhere. But since they can alter the reality in that container, they make up an ultra-comfortable kind of illusion and start enjoying it.
Perhaps this is the message the Wachowski Bros. would like to bring us: Even if we cannot improve our world more, it could be a hell of a festival or everything else we ever dream of.
Methinks these layered Matrices that resemble an onion skin could be more of a kind of security system.
Overly philosophically speaking, it may be, that the machines have no possibility to really innovate. (Which is why they just copied the 20th century for the "inner" matrix...) It could be, that because they have no soul, they are unable to get ahead their creators, the humans. (Slightly shown by Morpheus, who told Neo, that he could beat them all because they are restricted by fundamental physics.)
So if the machines have no real chance of keeping the humans captured, IF these humans really want to escape. (Fitting in to the notion of the film, that everything is possible if we believe in it) the layers of the matrix are like a rendundant system. The humans can break out of every matrix if they just try hard enough, so it is only logical to implement a kind of fall-back-option for this 1% escapists. The "next" matrix seems like the real world to those and so you break their will to escape further, just because they think they've already done so. It gives you some time to catch these before they find out the "real" depth of the "rabbit hole".
If each matrix catches 99% of the population, you only need x matrices to catch all and to reduce escape probabilities to near-zero. Plus, it adds the ability to bend the outer matrices in case of an emergency or updates without touching the inner ones much like the layer models of our computer models. (Think of OSI-layers)
This was thought before in one of the famous StarTrek - Next Generation episodes called "Ship in a bottle" where the Enterprise crew creates a virtual Enterprise with a virtual holodeck within another virtual holodeck of another virtual Enterprise (all within the "real" holodeck of course) to fool Moriarty.
And it was reality some centuries ago when cities and castles were surrounded by walls. The biggest ones had multiple walls around them, one to slow attackers down and one to kill the slowed invaders down one by one. Rich castles had then multiple "walled cells" of space within the inner wall, so any attacker had to breach wall after wall to get to the kings chamber or water reservoir. If they did not forget to close the "Kerkaporta", they'd be safe...
The incredibly sophisticated mp3-technology fits 15h of music onto a single cd-r. Pretty neat, isn't it? :) - And these players are truly affordable right now (at least here in Europe) and still going down in price, I cannot imagine why anyone with a pc/mac at home would want anything else to have in his car. Sound quality is not an issue here, since a) the car engine is way too loud for real hi-fi sound or b) you could pump up the bitrate if you got an hybrid/electro car :)
.ogg-files. But they are certainly more sturdy than a brittle harddisk and with a price starting from as low as 110euros / ~110 usd at our favority discounter (no-name, but incl. id3-tag support, antiskip and "hibernate"-mode to start the exact second where you left) nothing can beat it as yet.
15h of music with album or disc-wide random play and instant song change. Any old 6 or 10 cd disc changer looks medieval compared to this. Heck, and they even got new MP3-CD Changers!, so you can have 10x 15h of music. On CD-RW if you like, so crappy always-skip songs can be replaced by something better.
I'm aware of the possibility to build tiny notebook HDs into car stereos. But I strongly dislike the notion of having an oh so delicate component in my car that is very sensible to sudden shocks, in fact instantly and totally ruined if something goes wrong - we got potholes the size of texas here on our streets in Germany and it's going worse every winter. Besides, they got a hefty price tag and I don't have any ideas about how to transfer x GB of mp3's to my car other than carrying home the whole unit and hook it on the network. So it has no acceptable price / damageability or usability-ratio (if my friends are driving with me and got their favorite cd, it couldn't be played) - so I recommend MP3-CD players. Ok, they are not quite techy, don't run on linux and don't (yet?) play
Megalomaniac as I am, I can't wait to see MP3-DVD players emerging. They are already building car stereos with cd-rom components, hence the problem with some copy protection schemes with them, so a DVD-version could be feasible. ~50h of mp3-music on one disc, not even counting the possible savings thanks to more advanced audio codecs. Holy shit, just dare to think of 10x MP3-DVD changers... (again, mostly traditional technology put together with already available extras) - Ok, now you can go on complaining about crappy FM radio. With even my simple 15h 1-cd setup I got more variety than most of the "contemporary pop"-stations - with an 10x mp3-DVD-changer I'd beat any radio station variety anytime.
"In this case, we're talking about compensation for the damage the Anti Piracy Group claims its members have suffered. It's the courts that decide the amount of compensation to be paid due to copyright infringement, not the victim." said Martin von Haller Groenbaek, a Danish attorney specialising in IT law. - emphasis mine -
:) - If you find self-defense actions like this acceptable, fine. But don't expect the world to be a better place afterwards. Be prepared for MS suing you to death because of compensation fees for bad-mouthing their cashcow-product. Hehe
I would hold on to this point. While the MPAA/RIAA can hack, whack or kill any copyright-offending citizen in the USA without needing to bypass stupid anachronistic hurdles placed by the nostalgic constitution, such as legal defense, courts, a fair judge or even a hearing of the suspect, its not the same in other places of the world.
Accept this or face a massive bill for compensation of headaches reading your presumably totally wrong reply!
This reminds me of that cool game Syndicate, We aren't that far away anymore (Of course it was pirated, but sadly it didn't run under anything but pure DOS)
Hey, I won't have to buy another plane if it crashes. Isn't this great? As an aircraft owner you can save on burials, as pilot, err, you know. :)
In other news, approximated life expectancy of democratic senators just increased by 50%.
linux offers excellent software raid technology at no cost
while most raid controllers/mobo-chips allow only raid 0/1, linux allows for 0,1,5,0+1 in all standard distributions.
I would recommend raid 5 for all personal uses, as its efficiency is considerably higher than mirroring. (and 100% secure for one failed drive, though)
I did that last month, got myself a cheap mobo with integrated ide-raid (for the purpose of 2 additional IDE-channels, so that one failed drive won't stop the system & better performance through 3 different udma-100 connections) - and then 3 identical drives, together with an intermediate cheap duron. (~1GHz). while the desktop pc stays untouched and free from 3 additional heat sources (and on your OS of choice) while the important data is safe on the raid server, accessible over the lan. of course there is a tradeoff between transfer speed (100mbit is not much) and security, but in a personal environment, the typical bulk data is videos, mp3's and backup data, those can be handled with ease when using 100mbit ethernet. - one can even start his programs from there, half-life as an example takes longer to load on an 500MHz athlon with local drive than on an xp1800+ from the network share, but for performance sake, its no real alternative to local storage.
but after all, you get a backup solution for less than 300$/, that can store a lot of music/video data, with comfortable interface and you'll never have to worry about backup anymore. if a drive fails: shutdown the server, whine a bit, replace the drive, power up again and move on to work/fun, while the raid-subsystem resyncs the new drive (data stays accesible throughout that process, just with a performance decrease for ~2 hours till the drive is fully synced).
for more speed or capacity, take larger disks instead of the proposed 80gb (but that were the most cost/capicity-efficient models at the moment) or use gigabit ethernet.
and for the paranoid or criminal users: add an usb-keychain disc containing a 10mb keyfile for encryption of the disc array. if police/MIB/"they" come to seize the property, take away the small usb-plug and hide it...
possible sitation: I own the original, but I keep losing, I'm getting totally 0wned by everyone except grandma.
the question: is it because I have lousy gaming skills or because my cd-rom does not support the particular isses of that particular copy protection?
the comments above suggest, that secuROM et al have the habit of breaking the game for the legitimate owners. for games like NWN or UT2003, you at least notice there's something fishy with your original you paid for. with FADE it's hard to tell. such schemes stink. policeware is crap. scam one person and he will not buy something from you again. repeat until customers=0. exit().
we had our first real lan-parties back then...
:) - but he was kind enough to install the shareware-version on one pc. the sw-version was on the original cd and you know what's coming: while one of us kept the owner busy, installed and played the shareware for testing, i silently sat behind my pc, pretending to make something inconspicous while windows copied the original full version quake off the shared cd-rom. since quake had a long only-hd activity unpacking-setup, nobody noticed any slowdown in cd-access.
:)
2 cds in the package, equally usable for multiplayer, two of us had them, we were 4, so everyone was happy, we played till the mouses died. then the extra mission set came out, only one cd, allowing only the one with the cd in the drive to play the extra maps, units, music... but no one wanted to buy 4 cds at ~15$ each for a game that we already played in excess. cd burners weren't cheap or avail at that time (dunno), harddisk-space was limited (most had 560mb hd or smaller). so we shared the cd over the lan and used the network drive via game.exe -cd x:\ - that worked, but we had to start the game (not the actual match) at different times, so that the cdrom does not stutter back and forth trying to serve 4 concurrent read attempts. every game start loaded some small files and had to be in synch, so we were out of luck there, but albeit slow, it worked. then someone got his 1gig drive and could make a full backup. but the game was uninteresting quite before that time.
the best one we made was the drive-sharing trick used to get the quake full version. a friend of us had bought the game but wouldnt let us have a copy
no much hack, but when we were kids, we were happy like nothing.
the demo actually contains four full sized maps.
two for deathmatch/team deathmatch, one for bombing run and one for ctf.
hey, and these are four rather large maps with a lot of textures.
and they couldn't cut down on size, complexity or texture diversity, since it would not represent the real game for the über-hardware folks.
muahaha, that is the best crack that i have ever heard of.
if that really works, the people that added the copy protection should be fired immediately.
hehe, EXACTLY.
that is not called tax here, its called "sewage disposal fee". its collected via the fresh water supply, so if you consume 1 cubic metre fresh water, the water works makes you pay 5 eur for that AND 7.5 eur for the removal of said fresh water afterwards. so one counter for the water is sufficient to bill both.
but the worst thing is: the county officials here are flying the cities, making photos of the buildings and then calculate the area of sealed soil. for all square meters of sealed soil the owner must pay sewage fees for the RAINWATER that flows in the sewage system. so you pay sewage fee once as a part of your actually used fresh water AND for the amount of rainwater you direct of your roof into the sewage. if you collect the rain water into small tanks to water your plants you have to PROVE that to the officials.
germany is wierd, is it?
If one of my friends wants to buy a new SUV from Ford and I manage to make him believe that these SUVs do horrors to our environment and he buys a Bike instead,
I hope this shows, that your point is moot.
Can you lend me a mod point?
There is a small but significant difference between stealing a car or grape and copying a cd causing a lost sale.
Difference:
Cars and grapes are physical products, they are (more or less) rare and you cause direct damage to the former owner of the grape or the car.
CDs and DVDs represent virtual goods, they are available in unlimited numbers (almost, as they need a physical representation i.e. acrylic in case of the cds). As this is not about plain old shoplifting of cds, you do not steal a physical object. You could cause (at max) one lost sale. You do not hurt anyones wallet, you just prevent someone from making money.
So you do not steal a thing, you are an obstacle in the way of the profit. Thats a big difference I think.
Preventing some company from making money is at the same level as loitering drunk before the supermarket begging for money - it scares the customers away or like protesting before the shell/ford/GM building demanding the end of SUVs and global warmth caused by CO2 - scares customers away.
So please don't be too serious about "stealing" when you mean "copying". you only affect potential sales, in the end its a lot like greenpeace does with car, fuel and fur sales. If they scare all the potential car buyers about the ecological desaster of SUVs, ford doesn't sell that much explorers, causing them to stumble over the R&D costs of it.
Can you lend me a mod point?
there are two possibilities for your own programs with palladium (or any other OS-level DRM)
.exe compiled by YOU on YOUR computer.
.exe's. never. old programs programmed before the OS-level DRM would not work, and "protection" from ALL my own programs is ridiculous and will not be reality.
.exe's from someone else have to be validated with a license, but those programmed and compiled on this host are allowed. the maximum level a DRM-system could ever go. problem here: deCSS code is publicly available. no matter how hard MPAA strives, one cannot remove a 2KB textfile from the whole world. crackers will start publishing their programs in source code. maybe they obfuscate it, so the code can hardly be "stolen" by the other warez-groups, and every windows-user has an open-source GCC-port and just compiles the evil programs he downloaded in source code off the net. result: every user can execute every piece of code on its own system. users share illegal code instead of illegal binaries. DRM is useless.
a) you need a license or a security certificate from microsoft, verisign etc. to run an
not very likely, as users will rage in protest. no one can ever sell an OS that does restrict the usage of own self-programmed
as a) is useless, we come to
b) all programs compiled on host computer are allowed to run.
given fast, automated compilers and some getting used-to one probably won't notice any significant difference between downloading dvdripper.exe and dvdripper.c.zip anymore. so what's the point of OS-level DRM?
# echo "`grep cmd\.exe access_log | wc -l` / `wc -l access_log | sed 's/[^0-9]//g'`" | bc -l .81350976916651386427
that shows very good what is so wrong with linux today.
i don't have no spare gigs on any of my hd's