Ehr.. sorry, I just want music. I don't want no fancy packaging, bonus cards, air miles, shiny discs or whatever. All I want is the music, stored on my computer where I can do what it what I want.
Jockeying CD and DVD discs has gotten to the point of annoying me. Hence why I have a simple remote controlled jukebox/Tivo style system that can play or display anything I want, whenever I want.
Re:The Kernel Can Take a Hint
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The default kernel behaviour is WRONG. The whole idea of memory is to put in stuff that will be likely to be accessed again. How likely is it that you will be watching a 1 GB movie again?
Of course, the Kernel will have no idea about watching movies, but it stil can distinguish this "unimportant" data from data that do needs to be cached. The most important way to distinguish this data from data that does need caching is how fast it is needed in the first place.
When I do a grep on the kernel tree, you'll find that your harddisk speed is bottle neck; it is worth caching this data as grepping from memory would enhance its performance.
When I play a movie, the harddisk is not the bottleneck, in fact, NOTHING is a bottle neck, as my movie would be stuttering and unwatchable otherwise. This data is not worth caching (atleast not worth caching so much of it to the point of swapping out all else).
This goes for most media streams, but also for interaction with the internet (downloads/uploads/p2p). There's no need to keep a 1 GB file cached when that file has "accumulated" cache space in the course of an hour or more (ie, slow I/O); if it was important enough to warrant caching, I'd think the harddisk would have been the bottleneck in the first place...
--Swilver
Slow I/O should not be cached indefinitely
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have a Windows XP and a Linux box (2.6.4 kernel), both with 1 GB and both running without swap. The reason for this is simple; when I have my systems running a while doing nothing but serving files (slow downloads, or simply watching a big 2 hour movie), the machines will both be totally unresponsive when I get back to get some real work done; literally everyhing needs to be swapped back in because the machines use like 800 MB of it for cache buffers.
Both OS's have filled their RAM with completely useless cached files (part of a 1 GB+ AVI for example, that I will most likely not be watching again for several months), swapping out all the programs I have running.
Both OS's really need to learn how to deal with Slow I/O. If I/O is only being done at a rate that is a fraction of my harddisk speed (say 300-400 kB/sec), which occurs for stuff like watching a movie, playing music, serving an upload over DSL, then this data is really not worth caching for longer than a few minutes. Even if I do need it again, it will probably again be at just 300-400 kB/sec, something a harddisk can take care of quite comfortably.
Speeding laws are not the result of a very narrow special interests group. They exist because everyone wants to minimize the number of people killed in day to day traffic (or for any reason).
Even though a lot of drivers hate them, and break these laws a lot, they are a minority compared to all people that partake in traffic (pedestrians, cyclists and all the drivers that DO respect these laws).
Copyright laws are quite different in that respect. Most people donot think twice when they give a friend a copy of some of their favourite music, a recording of a show they missed on tv or when they print out the lyrics of a song they heard from a website.
Nobody gets killed, no costs are incured by the copyright holder because you used your own materials (CD-R, CD-writer, internet bandwidth, printer, etc..). The majority of people don't see any problem with it, just a small minority that are seeing their business disappear.
It makes me wonder what would happen if we could make copies (at cost) of physical objects at some point in the future, by just scanning some object and adding some raw materials...
I've managed to get my download drive (NTFS) so fragmented that the defrag tool in Win2k/XP is unable to defragment it, no matter how often you run it.
The files on the drive had an average size of 200 MB, were downloaded in 1kB increments several files at a time over a period of a week on average per file.
The reason for it failing on defraging (it doesn't say it fails, it just doesn't do much and stops after a while) is because the free space was also so badly fragmented that it couldn't even defragment a single file (it expects there is free space in a single chunk large enough to defragment one file... which is hard since the files are all quite large). The worst fragmented files had all well over 5000 fragments, and none less than 100 orso.
Even after making more than 50% space free on the drive, it was still suffering from fragmented free space and refused to defrag. After a while I decided it was far easier to just copy the whole drive (30 GB) and copy it back... writing the 30 GB back was about 20-30 times faster compared to reading the drive for the initial copy...
On a side note, I've put the exact same stress on a ext3fs disc, and it also fragmented very badly, despite claims that ext3fs doesn't need defragmentation "because it won't fragment your files much". If free space was also very fragmented, I cannot say, but I assume it was as deleting a very fragmented file would result in a very fragmented area of free space.
I personally use an unupdated, no service packs, illegal Windows XP at home. I don't even WANT microsoft's updates as they're sure to update stuff I donot want.
For security, I simply have the box behind my Linux firewall, never use programs like IE, Mediaplayer and Outlook and disabled all "services" that have no business being on on a simple single user machine.
The alternatives I use are Firefox, Mediaplayer Classic and Thunderbird. So far I never had any spyware, nor any viruses, not much of anything really -- makes me wonder really what all the fuss is about.
What if I really donot know the pass-phrase at all, and cannot retrieve it in any way?
I've been thinking about a simple scheme where the password would get destroyed as soon as my computer is moved to a different location (ie, it's stolen by burglars, RIAA, police, etc...)
It can be as simple as having a few dice lined up in your computer that get hussled up when you move it. No way I could remember what they were after you moved them, but when I needed my password I could simple read it from the dice...
Yeah I know, I'm paranoid, but I simply donot like giving up encryption keys just because there's a piece of text called a "law" that says I have to...
Encrypted protocols, or simply protocols that donot send the data as a stream. A simple way to defeat these filters would probably include sending all odd numbered bytes first... try fingerprinting that:)
They'll still want to grow, but up to a point. You see, having 10% market share means you earn 10% of the total market value minus 10% in taxes, so in effect you make 9% of the total market value. You will definitely want to grow bigger to 20% market share, as then you would earn 16% of the total market value.
About options #1 to #3, and why it is so important that the Internet is closely tied to Open Source...
The Internet is currently one of the fastest growth markets. The idea is that as the internet grows, so does the amount of open source development.
As the internet grows, the market for software applications for the internet grows, the amount of people exposed to open source grows and the amount of people developing open source applications grows.
Easily circumvented with encrypted traffic, or even using ports other than the default for your P2P apps.
To be honest, schemes like these appal me. It reeks of the "tax" on CD-R and DVD-R media we have here, just because you MIGHT use them to store copyrighted works -- the best part being that if you DO put copyrighted works on them (having paid the tax), you're still commiting an offense.
Fortunately they haven't taxed Hard Disks yet, they're about as cheap as DVD-R, will probably outlive most cheap DVD-media (try reading some after 2 years), don't require swapping, are faster and can be rewritten as often as you like.
Actually, this is not a problem. If software refuses to open/edit a significant percentage of pictures, people will look for other software. The more this mark is abused, the less copies of software that supports it will be sold as it slowly becomes unusable.
End result would be that the mark is outlawed for everything except currency (I seriously doubt such a law could be enforced), or they'll be forced to drop the protection altogether to avoid bankrupting the copier/scanner/image processing industry.
Simply add this Eurion Constellation mark to all your pictures, documents, etc.. Programs incorporating a mechanism that prevents you from altering such pictures will simply become unusable up to the point nobody wants to use them anymore or the protection is removed.
Trackers donot have any infringing material. A lot of trackers are public. Anyone can create a Torrent file and point it to a random tracker, and the tracker will have no idea whether the content it is keeping user lists for is legal or not.
It's like having a public forum where users can register themselves as interested parties for a certain file, so they can find each other and help each other to get that file. The forum doesn't know whether the file is infringing or not, it's just a medium to get into contact with others -- except it's all automated.
None of the file sharing tools currently available provide any kind of anonymity. You may be anonymous while browsing for files and doing searches as these usually flow through somekind of distributed network, but once the downloading (or uploading) starts the other side will know who you are as they have your IP address.
The main reason for this is lack of bandwidth. If you want anonymity even while downloading, someone else will have to act as an intermediary (preferably more than one). Those intermediaries though will have to download some data, and then upload it again to you which gains them nothing (in other words, it wastes a lot of bandwidth). Everyone will need to provide some bandwidth for this purpose to make this even remotely feasible.
Only Freenet currently does this that I'm aware of, and it's a lot slower for that very reason. Bandwidth however seems to be subject to Moore's law; soon there should be plenty of it, and then you can have real anonymity.
Bram seems surprised that sites like suprnova stay up, while all they are providing is a few tiny files with a load of checksums that nobody owns any rights over.
Even trackers are not doing anything illegal, as they are just collecting lists of people downloading the same file and provide this list to anyone who is interested (there's no illegal content there either).
The only illegal content comes from the users themselves, and its chopped in thousands of pieces, making them hard to identify.
You'd have to wonder why these researchers would even believe that using neural networks or whatever form of AI they come up with will even work, when not even a real human person sitting next to me working on the same program or document can accurately anticipate my needs...
I'm sorry for those 3000 victims, but it's impossible to make driving 100% safe. There is ALWAYS going to be people getting killed, no matter what you do. At some point people will just have to accept that there will be traffic victims even if you treat everyone as potential criminals.
What people donot seem to realize is that the number of deaths scales quite nicely to the amount of drivers on the road and general size of the population. Every year there are more drivers, and thus more deaths, yet a huge uproar is raised each time the absolute death toll rises.
If M$ indeed forces all code to be signed on Windows (by nagging each time if it isn't signed; just like you are practically forced to install Flash player because of the continous nagging if you don't), then I think there will be some major backlash.
I can't help but wondering if they will be actually that stupid though, as it would surely mean that Linux and other alternatives will become very popular...
Yes, stored in a closed dark cabinet since they were burned 20 months before.
> Were they all burned by the same CD burner?
That's likely, as it was a media test.
> Were they all burned from the same source (a single CD, hard drive, network, etc.)?
I don't see how that is even relevant, but that also seems likely.
Burning conditions are likely to be accurately duplicated for each of the CD-R's as it was a quality test of the media 20 months ago. It wouldn't do to use different testing circumstances. They claim to have stored these media for 20 months locked up tight, and now tested them again.
The article doesn't go in much detail about the results, but claims that a significant portion of the CD-R's tested were badly degraded since their initial test. In other words they were unreadable in some areas or a lot of error correction was required to get valid data -- they used a reader which can distinguish this.
My personal experience with CD-R's is not unlike this article. I have about 100 CD-R's of varying quality created about 5-6 years ago purely as backup (ie, they were never used after initial burning). They were stored in a closed box (I never left them lying around after backup) in my own home under normal circumstances (not refrigerated or anything).
Not too long ago I tried restoring the data, and found that almost all discs had problems reading, especially the files that were on the outer tracks. In most cases it was only possible to recover about 75% of each disc. Some of the discs had visible defects (bubbles, decolorations). Only a handful of discs were 100% intact. I used several different drives to read these, and had the best luck with CD Burning drives (mostly Plextor stuff), but even those would give up even though they could usually recovered 50-100 MB more than my other run-of-the-mill CD drives. The CD-R's I used were of varying quality, and I definitely bought a bad batch of about 25 orso (all badly damaged) -- none of the different brands and colors of discs I used seemed free of problems though.
I wonder when people realize just how silly it is that as a computer owner you have to "take action" and keep your system updated all the time so it can't be hacked.
Most users just want the box to darn well work. They turn on the machine, and want to do something with that machine which they determined before even turning it on -- they don't want to be bothered with stupid programs informing you about upgrades.. that's not what they turned on the box for.
The fact is that most people who use Windows do not understand that they need to update their OS in order to keep their computer running
If it isn't broken, do not fix it.
Known problems are better than unknown new ones.
If I have a computer which works and does what I want it to (even if it has some minor KNOWN quirks), there's no reason to "fix" it and run the risk of the "fix" breaking my perfectly working system.
Upgrades and Fixes are often the same thing in Microsoft's dictionary. Unfortunately, this means that if you just want exploit #35783 fixed, you have to upgrade your Internet Explorer, Direct X drivers, MediaPlayer, etc.. as they are "required" for this "software" to function "correctly".
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO they're written by anti-virus software companies. I'm sure that like any other business, they'd do anything to protect theirs.
Jockeying CD and DVD discs has gotten to the point of annoying me. Hence why I have a simple remote controlled jukebox/Tivo style system that can play or display anything I want, whenever I want.
Of course, the Kernel will have no idea about watching movies, but it stil can distinguish this "unimportant" data from data that do needs to be cached. The most important way to distinguish this data from data that does need caching is how fast it is needed in the first place.
When I do a grep on the kernel tree, you'll find that your harddisk speed is bottle neck; it is worth caching this data as grepping from memory would enhance its performance.
When I play a movie, the harddisk is not the bottleneck, in fact, NOTHING is a bottle neck, as my movie would be stuttering and unwatchable otherwise. This data is not worth caching (atleast not worth caching so much of it to the point of swapping out all else).
This goes for most media streams, but also for interaction with the internet (downloads/uploads/p2p). There's no need to keep a 1 GB file cached when that file has "accumulated" cache space in the course of an hour or more (ie, slow I/O); if it was important enough to warrant caching, I'd think the harddisk would have been the bottleneck in the first place...
--Swilver
Both OS's have filled their RAM with completely useless cached files (part of a 1 GB+ AVI for example, that I will most likely not be watching again for several months), swapping out all the programs I have running.
Both OS's really need to learn how to deal with Slow I/O. If I/O is only being done at a rate that is a fraction of my harddisk speed (say 300-400 kB/sec), which occurs for stuff like watching a movie, playing music, serving an upload over DSL, then this data is really not worth caching for longer than a few minutes. Even if I do need it again, it will probably again be at just 300-400 kB/sec, something a harddisk can take care of quite comfortably.
--Swilver
Even though a lot of drivers hate them, and break these laws a lot, they are a minority compared to all people that partake in traffic (pedestrians, cyclists and all the drivers that DO respect these laws).
Copyright laws are quite different in that respect. Most people donot think twice when they give a friend a copy of some of their favourite music, a recording of a show they missed on tv or when they print out the lyrics of a song they heard from a website.
Nobody gets killed, no costs are incured by the copyright holder because you used your own materials (CD-R, CD-writer, internet bandwidth, printer, etc..). The majority of people don't see any problem with it, just a small minority that are seeing their business disappear.
It makes me wonder what would happen if we could make copies (at cost) of physical objects at some point in the future, by just scanning some object and adding some raw materials...
--Swilver
The files on the drive had an average size of 200 MB, were downloaded in 1kB increments several files at a time over a period of a week on average per file.
The reason for it failing on defraging (it doesn't say it fails, it just doesn't do much and stops after a while) is because the free space was also so badly fragmented that it couldn't even defragment a single file (it expects there is free space in a single chunk large enough to defragment one file... which is hard since the files are all quite large). The worst fragmented files had all well over 5000 fragments, and none less than 100 orso.
Even after making more than 50% space free on the drive, it was still suffering from fragmented free space and refused to defrag. After a while I decided it was far easier to just copy the whole drive (30 GB) and copy it back... writing the 30 GB back was about 20-30 times faster compared to reading the drive for the initial copy...
On a side note, I've put the exact same stress on a ext3fs disc, and it also fragmented very badly, despite claims that ext3fs doesn't need defragmentation "because it won't fragment your files much". If free space was also very fragmented, I cannot say, but I assume it was as deleting a very fragmented file would result in a very fragmented area of free space.
--Swilver
I personally use an unupdated, no service packs, illegal Windows XP at home. I don't even WANT microsoft's updates as they're sure to update stuff I donot want.
For security, I simply have the box behind my Linux firewall, never use programs like IE, Mediaplayer and Outlook and disabled all "services" that have no business being on on a simple single user machine.
The alternatives I use are Firefox, Mediaplayer Classic and Thunderbird. So far I never had any spyware, nor any viruses, not much of anything really -- makes me wonder really what all the fuss is about.
--Swilver
I've been thinking about a simple scheme where the password would get destroyed as soon as my computer is moved to a different location (ie, it's stolen by burglars, RIAA, police, etc...)
It can be as simple as having a few dice lined up in your computer that get hussled up when you move it. No way I could remember what they were after you moved them, but when I needed my password I could simple read it from the dice...
Yeah I know, I'm paranoid, but I simply donot like giving up encryption keys just because there's a piece of text called a "law" that says I have to...
Encrypted protocols, or simply protocols that donot send the data as a stream. A simple way to defeat these filters would probably include sending all odd numbered bytes first... try fingerprinting that :)
About options #1 to #3, and why it is so important that the Internet is closely tied to Open Source...
The Internet is currently one of the fastest growth markets. The idea is that as the internet grows, so does the amount of open source development.
As the internet grows, the market for software applications for the internet grows, the amount of people exposed to open source grows and the amount of people developing open source applications grows.
Working link
To be honest, schemes like these appal me. It reeks of the "tax" on CD-R and DVD-R media we have here, just because you MIGHT use them to store copyrighted works -- the best part being that if you DO put copyrighted works on them (having paid the tax), you're still commiting an offense.
Fortunately they haven't taxed Hard Disks yet, they're about as cheap as DVD-R, will probably outlive most cheap DVD-media (try reading some after 2 years), don't require swapping, are faster and can be rewritten as often as you like.
End result would be that the mark is outlawed for everything except currency (I seriously doubt such a law could be enforced), or they'll be forced to drop the protection altogether to avoid bankrupting the copier/scanner/image processing industry.
Simply add this Eurion Constellation mark to all your pictures, documents, etc.. Programs incorporating a mechanism that prevents you from altering such pictures will simply become unusable up to the point nobody wants to use them anymore or the protection is removed.
Trackers donot have any infringing material. A lot of trackers are public. Anyone can create a Torrent file and point it to a random tracker, and the tracker will have no idea whether the content it is keeping user lists for is legal or not. It's like having a public forum where users can register themselves as interested parties for a certain file, so they can find each other and help each other to get that file. The forum doesn't know whether the file is infringing or not, it's just a medium to get into contact with others -- except it's all automated.
None of the file sharing tools currently available provide any kind of anonymity. You may be anonymous while browsing for files and doing searches as these usually flow through somekind of distributed network, but once the downloading (or uploading) starts the other side will know who you are as they have your IP address.
The main reason for this is lack of bandwidth. If you want anonymity even while downloading, someone else will have to act as an intermediary (preferably more than one). Those intermediaries though will have to download some data, and then upload it again to you which gains them nothing (in other words, it wastes a lot of bandwidth). Everyone will need to provide some bandwidth for this purpose to make this even remotely feasible.
Only Freenet currently does this that I'm aware of, and it's a lot slower for that very reason. Bandwidth however seems to be subject to Moore's law; soon there should be plenty of it, and then you can have real anonymity.
Even trackers are not doing anything illegal, as they are just collecting lists of people downloading the same file and provide this list to anyone who is interested (there's no illegal content there either).
The only illegal content comes from the users themselves, and its chopped in thousands of pieces, making them hard to identify.
You'd have to wonder why these researchers would even believe that using neural networks or whatever form of AI they come up with will even work, when not even a real human person sitting next to me working on the same program or document can accurately anticipate my needs...
I'm sorry for those 3000 victims, but it's impossible to make driving 100% safe. There is ALWAYS going to be people getting killed, no matter what you do. At some point people will just have to accept that there will be traffic victims even if you treat everyone as potential criminals.
What people donot seem to realize is that the number of deaths scales quite nicely to the amount of drivers on the road and general size of the population. Every year there are more drivers, and thus more deaths, yet a huge uproar is raised each time the absolute death toll rises.
Yes, I feel the same way.
If M$ indeed forces all code to be signed on Windows (by nagging each time if it isn't signed; just like you are practically forced to install Flash player because of the continous nagging if you don't), then I think there will be some major backlash.
I can't help but wondering if they will be actually that stupid though, as it would surely mean that Linux and other alternatives will become very popular...
> What speed was used to write the CDs?
The article doesn't say.
> Were they all stored in the same place?
Yes, stored in a closed dark cabinet since they were burned 20 months before.
> Were they all burned by the same CD burner?
That's likely, as it was a media test.
> Were they all burned from the same source (a single CD, hard drive, network, etc.)?
I don't see how that is even relevant, but that also seems likely.
Burning conditions are likely to be accurately duplicated for each of the CD-R's as it was a quality test of the media 20 months ago. It wouldn't do to use different testing circumstances. They claim to have stored these media for 20 months locked up tight, and now tested them again.
The article doesn't go in much detail about the results, but claims that a significant portion of the CD-R's tested were badly degraded since their initial test. In other words they were unreadable in some areas or a lot of error correction was required to get valid data -- they used a reader which can distinguish this.
My personal experience with CD-R's is not unlike this article. I have about 100 CD-R's of varying quality created about 5-6 years ago purely as backup (ie, they were never used after initial burning). They were stored in a closed box (I never left them lying around after backup) in my own home under normal circumstances (not refrigerated or anything).
Not too long ago I tried restoring the data, and found that almost all discs had problems reading, especially the files that were on the outer tracks. In most cases it was only possible to recover about 75% of each disc. Some of the discs had visible defects (bubbles, decolorations). Only a handful of discs were 100% intact. I used several different drives to read these, and had the best luck with CD Burning drives (mostly Plextor stuff), but even those would give up even though they could usually recovered 50-100 MB more than my other run-of-the-mill CD drives. The CD-R's I used were of varying quality, and I definitely bought a bad batch of about 25 orso (all badly damaged) -- none of the different brands and colors of discs I used seemed free of problems though.
I wonder when people realize just how silly it is that as a computer owner you have to "take action" and keep your system updated all the time so it can't be hacked.
Most users just want the box to darn well work. They turn on the machine, and want to do something with that machine which they determined before even turning it on -- they don't want to be bothered with stupid programs informing you about upgrades.. that's not what they turned on the box for.
Known problems are better than unknown new ones.
If I have a computer which works and does what I want it to (even if it has some minor KNOWN quirks), there's no reason to "fix" it and run the risk of the "fix" breaking my perfectly working system.
Upgrades and Fixes are often the same thing in Microsoft's dictionary. Unfortunately, this means that if you just want exploit #35783 fixed, you have to upgrade your Internet Explorer, Direct X drivers, MediaPlayer, etc.. as they are "required" for this "software" to function "correctly".