I've had exactly the experience you describe. When there is a hint of trouble, it is necessary to break the mirror and test each hard drive separately.
I wrote the Slashdot story. I've gotten additional information since then:
First, I don't see any evidence of low quality in ECS motherboards. Both ECS and Fry's employees say that the high rate of returns is due to the fact that the low cost attracts people who are very inexperienced at building computers. That seems right to me. An ECS sales representative mentions that Fry's uses ECS motherboards in the computers it builds. The ECS motherboards are suitable for business use. They may not be the best for overclockers or gamers.
I wrote a long letter to Promise Technology Technical Support about the fact that Promise is allowing ECS motherboards with Promise RAID mirroring controlers to be sold without software that is necessary to monitor the health of the mirror. The letter is below, and represents my opinions at the time. Even though the national sales manager of Promise suggested I send the letter, there was no answer.
Below the letter is all information and opinions that I had available at the time.
___________________
TO: Kevin Hong
Promise Technology Technical Support Engineer
Kevin,
Jason Turk told me to write to you about a problem with Elitegroup's
L7VTA Rev. 1.0 motherboard, which includes a Promise RAID controller
chip.
Elitegroup says they have never been provided the FastCheck or PAM
monitoring software for this motherboard. Can you supply monitoring
software that is certified by Promise to work? The software is not on
the CD supplied with the motherboard.
We need not just software that appears to work, we need software that
is certified by Promise Technology to work with this motherboard.
Several people at Promise have told me that the software provided on
the Promise web site for the Promise RAID controller adapter cards may
not work with the OEM controller chips installed on motherboards. I
suspect this is not true, but merely a Promise Technology marketing
scheme. However, we can't risk selling these to our customers and
finding later that there is some hidden serious defect.
Thanks,
Michael Jennings
Futurepower Computer Systems
_______________________________
Complete Information:
So that all the information to resolve this issue is supplied in one
place, I have provided everything that I know and think below:
Some versions of the Elitegroup L7VTA Rev. 1.0 motherboards are being
supplied with Promise Technology's PDC20265R IDE RAID controller.
Elitegroup supplies three of the four elements needed for a RAID
controller. The motherboard and included CD have 1) Promise
Technology's PDC20265R ASIC chip, 2) the latest version of the BIOS, 3)
and the driver software.
However, item 4 is missing. Elitegroup says Promise Technology never
supplied RAID array monitoring software for this chip. Promise
Technology calls this software the "FastCheck" or the "PAM, Promise
Array Management" utility. Without this software, the user cannot know
if a hard drive has failed in the RAID 0 or RAID 1 or RAID 0,1 array.
This issue is Elitegroup's Case number RAE54616. (Note that Elitegroup
also calls themselves "ECS".)
Computing survived 8088 processors running at 4.77 MHz, with only 5 1/4 inch floppy disks for storage. If computing can survive that, the Internet can survive anything.
Last time I talked to Symantec Tech Support about this, the support representative said that Norton SystemWorks was the most pirated software in the world. He sounded proud. He said that all copies that are "CD only" are pirated, as are lots of the others. He said that the price should never be less than $60. (SystemWorks includes Norton AntiVirus.)
Even some of my distributors, very legitimate companies, offer a pirated SystemWorks, apparently unknowingly.
Allowing piracy until now seems to be a deliberate marketing policy of Symantec. The idea seems to be that people invest time in learning how a product works. Those who discover they have pirated copies may not want to invest time again. They may then buy a legitimate copy.
If allowing piracy is not a deliberate marketing policy of Symantec, does that mean that no one at Symantec is smart enough to use Froogle? It's not as though finding the illegal copies is an expensive task.
Microsoft seems to have used this as a way of destroying competitors to DOS back in the old days, and with Microsoft Office more recently. There was a time when ALL local distributors were selling pirated copies of DOS (often unknowingly). I don't know if it is happening now, but at one time everyone who bought a computer from local builders was offered a "completely legal OEM copy" of Microsoft Office for $50. I called Microsoft and was told that all such copies were pirated.
Apparently, Microsoft's policy of allowing piracy was a way of killing competitors. Instead of Microsoft Office for $400 and Corel Word Perfect for $50, it was Microsoft Office for beaucoup moolah and Microsoft Office for cheap. It was impossible for Corel to establish Corel WordPerfect as a reasonable alternative. All second-tier products were crushed by the piracy of the most popular products.
Here's a question: Doesn't allowing piracy as a marketing tool invalidate the copyright?
When companies allow piracy, that makes it difficult for legitimate companies like ours. Our price doesn't seem competitive. Piracy as a marketing tool makes it seem like we are over-charging customers. It damages our reputation, and often prospective customers don't even give us a chance to explain.
Legal notice: I'm stating here my long-standing opinion only. I'm not saying I know anyone is a pirate, or a piracy encourager, only that they appear to me to be.
I experience the slowdown also. One of the problems is identical with Windows XP and Knoppix: If you close and open a lot of instances and tabs, eventually all instances of Mozilla will crash. Before that, a Windows XP system will become slow. After a Mozilla or Firebird crash in Windows XP, Windows also becomes unstable, requiring a reboot. In Knoppix Linux, with no hard drive or other configuration, Linux remains stable after Moz crashes. During the test with Knoppix, the problem occurred reliably with 20 instances of Mozilla, each with 3 to 5 tabs, approximately.
I reported this during Mozilla 1.4. It is not fixed in Firebird 0.6 or in Mozilla 1.4 yet. Someone on Mozilla Bugzilla commented that the crashing might be due to a stack overflow.
There appears to be another problem that causes slowness. If you approach the limit of memory in Windows XP, and the system begins to use virtual memory from the hard disk, apparently there is a bug in Windows XP that causes XP to become corrupted. I have not done a definitive test, but obviously if Windows XP becomes unstable, there is a serious bug in the OS. (I know this is difficult to believe considering Microsoft's reputation for quality and attention to detail.) A program crashing is not supposed to crash the OS.
Psychologist Robert Levine of the University of California studied numerous large cities, and found Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the kindest large city in the world. The outcome of the research mentioned in the articles below is not surprising to anyone who has been there:
Mr. Robert Levine is certainly correct that Rio is very friendly, but his study ignores other facts. People in Rio are often happy, often flirting and kissing on the streets, and they joke a lot.
Translation of the BBC article:
_______________________________
Rio de Janeiro has the most helpful people in the world, research says.
June 18, 2003 - Published 21:46 GMT
Atmosphere influences behavior, study affirms.
In spite of the violence, Rio de Janeiro is the metropolis with the kindest people found by researchers who studied 23 of the largest cities on the planet.
[My note: The phrase "In spite of the violence" is due to drug violence. Rio's reputation for violence is also due to media hype and apparently rivalry between the citizens of Sao Paulo and Rio. In actuality, the violence in Rio is not worse than other large cities. As in apparently all cities, most of the violence is in the areas where poor people live.]
The ranking was the result of research by psychologist Robert Levine of the University of California. According to him, blind people always receive aid to cross the Carioca [culture of Rio] streets, and invariably there is somebody willing to return a pen that another person dropped on the ground.
The Cariocas were ahead of the residents of Copenhagen (7th place), Stockholm (12th), Rome (16th) and New York (22nd), that were found to be less helpful.
In New York, for instance, the researchers led by Levine found that in only 28% of the cases somebody offers to help a person who limps whose belongings fell to the ground.
Good Latins
In Bangkok, in Thailand, a blind man will only be helped to cross the street in 42% of the cases.
The city that had the worst behavior in the Good Samaritan's index was Kuala Lampur, in Malaysia, that received 23rd placement in the ranking.
The best cities in the study were the cities of Iberian origin.
The capital of Costa Rica, San Jos, was second. Madrid was sixth, Mexico City, ninth, and San Salvador, the tenth.
"In general, we found that the people in cities in which Portuguese and Spanish is spoken tend to be more helpful", Levine said in his study.
Hostility on Slashdot: It amazes me that when someone makes a
mistake on Slashdot,
someone else, often an anonymous cowherd, will attack with extreme hostility,
as the AC has done in the parent comment above.
The quoted article says 79: The AC quotes the Washington Times. The article he quotes says, "In 1991, when the number of homicides in the
District peaked at 482, the rate was 79.42 killings per 100,000
residents." I had remembered 77, but the worst was 79. My information was
old; I don't often follow DC's homicide statistics. I am very happy that those
who run the District of Columbia have reduced the homicide rate there.
I've made a point in the grandparent comment above, that some things are
better in Brazil. The point stands. I don't have time to investigate the AC's
other statements, I'm very busy now. However, I think the homicide rate quoted
for Rio is very old. Some years ago, a mayor was elected who reduced the rate,
as the District of Columbia has done.
A country that uses proprietary, closed-source software is a country that is not free. A country that uses proprietary, closed-source software is partly under control of the seller of the software and of government of the country in which the seller is located.
Why is it that the government of Brazil is quicker than the government of the United States to realize the necessity of running a government with open source software?
To understand this, it may help to understand other differences between Brazil and the United States. One country is more primitive in some ways and less developed than the other. For example:
The United States government has bombed 24 countries in the years since the second world war. The Brazilian government has bombed none.
The United States government supports culture. It has an organization called the National Endowment for the Arts. Apparently that is the group that puts on those unbelievably boring shows in the U.S. capitol. The Brazilian government supports culture. The culture minister, Gilberto Gil, is a musician and singer who is famous throughout the world.
Officials of a large city in one country visited the officials of another country to learn how to run a city in a more humanistic way: Officials of the city of New York visited the officials of Curitiba, Brazil, to learn the mayor's methods for making a city an enjoyable place to live.
Brazilians are generally slim and good-looking. Americans are the most overweight populace that has ever existed. This seems to be because the Brazilians are more skilled at making themselves happy than Americans. Definitely Americans eat when they are not hungry, and indication of unhappiness.
The city of Rio de Janeiro has a reputation for violence. The homicide rate is 43 per 100,000 people. The city of Washington, D.C, the capitol of the United States, does not have a reputation for violence. The homicide rate in Washington, D.C. is approximately 77 per 100,000 population, close to double that of Rio.
The United States government has powerful organizations that operate in an almost completely secret way as a world-wide police force, forcing U.S. government ideas and culture on other countries. For example, there is the NSA, CIA, and FBI, and some agencies whose existence is almost a secret from U.S. citizens. The Brazilian government is far from perfect, but it has nothing comparable.
The Brazilian culture is far from perfect. For example, Brazilians generally don't like to plan, so things that require planning are often done poorly. But in the areas above and in other areas, things are better in Brazil.
There is a credible theory that modern democracy began because the nobles in England would not even consider following the king. So, rather than have a complete lock-up, they wrote the Magna Carta, which limited the power of the king.
I'm glad to see the same tradition being continued in the United States. The "Gallery of CSS Descramblers" says "Oh, you want to take away our freedom? Then our response is that we will exercise it more."
In the U.S. at the moment, the less intelligent, more conflicted people are in charge.
Thanks. It was 4 AM in the morning when I posted, and I didn't think of CSS. Can you tell me why it says "Opiniones sobre Microsoft", "Opinions about Microsoft"? That was how I initially became confused. That phrase is not in the article, either in the Spanish version or the English version. So, human looked at the article and classified it?
My article discusses how Windows XP has been designed in such a way that it
is adversarial toward the interests of Microsoft's customers. Clearly, if the seach engine
is skewing results, it makes mistakes. But, notice something: The source code for that link says my name is "span class='hit' ". [I changed the punctuation to make it readable.]
The 15th result, at the bottom of the first page, is the same article translated to
Spanish:
The HTML source code of this result says "span class='d' ". The result says "Opiniones sobre Microsoft", which, translated from Spanish, means, "Opinions about Microsoft".
So, apparently someone at Microsoft saw the article and classified it. Maybe the person who did the classifying did not have the technical knowledge necessary to realize that the article discusses abusive activities by Microsoft.
Notice in the source code of that result that the link is a link to MSN, not a direct link to my article. So, apparently the search engine is tracking visits to the Spanish version of the article. It is not clear to me the meaning of this.
One idea is to store the MD5 sums of all data files somewhere, possibly on the
CD itself. Then you can know if the files On CD have been corrupted.
This is the best MD 5 calculator I've found for Windows: MD5sums 1.1. It's
very fast and also does batch command-line calculations.
Maybe a better idea is to store all data meant to be written to CD in Zip
files. Archive files have a CRC stored for every file. The unarchiving
software will complain if the CRC does not match the file.
However, the CRC in a zip file is only 32 bits. I put 2**32 into Google and Google Calculator answered: 2 ** 32 = 4 294 967 296. So there is one
chance in 4 billion that a file is different but a CRC is the same.
MD5s are far more unlikely to be identical if the files are different. I put
32 ** 16 into Google and it answered: 32 ** 16 = 1.20892582 x 10**24. Them is
good odds. (There are 32 hexadecimal digits in an MD5.)
WinZip 9 beta has a command-line option to encrypt with AES. Encryption acts as a checksum that can be even more secure than an MD5.
Unfortunately, the design of archiving software like WinZip is still primitive. Archiving software should be able to prepare archive files of a given size, and span to a new archive file when adding another folder (or, optionally, a file) would make an archive too large. Then you would be able to retrieve the files easily, since each CD would have a complete archive stored on it. At present the spanning option of archiving software is stupid; it is necessary to put all the spanned archive files back together to retrieve any information.
I have perhaps 8 Sony CD blanks that apparently were attacked by fungus. I kept them because maybe they can be analyzed to understand what went wrong. We never bought Sony CD blanks, the blanks came with CD-RW writers.
Since we don't buy Sony writers any longer, and never bought many, I can't say if that is an ongoing problem.
Anyone else having problems with the quality of Sony products?
Whatever method is chosen, it must be completely open to the public. There can be NO proprietary, hidden software in Government. Otherwise, how would citizens inspect the workings of government, as is their duty?
There can be NO hidden file formats in government. Otherwise, how will a citizen or historian inspect government documents long after the file formats have changed by a greedy software vendor?
The complete plans to mechanical and electrical devices used in counting ballots must be available to anyone for inspection. That's the only way we can feel sure that there isn't some method of cheating.
I think that anything but government certified encryption is suspect. Often "simple" encryption schemes have been found to be very, very weak. Only serious professionals can design good encryption schemes.
In this case, the tech support person clearly understands English, but is probably racing through as many questions as possible, trying to give the appearance of actually answering them. He is probably paid by the question, so there is no value in giving quality.
I didn't know RAR has an output file size argument. Zip needs that.
You mentioned "Drive letter access" packet-writing schemes. I've had problems with Roxio's DLA version crashing Windows XP, literally causing Windows XP to re-boot without warning.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had exactly the experience you describe. When there is a hint of trouble, it is necessary to break the mirror and test each hard drive separately.
Added Information:
I wrote the Slashdot story. I've gotten additional information since then:
First, I don't see any evidence of low quality in ECS motherboards. Both ECS and Fry's employees say that the high rate of returns is due to the fact that the low cost attracts people who are very inexperienced at building computers. That seems right to me. An ECS sales representative mentions that Fry's uses ECS motherboards in the computers it builds. The ECS motherboards are suitable for business use. They may not be the best for overclockers or gamers.
I wrote a long letter to Promise Technology Technical Support about the fact that Promise is allowing ECS motherboards with Promise RAID mirroring controlers to be sold without software that is necessary to monitor the health of the mirror. The letter is below, and represents my opinions at the time. Even though the national sales manager of Promise suggested I send the letter, there was no answer.
Below the letter is all information and opinions that I had available at the time.
___________________
TO:
Kevin Hong
Promise Technology Technical Support Engineer
Kevin,
Jason Turk told me to write to you about a problem with Elitegroup's L7VTA Rev. 1.0 motherboard, which includes a Promise RAID controller chip.
Elitegroup says they have never been provided the FastCheck or PAM monitoring software for this motherboard. Can you supply monitoring software that is certified by Promise to work? The software is not on the CD supplied with the motherboard.
We need not just software that appears to work, we need software that is certified by Promise Technology to work with this motherboard. Several people at Promise have told me that the software provided on the Promise web site for the Promise RAID controller adapter cards may not work with the OEM controller chips installed on motherboards. I suspect this is not true, but merely a Promise Technology marketing scheme. However, we can't risk selling these to our customers and finding later that there is some hidden serious defect.
Thanks,
Michael Jennings
Futurepower Computer Systems
_______________________________
Complete Information:
So that all the information to resolve this issue is supplied in one place, I have provided everything that I know and think below:
Some versions of the Elitegroup L7VTA Rev. 1.0 motherboards are being supplied with Promise Technology's PDC20265R IDE RAID controller. Elitegroup supplies three of the four elements needed for a RAID controller. The motherboard and included CD have 1) Promise Technology's PDC20265R ASIC chip, 2) the latest version of the BIOS, 3) and the driver software.
However, item 4 is missing. Elitegroup says Promise Technology never supplied RAID array monitoring software for this chip. Promise Technology calls this software the "FastCheck" or the "PAM, Promise Array Management" utility. Without this software, the user cannot know if a hard drive has failed in the RAID 0 or RAID 1 or RAID 0,1 array.
This issue is Elitegroup's Case number RAE54616. (Note that Elitegroup also calls themselves "ECS".)
Elitegroup's web page for the L7VTA product is here:
http://www.ecs.com.tw/products/pd_spec.asp?product _id=327
The L7VTA V1.0 driver page is here, showing the latest Promise drivers:
http://www.ecs.com.tw/download/dw_spec.asp?product _id=63
Promise Technology's web page for on-motherboard RAID controllers is here:
http://www.promise.com/product/oem_ataraid_pdc2026 5r_eng.htm
Note that this Promise web page mentions all four elements of a
Computing survived 8088 processors running at 4.77 MHz, with only 5 1/4 inch floppy disks for storage. If computing can survive that, the Internet can survive anything.
Last time I talked to Symantec Tech Support about this, the support representative said that Norton SystemWorks was the most pirated software in the world. He sounded proud. He said that all copies that are "CD only" are pirated, as are lots of the others. He said that the price should never be less than $60. (SystemWorks includes Norton AntiVirus.)
Even some of my distributors, very legitimate companies, offer a pirated SystemWorks, apparently unknowingly.
Allowing piracy until now seems to be a deliberate marketing policy of Symantec. The idea seems to be that people invest time in learning how a product works. Those who discover they have pirated copies may not want to invest time again. They may then buy a legitimate copy.
If allowing piracy is not a deliberate marketing policy of Symantec, does that mean that no one at Symantec is smart enough to use Froogle? It's not as though finding the illegal copies is an expensive task.
Microsoft seems to have used this as a way of destroying competitors to DOS back in the old days, and with Microsoft Office more recently. There was a time when ALL local distributors were selling pirated copies of DOS (often unknowingly). I don't know if it is happening now, but at one time everyone who bought a computer from local builders was offered a "completely legal OEM copy" of Microsoft Office for $50. I called Microsoft and was told that all such copies were pirated.
Apparently, Microsoft's policy of allowing piracy was a way of killing competitors. Instead of Microsoft Office for $400 and Corel Word Perfect for $50, it was Microsoft Office for beaucoup moolah and Microsoft Office for cheap. It was impossible for Corel to establish Corel WordPerfect as a reasonable alternative. All second-tier products were crushed by the piracy of the most popular products.
Here's a question: Doesn't allowing piracy as a marketing tool invalidate the copyright?
When companies allow piracy, that makes it difficult for legitimate companies like ours. Our price doesn't seem competitive. Piracy as a marketing tool makes it seem like we are over-charging customers. It damages our reputation, and often prospective customers don't even give us a chance to explain.
Legal notice: I'm stating here my long-standing opinion only. I'm not saying I know anyone is a pirate, or a piracy encourager, only that they appear to me to be.
Yes, but something different happens when Windows XP swaps because it has reached the limit of free memory.
I experience the slowdown also. One of the problems is identical with Windows XP and Knoppix: If you close and open a lot of instances and tabs, eventually all instances of Mozilla will crash. Before that, a Windows XP system will become slow. After a Mozilla or Firebird crash in Windows XP, Windows also becomes unstable, requiring a reboot. In Knoppix Linux, with no hard drive or other configuration, Linux remains stable after Moz crashes. During the test with Knoppix, the problem occurred reliably with 20 instances of Mozilla, each with 3 to 5 tabs, approximately.
I reported this during Mozilla 1.4. It is not fixed in Firebird 0.6 or in Mozilla 1.4 yet. Someone on Mozilla Bugzilla commented that the crashing might be due to a stack overflow.
There appears to be another problem that causes slowness. If you approach the limit of memory in Windows XP, and the system begins to use virtual memory from the hard disk, apparently there is a bug in Windows XP that causes XP to become corrupted. I have not done a definitive test, but obviously if Windows XP becomes unstable, there is a serious bug in the OS. (I know this is difficult to believe considering Microsoft's reputation for quality and attention to detail.) A program crashing is not supposed to crash the OS.
More about Brazil:
Psychologist Robert Levine of the University of California studied numerous large cities, and found Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the kindest large city in the world. The outcome of the research mentioned in the articles below is not surprising to anyone who has been there:
Below is my translation of this article on the BBC Brazil web site:
Rio de Janeiro tem o povo mais solcito do mundo, diz pesquisa
http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/noticias/030618_r
Mr. Robert Levine is certainly correct that Rio is very friendly, but his study ignores other facts. People in Rio are often happy, often flirting and kissing on the streets, and they joke a lot.
The BBC article discusses research reported in New Scientist magazine:
The Kindness of Strangers
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDe
_______________________________
Translation of the BBC article:
_______________________________
Rio de Janeiro has the most helpful people in the world, research says.
June 18, 2003 - Published 21:46 GMT
Atmosphere influences behavior, study affirms.
In spite of the violence, Rio de Janeiro is the metropolis with the kindest people found by researchers who studied 23 of the largest cities on the planet.
[My note: The phrase "In spite of the violence" is due to drug violence. Rio's reputation for violence is also due to media hype and apparently rivalry between the citizens of Sao Paulo and Rio. In actuality, the violence in Rio is not worse than other large cities. As in apparently all cities, most of the violence is in the areas where poor people live.]
The ranking was the result of research by psychologist Robert Levine of the University of California. According to him, blind people always receive aid to cross the Carioca [culture of Rio] streets, and invariably there is somebody willing to return a pen that another person dropped on the ground.
The Cariocas were ahead of the residents of Copenhagen (7th place), Stockholm (12th), Rome (16th) and New York (22nd), that were found to be less helpful.
In New York, for instance, the researchers led by Levine found that in only 28% of the cases somebody offers to help a person who limps whose belongings fell to the ground.
Good Latins
In Bangkok, in Thailand, a blind man will only be helped to cross the street in 42% of the cases.
The city that had the worst behavior in the Good Samaritan's index was Kuala Lampur, in Malaysia, that received 23rd placement in the ranking.
The best cities in the study were the cities of Iberian origin.
The capital of Costa Rica, San Jos, was second. Madrid was sixth, Mexico City, ninth, and San Salvador, the tenth.
"In general, we found that the people in cities in which Portuguese and Spanish is spoken tend to be more helpful", Levine said in his study.
Hostility on Slashdot: It amazes me that when someone makes a mistake on Slashdot, someone else, often an anonymous cowherd, will attack with extreme hostility, as the AC has done in the parent comment above.
The quoted article says 79: The AC quotes the Washington Times. The article he quotes says, "In 1991, when the number of homicides in the District peaked at 482, the rate was 79.42 killings per 100,000 residents." I had remembered 77, but the worst was 79. My information was old; I don't often follow DC's homicide statistics. I am very happy that those who run the District of Columbia have reduced the homicide rate there.
I've made a point in the grandparent comment above, that some things are better in Brazil. The point stands. I don't have time to investigate the AC's other statements, I'm very busy now. However, I think the homicide rate quoted for Rio is very old. Some years ago, a mayor was elected who reduced the rate, as the District of Columbia has done.
A country that uses proprietary, closed-source software is a country that is not free. A country that uses proprietary, closed-source software is partly under control of the seller of the software and of government of the country in which the seller is located.
Why is it that the government of Brazil is quicker than the government of the United States to realize the necessity of running a government with open source software?
To understand this, it may help to understand other differences between Brazil and the United States. One country is more primitive in some ways and less developed than the other. For example:
The United States government has bombed 24 countries in the years since the second world war. The Brazilian government has bombed none.
The United States government supports culture. It has an organization called the National Endowment for the Arts. Apparently that is the group that puts on those unbelievably boring shows in the U.S. capitol. The Brazilian government supports culture. The culture minister, Gilberto Gil, is a musician and singer who is famous throughout the world.
Officials of a large city in one country visited the officials of another country to learn how to run a city in a more humanistic way: Officials of the city of New York visited the officials of Curitiba, Brazil, to learn the mayor's methods for making a city an enjoyable place to live.
Brazilians are generally slim and good-looking. Americans are the most overweight populace that has ever existed. This seems to be because the Brazilians are more skilled at making themselves happy than Americans. Definitely Americans eat when they are not hungry, and indication of unhappiness.
The city of Rio de Janeiro has a reputation for violence. The homicide rate is 43 per 100,000 people. The city of Washington, D.C, the capitol of the United States, does not have a reputation for violence. The homicide rate in Washington, D.C. is approximately 77 per 100,000 population, close to double that of Rio.
The United States government has powerful organizations that operate in an almost completely secret way as a world-wide police force, forcing U.S. government ideas and culture on other countries. For example, there is the NSA, CIA, and FBI, and some agencies whose existence is almost a secret from U.S. citizens. The Brazilian government is far from perfect, but it has nothing comparable.
The Brazilian culture is far from perfect. For example, Brazilians generally don't like to plan, so things that require planning are often done poorly. But in the areas above and in other areas, things are better in Brazil.
There is a credible theory that modern democracy began because the nobles in England would not even consider following the king. So, rather than have a complete lock-up, they wrote the Magna Carta, which limited the power of the king.
I'm glad to see the same tradition being continued in the United States. The "Gallery of CSS Descramblers" says "Oh, you want to take away our freedom? Then our response is that we will exercise it more."
In the U.S. at the moment, the less intelligent, more conflicted people are in charge.
Thanks. It was 4 AM in the morning when I posted, and I didn't think of CSS. Can you tell me why it says "Opiniones sobre Microsoft", "Opinions about Microsoft"? That was how I initially became confused. That phrase is not in the article, either in the Spanish version or the English version. So, human looked at the article and classified it?
twitter, it is very interesting what you said above, about the design of the search engine making results more Microsoft-friendly.
That made me wonder what would happen if I put in my own name. The second result on the list is:
Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.
www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft.htm
My article discusses how Windows XP has been designed in such a way that it is adversarial toward the interests of Microsoft's customers. Clearly, if the seach engine is skewing results, it makes mistakes. But, notice something: The source code for that link says my name is "span class='hit' ". [I changed the punctuation to make it readable.]
The 15th result, at the bottom of the first page, is the same article translated to Spanish:
Windows XP muestra la direccion que Microsoft esta tomando. Opiniones sobre Microsoft.
www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft-es.ht
The HTML source code of this result says "span class='d' ". The result says "Opiniones sobre Microsoft", which, translated from Spanish, means, "Opinions about Microsoft".
So, apparently someone at Microsoft saw the article and classified it. Maybe the person who did the classifying did not have the technical knowledge necessary to realize that the article discusses abusive activities by Microsoft.
Notice in the source code of that result that the link is a link to MSN, not a direct link to my article. So, apparently the search engine is tracking visits to the Spanish version of the article. It is not clear to me the meaning of this.
You can't estimate the disk corruption by comparing MD5s. You can know if the file is corrupt.
There are tools, I believe, that can investigate and display the extent of the bad blocks. Maybe someone has a link to one.
Okay, I'll try WinRar. However, I would like an option not to break any file.
One idea is to store the MD5 sums of all data files somewhere, possibly on the CD itself. Then you can know if the files On CD have been corrupted.
This is the best MD 5 calculator I've found for Windows: MD5sums 1.1. It's very fast and also does batch command-line calculations.
Maybe a better idea is to store all data meant to be written to CD in Zip files. Archive files have a CRC stored for every file. The unarchiving software will complain if the CRC does not match the file.
However, the CRC in a zip file is only 32 bits. I put 2**32 into Google and Google Calculator answered: 2 ** 32 = 4 294 967 296. So there is one chance in 4 billion that a file is different but a CRC is the same.
MD5s are far more unlikely to be identical if the files are different. I put 32 ** 16 into Google and it answered: 32 ** 16 = 1.20892582 x 10**24. Them is good odds. (There are 32 hexadecimal digits in an MD5.)
WinZip 9 beta has a command-line option to encrypt with AES. Encryption acts as a checksum that can be even more secure than an MD5.
Unfortunately, the design of archiving software like WinZip is still primitive. Archiving software should be able to prepare archive files of a given size, and span to a new archive file when adding another folder (or, optionally, a file) would make an archive too large. Then you would be able to retrieve the files easily, since each CD would have a complete archive stored on it. At present the spanning option of archiving software is stupid; it is necessary to put all the spanned archive files back together to retrieve any information.
I have perhaps 8 Sony CD blanks that apparently were attacked by fungus. I kept them because maybe they can be analyzed to understand what went wrong. We never bought Sony CD blanks, the blanks came with CD-RW writers.
Since we don't buy Sony writers any longer, and never bought many, I can't say if that is an ongoing problem.
Anyone else having problems with the quality of Sony products?
The quickest way to stop spam in the U.S. would be to have a respected person such as the Surgeon General of the United States say that
1) There is no way to increase the size of your body parts,
2) The cheap Viagra is not Viagra,
3) and so on.
We can help by telling everyone we know not to buy anything from spam. Next time you are at a party or family gathering, make that point.
Spam would disappear if there were no buyers. We need to make it culturally unacceptable to buy anything that is advertised through spam.
Whatever method is chosen, it must be completely open to the public. There can be NO proprietary, hidden software in Government. Otherwise, how would citizens inspect the workings of government, as is their duty?
There can be NO hidden file formats in government. Otherwise, how will a citizen or historian inspect government documents long after the file formats have changed by a greedy software vendor?
The complete plans to mechanical and electrical devices used in counting ballots must be available to anyone for inspection. That's the only way we can feel sure that there isn't some method of cheating.
I was intending to thank you, not hassle you. However, I wasn't sure I had the right links. Thanks for the help.
Hey, BrokenHalo, thanks for the info. I suppose you mean:
CD-Writing HOWTO and
Linux MP3 CD Burning mini-HOWTO and
CD-Writing HOWTO: Troubleshooting
Yes, I can RTFM, but it is a big time-saver to read the best documentation immediately, and not have to search for it.
I think that anything but government certified encryption is suspect. Often "simple" encryption schemes have been found to be very, very weak. Only serious professionals can design good encryption schemes.
Cdrecord has the most poorly organized web site I can remember seeing. Is there good documentation available somewhere?
Also, the link is to the alpha version, it appears. Where is the latest stable binary?
In this case, the tech support person clearly understands English, but is probably racing through as many questions as possible, trying to give the appearance of actually answering them. He is probably paid by the question, so there is no value in giving quality.
Slashdot has everything! Including a list of the benefits of wearing pants. LOL!
I didn't know RAR has an output file size argument. Zip needs that.
You mentioned "Drive letter access" packet-writing schemes. I've had problems with Roxio's DLA version crashing Windows XP, literally causing Windows XP to re-boot without warning.