"Brings a whole new meaning to "Blue Screen of Death", no?
Great, that's all I need; my doctor slips up while I'm on the operating table and he spends the next 5 minutes making motions with his hand as if to hit the "back" button on a web browser.
me: "Something wrong, Doc?" doctor: "No.. at least... I don't think so. It's just that I've never seen a real live patient before; at least not I. R. L."
"Damn, nurse... brain surgery is sooo much easier when you can use two hands!"
nurse: "Doctor! Doctor! Have you ever had experience with this kind of disease?! doctor: "Of course I have! Level 34, just before I grabbed the RailGun."
wife: "Doctor, is my husband... going to die?" doctor: "Nah, if it gets too bad, I'll just pull the plug on the router and it'll look like we lost the connection. Then I'll try again." *doctor smiles while the wife wonders what the hell he's talking about*
How about conspiracy to commit wire fraud? From my little understanding of law (I'm not a lawyer, mind you), the left hand (Ebay) doesn't even have to know what the right hand (fraudulent seller) is doing, so long as they both benefit and Ebay doesn't attempt to stop what is likely illegal activity. The way I see it, the seller should be charged with fraud and conspiracy to commit, and Ebay should be charged with a matching conspiracy to commit for each and every offense.
Any bets on whether they'd rethink their fraud policies in the face of 10,000 charges filed against them?
Attouney General John Ashcroft has made a major announcement on the breakup of a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist cell in the US. Read more below.
- "Earlier today, we stopped an unfolding terrorist plot here in the United States. A group of individuals believed to be cells for Al Qaeda were arrested after several hundred anonymous TIPS. These cells seemed to have once again used the evil internet, source of all evil and the backbone of the "Axis of Evil(r)"; specifically a website going by the name 'slashdot' to come together and plan the destruction of my... I mean our great nation. About 250,000 "enemy combatants" were taken into custody and are currently being housed in an undisclosed location. All appear to be Muslim; extremest; terrorist; evil; doubleplus ungood. Do not let these terrorists win, you must go about your lives as usual, and... just please forget we have these people in custody. Thank you." -
In an unrelated story, the tech industry in the US came to a grinding halt today, as most of America's computer-elites were no-shows at work. No further information is available at this time, and we've been told by unnamed sources to "shut the hell up and quit asking questions" on the topic. We don't expect to bring you more on this topic later in the day... or... ever.
"Jaszi is talking about a November 2001 decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled 3-0 that it was illegal to distribute a DVD-unlocking program called DeCSS.exe."
The "DeCSS.exe" was a hyperlink to a DeCSS W32 executable file.
"~50 CD's over the last few years....where is my $250?"
Well... You can try going to Hilary Rosen, but unless you have proof of purchase for each of those CDs, she'll likely consider them stolen and have you arrested.
"such as moving them to the slowest areas of the drive."
This is exactly what I was talking about doing. As far as speed, I think it's one thing to take into consideration amoung many other factors. While this would be a nice feature, it does no one any good if it kills drive performance, but I agree that the impact can be minimal so long as work is done on optimization. Of course, the optimal solution would be something hardware/firmware based on the drive itself which is able to work according to a standard so long as it's implimented by the file system as well. I also agree that this, like most features, should be made simple to enable/disable. I would probably use this feature, as I will once in a long while delete something I would rather not. Although it's never a system file, nor something I don't have backed up, it'd still be much more conventient to be able to recover it directly from the drive with a few keystrokes. Perhaps a file listing of each file, or even a simple GUI interface to browse deleted-but-recoverable files would be best, as to make the task of data recovery even easier.
Speed optimizations aside, one still must consider security and other things. At least part of the security issue could be addressed by preservation of file permissions, as well as the inclusion of some sort of shredder utility to completely destroy sensitive data (preferably with an option to do so to DoD standards - think it's something like 10 passes). A very simple encryption algorithm could further increase security with deleted data without a serious or noticeable performance hit. Obviously, the more work done, the more of a performance hit is taken, but so long as this is all fully configurable and is reasonably optimized, we shouldn't see any major problems. Instead of integrating this into a single file system, I would suggest an open standard which allows an add-on/upgrade to most widely used file systems. This both encourages the use of open standards, and allows for widescale adoption even at an early stage.
" The part you neglect to mention is the escalation of the undesirable behaviour before you get the desirable behaviour. Even if it would work, things would get a whole lot worse before they ever got better."
Ya know? I think you're onto something here, so I'm going to throw my support behind the chap a bit further up the page who wanted to chop up the spammers and burn 'em on TV. Certainly sounds like a reasonable solution, and hey, it sounds like fun!
"Even with your solution, the file will be deleted eventually (when its blocks get reused)."
There's no solution that offers absolute recoverability 'til the end of time, but we're talking about implementing a system which will allow for maximum data integrity post-deletion without a major performance hit. Moving deleted data to the end of the drive upon deletion seems like a good way to start, especially with larger hard drives available today. The next step would be keep a catalog of sorts, listing a priority index for each deleted file so the file system knows which files to overwrite first when deleted data space needs to be reclaimed for new files. Another user pointed out that such priorities could be established by using an algorithm that looks at access frequency amoung other factors. Assuming you have a 40GB hard drive (small for a new computer), and assuming you use roughly half of that drive at peak usage, this leaves you 20GB of deleted files available for recovery on demand. This could go back months, or even years for some people without seriously hitting your disk performance, as the data currently being used should be at the "front end" of the drive. Obviously, this is a simplistic view of the system that would need to be implemented, and serious issues would still need to be addressed to make it viable; security and performance being two of them, but the fundamentals must be in place before details may be realized.
"As a user I don't push the drives hard enough to notice a difference. I'm not running a high traffic web server, I'm editing documents."
And that's fine, but don't assume that your particular usage is indicative of the vast majority of the masses. I do happen to use my hard drives, often pushing them to the point where the cpu is sitting at 20% waiting for the drive to feed it some data.
"The drive doesn't give a damn what those bits are, it has no concept of full or empty, it just reads and writes where its told. Your filesystem may have issues when you hit 50-80% capacity, but that doesn't have anything to do with the drive."
Well, if you'd like to get technical (as well as snitty), the drive has no "concept" of anything, as that would pre-suppose cognizance. In any event, if you look through any of a number of benchmarks (I personally like HDTach) which may either use a filesystem or not use one to do their work, you'll see that where you're reading/writing on the drive does have an effect on the performance. The filesystem generally cares only in that the fragmentation level tends to be higher at high disk usage, and it becomes increasingly difficult to defragment a drive as the free space dwindles.
I'm not sure what you'd like to call a "typical desktop system", but I can tell you that if you take two systems with identical specs except that one has a 2GB 5400RPM drive with 10MB free, and use it along side another with a 36GB Cheetah X15 with 35GB free space, you'll see a remarkable improvement in many fields, especially games, photo/video/sound editing software, and anything else that requires writes/reads from the hard disk and/or swap file. If you don't think that the performance difference matters most of the time, then I think you ought to send a resume to Redmond, WA, as I'm sure you're just the kind of person they're looking for there.
Re:Possible solution.
on
Undelete In Linux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You run into several problems here. First of all, at the current state of computers, the bottleneck in most machines is the hard disk. What we're doing here is adding additional work for the hard disk, thereby slowing down the computer further. Secondly, by continuing to avoid overwriting data and allowing the drive to fill, you further decrease disk performance. Hard drives generally begin to work more slowly when they become more than half filled, with a more severe and noticeable performance hit at around 80% depending on the drive.
A more viable solution might be to take into account the above suggestions with the added idea of moving the data to the end of the drive during 'deletion' while still marking the space as available; albeit a new class of available which preserves data integrity based upon importance. This saves you from insane fragmentation and lower disk performance, and allows you to continue to maintain data integrity long after deletion. Two tables is again, twice the work, but a modified table which takes deleted information viability into account would certainly be useful. Issues such as security and performance are still in question, however, as well as how to implement such a table along-side existing file systems in such a way as to not break functionality or lose data. Backwards compatability and data security are probably the biggest issues, although preserving file permissions solves half of the security problem. Secure deletion must also be a choice for users eliminating sensitive data who don't want it recovered or viewed ever again.
What do you think about Distributed.net and other distributed computing projects that utilize the internet? At any point during your work before the mid-90's, did you ever invision such a concept as distributed computing over a worldwide inter-network being a viable alternative to expensive supercomputers?
Building on that last question, did you at any time consider the possibility of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against a single host on the inter-network, or against the inter-network as a whole? If so, what, if any safeguards did you consider implementing to protect against such problems?
"Yeah, yeah, shame on us for chipping away at the rights of the poor hard working child pornographers and the little ol' billion dollar telecoms."
Taken without the sarcasm, this would be correct. The lowest and most disgusting members of society still have certain inalienable God-given rights. Do I support them making or distributing their horrific goods? Absolutely positively NOT. But first of all, instead of relying on censurship, how about going after the people who made and maintain the site? How about going after the people who created this crap? I'd be completely willing to support the rights of anyone to post legal content. I would assume that at least some content on these blocked sites passes legal muster. To outright block the ip does a disservice to all affected; and to hide evidence of which sites are blocked is much, much worse. As the good judge said, "Democracies die behind closed doors."
You attacked my posting with irrational blabbering, which does nothing for debate. Unable to attack a point made about a controversial subject, you chose instead to succum to the usual mass hysteria that surrounds this type of subject. A "one-liner" usually referrs to a joke. I use quotes when my own words fail to eloquently articulate my thoughts, especially when the quote comes from someone I respect such as Thomas Jefferson. The time of the person's death is unimportant, and the person sited is nearly as unimportant. What is important is the thought conveyed by the words themselves. You, sir, fail to understand the purpose of language. Before posting about a subject that often solicits emotional responses, take a step back and make sure you're actually forming a rational argument.
It's posts such as this which make me sad that the moderation only goes to 5. It's nice to know some people still have the balls to think and say the tough things. Preach on...
"when the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes." - Earl Warren, "The Law and the Future", Fortune, November 1955, The Public Papers of Chief Justice Earl Warren H. M. christman, Ed. Simon & Schuster, NY 1959
You know what we need here at/. ? A comments box for moderators to put the reason WHY they modded something the way they did. I'm left wondering why on Earth someone modded this as "overrated" at 3, and yet if they tell me, they can't moderate the story and lose that mod point. It would also help meta-moderators to figure out if the mod really was fair or unfair.
Slashdot Mirror
"Brings a whole new meaning to "Blue Screen of Death", no?
Great, that's all I need; my doctor slips up while I'm on the operating table and he spends the next 5 minutes making motions with his hand as if to hit the "back" button on a web browser.
me: "Something wrong, Doc?"
doctor: "No.. at least... I don't think so. It's just that I've never seen a real live patient before; at least not I. R. L."
"Damn, nurse... brain surgery is sooo much easier when you can use two hands!"
nurse: "Doctor! Doctor! Have you ever had experience with this kind of disease?!
doctor: "Of course I have! Level 34, just before I grabbed the RailGun."
wife: "Doctor, is my husband... going to die?"
doctor: "Nah, if it gets too bad, I'll just pull the plug on the router and it'll look like we lost the connection. Then I'll try again."
*doctor smiles while the wife wonders what the hell he's talking about*
How about conspiracy to commit wire fraud? From my little understanding of law (I'm not a lawyer, mind you), the left hand (Ebay) doesn't even have to know what the right hand (fraudulent seller) is doing, so long as they both benefit and Ebay doesn't attempt to stop what is likely illegal activity. The way I see it, the seller should be charged with fraud and conspiracy to commit, and Ebay should be charged with a matching conspiracy to commit for each and every offense.
Any bets on whether they'd rethink their fraud policies in the face of 10,000 charges filed against them?
"I have press credentials at the court, so I was able to take notes during the argument"
Hmmm... press credentials; now why didn't I think of that? Come on inkjet printer, court starts in an hour; let's get a move-on.
Hell, I'd just like to heckle Ashcroft (assuming he's in there) and maybe wear my "Got DeCSS?" t-shirt.
CNN Headline tomorrow...
Breaking News!!!
Attouney General John Ashcroft has made a major announcement on the breakup of a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist cell in the US. Read more below.
-
"Earlier today, we stopped an unfolding terrorist plot here in the United States. A group of individuals believed to be cells for Al Qaeda were arrested after several hundred anonymous TIPS. These cells seemed to have once again used the evil internet, source of all evil and the backbone of the "Axis of Evil(r)"; specifically a website going by the name 'slashdot' to come together and plan the destruction of my... I mean our great nation. About 250,000 "enemy combatants" were taken into custody and are currently being housed in an undisclosed location. All appear to be Muslim; extremest; terrorist; evil; doubleplus ungood. Do not let these terrorists win, you must go about your lives as usual, and... just please forget we have these people in custody. Thank you."
-
In an unrelated story, the tech industry in the US came to a grinding halt today, as most of America's computer-elites were no-shows at work. No further information is available at this time, and we've been told by unnamed sources to "shut the hell up and quit asking questions" on the topic. We don't expect to bring you more on this topic later in the day... or... ever.
"Jaszi is talking about a November 2001 decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled 3-0 that it was illegal to distribute a DVD-unlocking program called DeCSS.exe."
;)
The "DeCSS.exe" was a hyperlink to a DeCSS W32 executable file.
Gee, think he knew...?
Or the ACLU.
Countersue
" What will Bart be writing on the blackboard?"
...
If it's a Hollywood movie?
I will not download pirated movies on Kazaa.
I will not download pirated movies on Kazaa.
I will not download pirated movies on Kazaa.
"~50 CD's over the last few years....where is my $250?"
Well... You can try going to Hilary Rosen, but unless you have proof of purchase for each of those CDs, she'll likely consider them stolen and have you arrested.
Nothing can compete with the power of this new and exciting technology that's about to take off, called... infrared !
"such as moving them to the slowest areas of the drive."
This is exactly what I was talking about doing. As far as speed, I think it's one thing to take into consideration amoung many other factors. While this would be a nice feature, it does no one any good if it kills drive performance, but I agree that the impact can be minimal so long as work is done on optimization. Of course, the optimal solution would be something hardware/firmware based on the drive itself which is able to work according to a standard so long as it's implimented by the file system as well. I also agree that this, like most features, should be made simple to enable/disable. I would probably use this feature, as I will once in a long while delete something I would rather not. Although it's never a system file, nor something I don't have backed up, it'd still be much more conventient to be able to recover it directly from the drive with a few keystrokes. Perhaps a file listing of each file, or even a simple GUI interface to browse deleted-but-recoverable files would be best, as to make the task of data recovery even easier.
Speed optimizations aside, one still must consider security and other things. At least part of the security issue could be addressed by preservation of file permissions, as well as the inclusion of some sort of shredder utility to completely destroy sensitive data (preferably with an option to do so to DoD standards - think it's something like 10 passes). A very simple encryption algorithm could further increase security with deleted data without a serious or noticeable performance hit. Obviously, the more work done, the more of a performance hit is taken, but so long as this is all fully configurable and is reasonably optimized, we shouldn't see any major problems. Instead of integrating this into a single file system, I would suggest an open standard which allows an add-on/upgrade to most widely used file systems. This both encourages the use of open standards, and allows for widescale adoption even at an early stage.
Stable drivers?
When they got back to Earth (after the 6-second flight), did the pilot get a rub-down with the blue goo by the vulcan from Enterprise? :-)
Does this mean that Microsoft will finally lose the trademark on such obsurdly common words as, "office" and "windows" etc?
If not, then I hereby request trademarks for my new products: A(r), An(r), and The(r).
" The part you neglect to mention is the escalation of the undesirable behaviour before you get the desirable behaviour. Even if it would work, things would get a whole lot worse before they ever got better."
Ya know? I think you're onto something here, so I'm going to throw my support behind the chap a bit further up the page who wanted to chop up the spammers and burn 'em on TV. Certainly sounds like a reasonable solution, and hey, it sounds like fun!
From:
Subject: Spam Email
"All your spamboxes are belong to us."
% for(;;) sendmsg()
"Even with your solution, the file will be deleted eventually (when its blocks get reused)."
There's no solution that offers absolute recoverability 'til the end of time, but we're talking about implementing a system which will allow for maximum data integrity post-deletion without a major performance hit. Moving deleted data to the end of the drive upon deletion seems like a good way to start, especially with larger hard drives available today. The next step would be keep a catalog of sorts, listing a priority index for each deleted file so the file system knows which files to overwrite first when deleted data space needs to be reclaimed for new files. Another user pointed out that such priorities could be established by using an algorithm that looks at access frequency amoung other factors. Assuming you have a 40GB hard drive (small for a new computer), and assuming you use roughly half of that drive at peak usage, this leaves you 20GB of deleted files available for recovery on demand. This could go back months, or even years for some people without seriously hitting your disk performance, as the data currently being used should be at the "front end" of the drive. Obviously, this is a simplistic view of the system that would need to be implemented, and serious issues would still need to be addressed to make it viable; security and performance being two of them, but the fundamentals must be in place before details may be realized.
"As a user I don't push the drives hard enough to notice a difference. I'm not running a high traffic web server, I'm editing documents."
And that's fine, but don't assume that your particular usage is indicative of the vast majority of the masses. I do happen to use my hard drives, often pushing them to the point where the cpu is sitting at 20% waiting for the drive to feed it some data.
"The drive doesn't give a damn what those bits are, it has no concept of full or empty, it just reads and writes where its told. Your filesystem may have issues when you hit 50-80% capacity, but that doesn't have anything to do with the drive."
Well, if you'd like to get technical (as well as snitty), the drive has no "concept" of anything, as that would pre-suppose cognizance. In any event, if you look through any of a number of benchmarks (I personally like HDTach) which may either use a filesystem or not use one to do their work, you'll see that where you're reading/writing on the drive does have an effect on the performance. The filesystem generally cares only in that the fragmentation level tends to be higher at high disk usage, and it becomes increasingly difficult to defragment a drive as the free space dwindles.
I'm not sure what you'd like to call a "typical desktop system", but I can tell you that if you take two systems with identical specs except that one has a 2GB 5400RPM drive with 10MB free, and use it along side another with a 36GB Cheetah X15 with 35GB free space, you'll see a remarkable improvement in many fields, especially games, photo/video/sound editing software, and anything else that requires writes/reads from the hard disk and/or swap file. If you don't think that the performance difference matters most of the time, then I think you ought to send a resume to Redmond, WA, as I'm sure you're just the kind of person they're looking for there.
You run into several problems here. First of all, at the current state of computers, the bottleneck in most machines is the hard disk. What we're doing here is adding additional work for the hard disk, thereby slowing down the computer further. Secondly, by continuing to avoid overwriting data and allowing the drive to fill, you further decrease disk performance. Hard drives generally begin to work more slowly when they become more than half filled, with a more severe and noticeable performance hit at around 80% depending on the drive.
A more viable solution might be to take into account the above suggestions with the added idea of moving the data to the end of the drive during 'deletion' while still marking the space as available; albeit a new class of available which preserves data integrity based upon importance. This saves you from insane fragmentation and lower disk performance, and allows you to continue to maintain data integrity long after deletion. Two tables is again, twice the work, but a modified table which takes deleted information viability into account would certainly be useful. Issues such as security and performance are still in question, however, as well as how to implement such a table along-side existing file systems in such a way as to not break functionality or lose data. Backwards compatability and data security are probably the biggest issues, although preserving file permissions solves half of the security problem. Secure deletion must also be a choice for users eliminating sensitive data who don't want it recovered or viewed ever again.
What do you think about Distributed.net and other distributed computing projects that utilize the internet? At any point during your work before the mid-90's, did you ever invision such a concept as distributed computing over a worldwide inter-network being a viable alternative to expensive supercomputers?
Building on that last question, did you at any time consider the possibility of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against a single host on the inter-network, or against the inter-network as a whole? If so, what, if any safeguards did you consider implementing to protect against such problems?
"Yeah, yeah, shame on us for chipping away at the rights of the poor hard working child pornographers and the little ol' billion dollar telecoms."
Taken without the sarcasm, this would be correct. The lowest and most disgusting members of society still have certain inalienable God-given rights. Do I support them making or distributing their horrific goods? Absolutely positively NOT. But first of all, instead of relying on censurship, how about going after the people who made and maintain the site? How about going after the people who created this crap? I'd be completely willing to support the rights of anyone to post legal content. I would assume that at least some content on these blocked sites passes legal muster. To outright block the ip does a disservice to all affected; and to hide evidence of which sites are blocked is much, much worse. As the good judge said, "Democracies die behind closed doors."
You attacked my posting with irrational blabbering, which does nothing for debate. Unable to attack a point made about a controversial subject, you chose instead to succum to the usual mass hysteria that surrounds this type of subject. A "one-liner" usually referrs to a joke. I use quotes when my own words fail to eloquently articulate my thoughts, especially when the quote comes from someone I respect such as Thomas Jefferson. The time of the person's death is unimportant, and the person sited is nearly as unimportant. What is important is the thought conveyed by the words themselves. You, sir, fail to understand the purpose of language. Before posting about a subject that often solicits emotional responses, take a step back and make sure you're actually forming a rational argument.
It's posts such as this which make me sad that the moderation only goes to 5. It's nice to know some people still have the balls to think and say the tough things. Preach on...
"We're not opening a Pandora's box"
"when the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes." - Earl Warren, "The Law and the Future", Fortune, November 1955, The Public Papers of Chief Justice Earl Warren H. M. christman, Ed. Simon & Schuster, NY 1959
>>Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the
>>intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.
>That's only because Bill Gates owns his soul.
See, you think that's funny, but you didn't read the EULA on that hotfix you installed last Thursday, did you Bob...
You know what we need here at /. ? A comments box for moderators to put the reason WHY they modded something the way they did. I'm left wondering why on Earth someone modded this as "overrated" at 3, and yet if they tell me, they can't moderate the story and lose that mod point. It would also help meta-moderators to figure out if the mod really was fair or unfair.