How do you make an installer that can remove the old version of a program, and yet have zero chance that it never removes the wrong thing?
Well, you give it the "list of files" of the old installations, and make it delete all files from those old installations that do not contain any user-data. (e.g. leave out the "initial database" that is distributed with the program).
In effect you have:
for (tp = file_list; tp;tp=tp->next)
unlink (tp->fname);
See the missing check if the unlink works? That's intentional. We're not interested if the remove of the file worked. If for example the user decided to write-protect some of the files (actually directories) we don't want them deleted.
After the pc freezes of dies, the burnt cpu would logically cool down.
If you actually FRY a transitor, it can break in two ways. First it can go into "permanently conducting" or it can go into "permanantely nonconducting".
In the permanently conducting state, there is a lot of room of "continuing the frying process".
And the REST of the world must suffer because some american law (which has no jurisdiction OUTSIDE america) exists?
Normal countries state somewhere in their laws that their laws don't apply outside their borders. Somehow the USA is different.
We KNOW that they arrested that russian guy because he did something (violate DMCA) outside the American borders.
If the Americans are desparate enough, they'll come and get you, jurisdiction or not. Otherwise they might let it rest until you set foot on their soil.
Now tell me again, that Alan need not be afraid of American law.
I'm a little lost, but it looks like he's being overzealous.
I don't think so. Alan is trying to prove a point. That point being: The US is being rediculous with that DMCA.
There WAS a bug, there is no longer. Publishing the bug means you're providing people with a "circumvention device" (on the older kernels). The DMCA forbids that.
Alan is being rediculous with a purpose. The more people realize that this DMCA is rediculous the more they will be inclined to complain to their senators or whatever means those Americans have to influence their politicians.
Procmail is excellent for fine-tuning and for sorting already identified spam to a separate folder (some sites will just tag suspect messages,
As a mail administrator, I don't want to force my opinion on all others whose Email my server handles. So, filtering on the server is out of the question. My procmail will do the RBL check, and sort appropriately. Works great.
A lot of users seem to think that they can sell off their no-longer-used software to subsidize upgrades, but that's just not what the EULAs say (at least with pre-installed MS software).
Ah, You must be living in that funny country across the big pond.
Here in Europe, basic consumer rights say that you can sell whatever you leagally paid for, including software, even if the EULA says otherwise.
If microsoft doesn't like that, they can come and battle with the EU governement, or stop selling their products out here.
Or, for 1/4 the price you can pack together 2x75GB drives in a raid 0 array, get 30x as much space AND get the same bandwidth.
There should be two parameters in every "performance" measure: Bandwidth and latency.
Depending on what you're doing, having a low
latency can make a BIG difference.
Take a large area on your disk, pick a random 1k block, and read it. Repeat. 6G disks of a few years back could do about 40 to 60 of these requests per second. Modern disks can do maybe 100 or 200.
The RAM disk will keep on doing about 100 Mb per second: That's 1000 times better performance than the rotating media disk, even if both do 100Mb per second in streaming mode.....
... so a a couple gigs of SRAM is sorta out of the question.
Also the fact that "power consumed" is proportional to the number of RAM cells. Sure they use very little: One of those battery backed up thingies will keep 32k alive for lots of years. But at 1G, you're going to be feeding 30000 times more cells. And smaller cells means larger leakage.
How dangerous is it to keep using it while waiting for the replacement part?"
If an electrical apparatus consumes 10W of power, then that's about the amount of "heat" that it will produce (unless it moves stuff in the real world).
Normally that would require say 20 degrees heat-difference between the adapter and the room. So, the adapter will become 40 degrees if your room-temperature is 20.
If you thermally isolate the adapter, then still that 10W of heat will have to leave the adapter+isolation. If the isolation is good it will increase the thermal resistance by a factor of ten, and by that time the temperature of the adapter will become 220 degrees centigrade. At that point, some components will give up, and they might start a fire.
Thus: DO NOT use the adapter while thermally isolated. Keep it cool. Ventilate well. Don't put it on the couch, especially not with a cushion on top. Put it on a table.
Western Digital drives, and bad luck with Maxtor drives, when Maxtor is the one who makes the drives Western Digital distributes (read: slap a new label on them, and you're done with WD's involvement)
Hi,
I'm in the data-recovery business. That makes me "recognize" many drives by their looks, and not by their labels. So even if a drive has an "HP" label, I recognize it as a "quantum Atlas" or a seagate.
WD makes different drives from Maxtor. They are really different.
Maxtor bought the disk division of "quantum". Thus we're starting to see quantum drives labelled "maxtor".
They said that they don't have to use a double opt-in.
I got an Email a couple of weeks back that I had opted in "in the last 6 months or so" to get their spam. That was sent to an Email address that I haven't used for 5 years.
The general trick is that with "simple opt-in" the spammer gets to hire a friend who will "opt-in" for a million of HIS friends.
(Though that would assume the planes hit at the levels that were intended.)
I was going to write the response you did: The collapse of the buildings was likely not intended.
Landing a plane is easy if you have a 5 mile x 3 mile landing square. However, landing on a 100 feet wide strip 5 miles long is reasonably easy. Landing in the right 2 miles of the landing strip is however much harder: You have to make estimates about your vertical position, multiply that by 10 or fifteen and compare that to the length you have to the start of the runway.
So, to hit one of the towers, you level the plane, decend to the level where you see new york below the horizon and the twin towers above the horizon. Then keep the nose aimed exactly at them, and you'll hit the tower without any trouble.
You need a 1 hour flying lesson in a chessna to learn how to do this.
That second plane hitting the tower, which was caught on tape, didn't do it the easy way.
Anyway, controlling the height is much harder than controlling the place. Striking the tower was the goal, and they achieved that.
Finding examples of four, simultaneously suicidal, pilots on American carriers is, well, ridiculous.
Agreed. And you can't walk into the cockpit and put a gun to the pilot's head and say: "Please fly me into the WTC tower, as low as you can... ".
The hijacker will have had to walk into the cockpit, kill two pilots, and sit at the 'wheel' himself. Possibly the "lockable door" to the cockpit provides enough privacy for a lone hijacker to do his deed. An occasional shot through the door would keep people from breaking it down.
If the pilot of the PA plane had heard about the WTC, and found someone on HIS plane coming into the cockpit, my brother suggests that the best reaction is: shut off all motors, pull up the nose, untill the plane stalls. At that point in time there is likely not enough time to switch pilots, and recover the plane.
Note that the pilot brave enough to do this is in fact committing suicide, albeit just say 5 minutes before an otherwise certain death.
3) Allow ENUM users to set 'privacy policies' on their ENUM, including 'no unsolicited promotional material'.
The problem is that about 50% of the spam I get claims that I subscribed for it. Or I entered my Email address "somewhere".
About a week ago, I got a spam on an Email address that I haven't used for over 5 years. Well, they claimed that I subscribed for their junk "in the last 6 months or so".
When you would start to bother them about it, they claim they get their addresses "from all over the place" and that they don't remember who gave them YOUR email.
The legislation should include a requirement to keep track of how you get your email addresses, and that it's an offense of not being able to prove the "he subscribed for our junk".
what are some specific real-world applications of such a device?
There are lots of devices that you expect to be ready for use within a second or so after you turn them on. More and more of these devices are getting more and more complicated. To the level that these would run a real operating system like Linux.
I've tested a "digital TV decoder" box. It would take at least 20 seconds to boot. So you turn on the box, and have to wait quite a while before it can be operated. It was slow as hell in anything you'd do, and the guys writing the software hadn't heard about "user interface design". So for instance, if you pressed "channel up" it would take a couple of seconds for the device to react. If that's a technical restriction on digital TV channel decoding, then that's fine with me. But in the meanwhile you really NEED to provide feedback about the channel switch by updating the front panel!
I walked into my show a couple of weeks ago, and they told me they had the DVD burner that belonged with the dvd writable media. No problem.
Price: Around $600.
IMHO, the real reason why bluetooth won't make it is this: I saw an ad: "Bluetooth protocol stack in only 27k of code memory!!!!"
I'd want bluetooth connectivity on my PIC from microchip. These come with 1k up to something like 4k of program memory. You can do (probably a bit limited) tcp/ip in them (Search slashdot for the smallest web server, and you'll find a couple of references), but if the bluetooth protocol stack requires 27k of code, that will never fit. And TCP/IP lends itself to implementing part. I expect the bluetooth protocol not to be so lenient.
Anyway, a cheap coffeemachine costs $20, You'd want one with connectivity for say $40, and that would mean you can spend $5 for the PIC from Microchip, but not much more. A microcontroller with a separate ROM is already going to be much too expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you make an installer that can remove the old version of a program, and yet have zero chance that it never removes the wrong thing?
Well, you give it the "list of files" of the old installations, and make it delete all files from those old installations that do not contain any user-data. (e.g. leave out the "initial database" that is distributed with the program).
In effect you have:
for (tp = file_list; tp;tp=tp->next)
unlink (tp->fname);
See the missing check if the unlink works? That's intentional. We're not interested if the remove of the file worked. If for example the user decided to write-protect some of the files (actually directories) we don't want them deleted.
Roger.
After the pc freezes of dies, the burnt cpu would logically cool down.
If you actually FRY a transitor, it can break in two ways. First it can go into "permanently conducting" or it can go into "permanantely nonconducting".
In the permanently conducting state, there is a lot of room of "continuing the frying process".
Roger.
And the REST of the world must suffer because some american law (which has no jurisdiction OUTSIDE america) exists?
Normal countries state somewhere in their laws that their laws don't apply outside their borders. Somehow the USA is different.
We KNOW that they arrested that russian guy because he did something (violate DMCA) outside the American borders.
If the Americans are desparate enough, they'll come and get you, jurisdiction or not. Otherwise they might let it rest until you set foot on their soil.
Now tell me again, that Alan need not be afraid of American law.
Roger.
If the datadensity is such that it can store 500Mb on a quarter sized disk, I'd want a CD-sized disk that can store 50G.
Roger
I'm a little lost, but it looks like he's being overzealous.
I don't think so. Alan is trying to prove a point. That point being: The US is being rediculous with that DMCA.
There WAS a bug, there is no longer. Publishing the bug means you're providing people with a "circumvention device" (on the older kernels). The DMCA forbids that.
Alan is being rediculous with a purpose. The more people realize that this DMCA is rediculous the more they will be inclined to complain to their senators or whatever means those Americans have to influence their politicians.
Roger.
Procmail is excellent for fine-tuning and for sorting already identified spam to a separate folder (some sites will just tag suspect messages,
As a mail administrator, I don't want to force my opinion on all others whose Email my server handles. So, filtering on the server is out of the question. My procmail will do the RBL check, and sort appropriately. Works great.
Roger.
A lot of users seem to think that they can sell off their no-longer-used software to subsidize upgrades, but that's just not what the EULAs say (at least with pre-installed MS software).
Ah, You must be living in that funny country across the big pond.
Here in Europe, basic consumer rights say that you can sell whatever you leagally paid for, including software, even if the EULA says otherwise.
If microsoft doesn't like that, they can come and battle with the EU governement, or stop selling their products out here.
Roger.
Or, for 1/4 the price you can pack together 2x75GB drives in a raid 0 array, get 30x as much space AND get the same bandwidth.
There should be two parameters in every "performance" measure: Bandwidth and latency.
Depending on what you're doing, having a low
latency can make a BIG difference.
Take a large area on your disk, pick a random 1k block, and read it. Repeat. 6G disks of a few years back could do about 40 to 60 of these requests per second. Modern disks can do maybe 100 or 200.
The RAM disk will keep on doing about 100 Mb per second: That's 1000 times better performance than the rotating media disk, even if both do 100Mb per second in streaming mode.....
Roger.
Also the fact that "power consumed" is proportional to the number of RAM cells. Sure they use very little: One of those battery backed up thingies will keep 32k alive for lots of years. But at 1G, you're going to be feeding 30000 times more cells. And smaller cells means larger leakage.
Roger.
How dangerous is it to keep using it while waiting for the replacement part?"
If an electrical apparatus consumes 10W of power, then that's about the amount of "heat" that it will produce (unless it moves stuff in the real world).
Normally that would require say 20 degrees heat-difference between the adapter and the room. So, the adapter will become 40 degrees if your room-temperature is 20.
If you thermally isolate the adapter, then still that 10W of heat will have to leave the adapter+isolation. If the isolation is good it will increase the thermal resistance by a factor of ten, and by that time the temperature of the adapter will become 220 degrees centigrade. At that point, some components will give up, and they might start a fire.
Thus: DO NOT use the adapter while thermally isolated. Keep it cool. Ventilate well. Don't put it on the couch, especially not with a cushion on top. Put it on a table.
Roger.
A friend has a Raid array with 6 disks. He has had 9 out of 10 go bad. He was allowed to return the 10th disk without having to wait for it to go bad.
Roger.
Western Digital drives, and bad luck with Maxtor drives, when Maxtor is the one who makes the drives Western Digital distributes (read: slap a new label on them, and you're done with WD's involvement)
Hi,
I'm in the data-recovery business. That makes me "recognize" many drives by their looks, and not by their labels. So even if a drive has an "HP" label, I recognize it as a "quantum Atlas" or a seagate.
WD makes different drives from Maxtor. They are really different.
Maxtor bought the disk division of "quantum". Thus we're starting to see quantum drives labelled "maxtor".
Roger.
They said that they don't have to use a double opt-in.
I got an Email a couple of weeks back that I had opted in "in the last 6 months or so" to get their spam. That was sent to an Email address that I haven't used for 5 years.
The general trick is that with "simple opt-in" the spammer gets to hire a friend who will "opt-in" for a million of HIS friends.
Roger.
Firstly - not all calls are barred - merely calls for marketing purposes.
AHHHH!!! That's why they always tell me they are doing some market research.
Roger.
How long before these things can power my handheld?"
Pretty long: Handhelds are simply using more power than is theoretically available....
Roger.
and are totally silent. Hydrogen in one end...
electricity out the other.
.... In principle. In practise there may be some fans and pumps to keep the cool parts cool and the hot parts hot.
Roger.
My server got hit 800 times by 189 unique hosts so far. Ehmm. Make that 191 while writing this message....
Roger.
(Though that would assume the planes hit at the levels that were intended.)
I was going to write the response you did: The collapse of the buildings was likely not intended.
Landing a plane is easy if you have a 5 mile x 3 mile landing square. However, landing on a 100 feet wide strip 5 miles long is reasonably easy. Landing in the right 2 miles of the landing strip is however much harder: You have to make estimates about your vertical position, multiply that by 10 or fifteen and compare that to the length you have to the start of the runway.
So, to hit one of the towers, you level the plane, decend to the level where you see new york below the horizon and the twin towers above the horizon. Then keep the nose aimed exactly at them, and you'll hit the tower without any trouble.
You need a 1 hour flying lesson in a chessna to learn how to do this.
That second plane hitting the tower, which was caught on tape, didn't do it the easy way.
Anyway, controlling the height is much harder than controlling the place. Striking the tower was the goal, and they achieved that.
Roger.
The server for wtc-top.com seems to be down.
U :w ww.wtc-top.com/funfacts.html+wtc+facts&hl=en
Read the google-cache at:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:pAFmM6tWlq
Roger.
Finding examples of four, simultaneously suicidal, pilots on American carriers is, well, ridiculous.
Agreed. And you can't walk into the cockpit and put a gun to the pilot's head and say: "Please fly me into the WTC tower, as low as you can... ".
The hijacker will have had to walk into the cockpit, kill two pilots, and sit at the 'wheel' himself. Possibly the "lockable door" to the cockpit provides enough privacy for a lone hijacker to do his deed. An occasional shot through the door would keep people from breaking it down.
If the pilot of the PA plane had heard about the WTC, and found someone on HIS plane coming into the cockpit, my brother suggests that the best reaction is: shut off all motors, pull up the nose, untill the plane stalls. At that point in time there is likely not enough time to switch pilots, and recover the plane.
Note that the pilot brave enough to do this is in fact committing suicide, albeit just say 5 minutes before an otherwise certain death.
Roger.
3) Allow ENUM users to set 'privacy policies' on their ENUM, including 'no unsolicited promotional material'.
The problem is that about 50% of the spam I get claims that I subscribed for it. Or I entered my Email address "somewhere".
About a week ago, I got a spam on an Email address that I haven't used for over 5 years. Well, they claimed that I subscribed for their junk "in the last 6 months or so".
When you would start to bother them about it, they claim they get their addresses "from all over the place" and that they don't remember who gave them YOUR email.
The legislation should include a requirement to keep track of how you get your email addresses, and that it's an offense of not being able to prove the "he subscribed for our junk".
Roger.
Sun has forth code in the firmware. That's MUCH slower than the 16 bit legacy we have for DOS.
Roger.
what are some specific real-world applications of such a device?
There are lots of devices that you expect to be ready for use within a second or so after you turn them on. More and more of these devices are getting more and more complicated. To the level that these would run a real operating system like Linux.
I've tested a "digital TV decoder" box. It would take at least 20 seconds to boot. So you turn on the box, and have to wait quite a while before it can be operated. It was slow as hell in anything you'd do, and the guys writing the software hadn't heard about "user interface design". So for instance, if you pressed "channel up" it would take a couple of seconds for the device to react. If that's a technical restriction on digital TV channel decoding, then that's fine with me. But in the meanwhile you really NEED to provide feedback about the channel switch by updating the front panel!
Roger.
first commercially available DVD recorder,
I walked into my show a couple of weeks ago, and they told me they had the DVD burner that belonged with the dvd writable media. No problem.
Price: Around $600.
Roger.
IMHO, the real reason why bluetooth won't make it is this: I saw an ad: "Bluetooth protocol stack in only 27k of code memory!!!!"
I'd want bluetooth connectivity on my PIC from microchip. These come with 1k up to something like 4k of program memory. You can do (probably a bit limited) tcp/ip in them (Search slashdot for the smallest web server, and you'll find a couple of references), but if the bluetooth protocol stack requires 27k of code, that will never fit. And TCP/IP lends itself to implementing part. I expect the bluetooth protocol not to be so lenient.
Anyway, a cheap coffeemachine costs $20, You'd want one with connectivity for say $40, and that would mean you can spend $5 for the PIC from Microchip, but not much more. A microcontroller with a separate ROM is already going to be much too expensive.
Roger.