I used a Seagate Medalist 6531, about 6.5GB, and the additional space was about 4.5GB. It works exactly the way they say it does. Unfortunately, the partition table shows that the second partition starts about 30% of the way into the space allocated by the first partition table, and ends at the same point.
Filling the new partition up with data quickly overwrites the original partition. I used RAR files so I could verify that the checksums went bad, though I need not have bothered, since the problem presented itself in the directory structure fairly quickly, and was obvious from the partition table entries.
I had some time to kill an a bunch of old hard drives sitting around, so I thought what the heck, try it. I have to admit, after creating the second partition and formatting it with a full (rather than quick) format, everything worked perfectly and I got some insight into how those kids must have felt when they discovered this. It was pretty good fun. Like striking oil in your back yard. At least until the man from company arrives to find out what happened to the pipe.
I figured out why Norton Ghost does this. It creates a file called VIRTPART in the root of C: to hold all of the code that it needs to boot the PC into their little window manager and make the "ghost" image of the system drive. It then creates a second entry in the partition table indicating a partition beginning at the physical location of the beginning of the VIRTPART file, and ending at the end of the physical drive. Ghost makes this second partition the active partition, and the machine reboots into this partition to do its business. When the operation is finished, Ghost makes the first (real) partition active, deletes the phony partition table entry and reboots the machine. If you interrupt the process, Ghost can't put things back to normal, and you are left with a new partition that is the same size as the space between the beginning of VIRTPART and the end of your drive. In my case, VIRTPART started about 2GB from the beginning of the drive, hence my "recovered" space was about 4.5GB on a 6.5GB drive.
It's actually pretty nifty, and consistent with Norton's reputation for getting its hooks deep into the machine and the OS.
I'm glad I tried it before I posted, because there was enough dissent here that I couldn't be sure what was truth. I also learned an interesting trick for booting into virtual partitions.
I'm sure that there are hard drives out there that have unused space as shipped, but it occurs to me that any technique for recovering that space will have the following characteristics:
(1) The information will be specific to a single model or group of models of hard drives.
(2) It will involve a firmware or hardware modification, rather than just the partition table.
Microsoft also makes a great for-pay memory tester: Microsoft Office.
Many, many times over the years when I have suspected bad memory but the usual tools (I own Micro Scope and a few others) don't indicate a problem, MS Office has boldly crashed where no other software dared to go.
Swap out the memory for known good, and it runs fine. Mostly, my customers were complaining about one MS product or another crashing, anyway, so this was a "real-world" test.
Strangely, it doesn't seem to matter much which application, though for improved reliability I usually start up Word, Excel and Access at the same time. It usually isn't necessary even to do anything with them. Sometimes it is helpful to turn off cache.
Even better, the user often owns a copy of the "diagnostic software".
Actually, I haven't used MS Office for any other purpose for a long time.
I don't know if I would say "a lot". I just reviewed the Spirit raw data, and the total number of L4,L5,L6 image sets to date is 27 (not including sets showing only the sundial, instrumentation, or some weird light), but of those only six include the horizon.
For those who wish to combine the RGB channels themselves, here is the breakdown for Spirit:
Sol007 - one image set,
Sol008 - one image set (1 horizon),
Sol009 - twelve image sets (5 horizon),
Sol011 - five image sets,
Sol012 - four image sets,
Sol026 - two image sets,
Sol030 - two image sets
I'm pretty sure the data from even the best day, Sol009, is insufficient to combine into a "true colour" panorama (like the one they released on 12-Jan-2004), with only 5 horizon shots. The aberrant colours in that image and the others around that time gave rise to this whole controversy, so it is significant that we don't have enough L4,L5,L6 sets to create a nice big picture.
Interestingly, they have added more images to Sols 9, 11 and 12 since my first and second analyses of the raw data. I believe that they are now posting web pages with blank spaces to indicate missing data, which would be very helpful to those of us who wish to know when all the data has been posted.
Anyway, it is pretty obvious that Spirit is capable of doing L4,L5,L6 sets, and also that there were some holes in the raw data as originally posted at JPL. I suppose this whole issue was a failure of NASA to understand the need for RGB channel images for P.R. purposes. They have probably never had their data examined carefully by so many people.
It is a misconception that you can use Photoshop or some other image processing program to produce a "true colour" or RGB image when one channel represents infrared data. Here's why:
If you use an infrared filter like the L2 filter on Sprit's Pancam, you get data that represents only things which reflect or emit light in that particular region of the spectrum. Anything that emits light ONLY in the red will be absent from the data set. It is possible for something that appears as a fairly monochromatic red to be entirely invisible. How can you use Photoshop to put back something that is invisible? You cannot.
You can adjust an individual colour in the image using a reference image taken with the appropriate filters, and that colour will then appear correct. Other colours, however, will remain distorted.
Worse, you cannot possibly know the emission/reflectivity spectrum of things on Mars, so any image you produce that appears to show the sundial colour chips correctly may distort terribly the Mars components of the image. It is not really very interesting to see a colour corrected photo of the sundial, is it? We could have achieved that without sending the rover all the way to Mars.
Nope, using a relatively narrow-band-pass infrared filter like the L2 simply leaves out information about the red part of the spectrum, and extrapolation only goes so far in recreating that data. Non-linear data - discontinuities within the missing portion of the spectrum - are simply gone, never to be retrieved.
Also, NASA is lying. Perhaps 'lying' is too strong a word, but they are either deceiving us or they are operating under a serious misconception.
"We just made a mistake," said Dr. James F. Bell III, the lead scientist for the camera. "It's really just a mess-up." Well, NASA claims to be releasing the raw data from Spirit on its web site, but the raw data does not contain any image sets for the panoramas taken with the L4, L5, L6 filters. They have almost never used the L4 filter.
So either the "mess up" is that they have forgotten to use the L4 filter from day one (unlikely, since each photograph taken presents another opportunity to switch to the L4) or that they have L4 images but they are not releasing them, in which case they really are not releasing the raw data.
The argument about the L2 being better for science is bogus. There's no way that NASA scientists are doing serious mineral analysis with a pretty, stitched-together wide view panorama. That's just rubbish. they would be looking at detail images, and possibly comparing between detail-level images. The panoramas are strictly for public consumption, and maybe office posters at JPL.
It's probably not a conspiracy, but it is a mystery.
Yes, Build 1069 of Windows XP 64-bit includes Media player. It is a common misconception that Media Player was left out of the OS, but it is untrue.
I have been running 1069 for several weeks, and Media Player has been working fine with two exceptions: it has no support for DVDs and I have had some trouble installing nonstandard codecs. I am not sure why.
Build 1069 also includes a 64-bit build of IE, which is noticeably very much faster at drawing and reflowing complicated pages as compared with the 32-bit version on the same machine under old Windows XP.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a single benchmark compiled for AMD64 in order to do further speed testing, nor in fact any other AMD64 applications for real-world type comparisons. Apparently Sisoft Sandra has been released for AMD64, but I cannot find it.
Expanding zip archives with WinRAR is so fast on my AMD 3200+ system with 1GB DDR400 and MSI MB that, at first, I sat there waiting for something to happen, not realizing the operation had completed without raising an hourglass. I suspect that this may be a chip architecture effect, rather than a speed advantage of XP64, however, since it seems fast under XP32 and my version of WinRAR is certainly not complied for AMD64.
The only real problem is drivers. I managed to get a Promise SATA driver running well in SATA (rather than RAID) mode by downloading the very latest drivers from Promise.
I got that letter from Rogers in Toronto yesterday.
This is a bald-faced scam. No matter what the absolute capacity of their network, they can reduce usage by constantly sending out these letters to the top 1% of their customers, based upon traffic measurements.
Each week, or month, they pick the top 1% and send out these letters. Bandwidth usage goes down, response times go up, and the need to upgrade capacity and infrastructure goes away.
There will always be a top 1%, and there will always be a significant difference between the bandwidth requirements of power users versus mom & pop emailing the kids.
Considering that their AUP and EUA agreements do not spell out specific limits on usage, they are using the argument "you are different, so you are bad" in place of a proper contract for service. Offering unlimited bandwidth then playing this game is nothing short of fraud, and I intend to stand up against it.
When Home Depot comes into a community with its deep pockets, undersells the local-owned hardware stores until they are forced to close, then jacks up their prices, I call it obscene. When ISP's like Rogers do the same thing then change their terms of service unilaterally, I call it criminal.
I am sure that they would like nothing better than for me to go away and get DSL, but I shall not offer them the satisfaction. I'll fight these bastards until I'm dead. I have already served notice that they will face legal action if they cut off my connection.
NASA should never have used a Sony WHITE memory stick with built-in DRM. That rover probably took a picture of something that looked a little too much like a Disney character, and - bam - total shutdown!
Ack! All of this arguing all over the Internet, endless postings and emails to NASA and nobody is asking (or answering) the single relevant question:
Why isn't the Spirit team using the L4 filter?
The L4 filter passes light at 600nm, right on the red channel for RGB. Combine that with L5 + L6 and we have a perfect RGB channel image to end all this bickering.
Yes, it would be a narrower frequency band and less scientifically interesting because of the lack of sensitivity in the near infrared. Yes it would be affected by colour absorption in the martian atmosphere. Yes it would be an RGB channel image rather than a true human visual image (no digital image can be). But it would be the closest thing to the kind of snapshot a human standing on mars with a digital camera would take. It would be something we could all relate to directly.
I thought that the whole idea with Spirit was to make it anthropomorphic: binocular vision, 1.5 metres tall, mobile, etc. So why not do a couple of panoramas in RGB? Why not look around before launching into the science?
In fact, Spirit has taken a couple of images with L4, but mainly for calibration against the sundial or as part of a test rotation through all filters. Almost all of the component images for the panoramas are taken with L2, L5 & L6, resulting in the present confusion when these are mapped back into an RGB image. So we know the L4 filter works.
Chris Hadfield (NASA Robotics, astronaut, colonel in the Canadian military) spoke in Toronto this past Friday, and he made some interesting comments about civilian versus government/military exploration of space.
He said that we need to establish a profit motive for exploring space. He likened the situation to the impetus given to the European exploration and colonization of the world in the 15th-19th centuries by the promise of wealth.
When asked about the X-Prize, however, he said that he thought that the exploration of space was too dangerous for private corporations and individuals, and that it should be left up to governments who could be expected to take "proper safety precautions".
He also praised dubya for clarifying the path to space and said that he hoped that things would move along sharply now that a "popular and well-respected president" had shown us the way.
Until the End of the World is my favourite movie of all time.
It worth seeing for the scene where William Hurt is flying a small plane over the Australian Outback and an EMP kills the engine. The background music is Peter Gabriel's "Blood Of Eden". That scene, and what Hurt says to Solveig Dommartin is one if the things that will stay with me forever.
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I used a Seagate Medalist 6531, about 6.5GB, and the additional space was about 4.5GB. It works exactly the way they say it does. Unfortunately, the partition table shows that the second partition starts about 30% of the way into the space allocated by the first partition table, and ends at the same point.
Filling the new partition up with data quickly overwrites the original partition. I used RAR files so I could verify that the checksums went bad, though I need not have bothered, since the problem presented itself in the directory structure fairly quickly, and was obvious from the partition table entries.
I had some time to kill an a bunch of old hard drives sitting around, so I thought what the heck, try it. I have to admit, after creating the second partition and formatting it with a full (rather than quick) format, everything worked perfectly and I got some insight into how those kids must have felt when they discovered this. It was pretty good fun. Like striking oil in your back yard. At least until the man from company arrives to find out what happened to the pipe.
I figured out why Norton Ghost does this. It creates a file called VIRTPART in the root of C: to hold all of the code that it needs to boot the PC into their little window manager and make the "ghost" image of the system drive. It then creates a second entry in the partition table indicating a partition beginning at the physical location of the beginning of the VIRTPART file, and ending at the end of the physical drive. Ghost makes this second partition the active partition, and the machine reboots into this partition to do its business. When the operation is finished, Ghost makes the first (real) partition active, deletes the phony partition table entry and reboots the machine. If you interrupt the process, Ghost can't put things back to normal, and you are left with a new partition that is the same size as the space between the beginning of VIRTPART and the end of your drive. In my case, VIRTPART started about 2GB from the beginning of the drive, hence my "recovered" space was about 4.5GB on a 6.5GB drive.
It's actually pretty nifty, and consistent with Norton's reputation for getting its hooks deep into the machine and the OS.
I'm glad I tried it before I posted, because there was enough dissent here that I couldn't be sure what was truth. I also learned an interesting trick for booting into virtual partitions.
I'm sure that there are hard drives out there that have unused space as shipped, but it occurs to me that any technique for recovering that space will have the following characteristics: (1) The information will be specific to a single model or group of models of hard drives. (2) It will involve a firmware or hardware modification, rather than just the partition table.
Many, many times over the years when I have suspected bad memory but the usual tools (I own Micro Scope and a few others) don't indicate a problem, MS Office has boldly crashed where no other software dared to go.
Swap out the memory for known good, and it runs fine. Mostly, my customers were complaining about one MS product or another crashing, anyway, so this was a "real-world" test.
Strangely, it doesn't seem to matter much which application, though for improved reliability I usually start up Word, Excel and Access at the same time. It usually isn't necessary even to do anything with them. Sometimes it is helpful to turn off cache.
Even better, the user often owns a copy of the "diagnostic software".
Actually, I haven't used MS Office for any other purpose for a long time.
For those who wish to combine the RGB channels themselves, here is the breakdown for Spirit:
Sol007 - one image set, Sol008 - one image set (1 horizon), Sol009 - twelve image sets (5 horizon), Sol011 - five image sets, Sol012 - four image sets, Sol026 - two image sets, Sol030 - two image sets
I'm pretty sure the data from even the best day, Sol009, is insufficient to combine into a "true colour" panorama (like the one they released on 12-Jan-2004), with only 5 horizon shots. The aberrant colours in that image and the others around that time gave rise to this whole controversy, so it is significant that we don't have enough L4,L5,L6 sets to create a nice big picture.
Interestingly, they have added more images to Sols 9, 11 and 12 since my first and second analyses of the raw data. I believe that they are now posting web pages with blank spaces to indicate missing data, which would be very helpful to those of us who wish to know when all the data has been posted.
Anyway, it is pretty obvious that Spirit is capable of doing L4,L5,L6 sets, and also that there were some holes in the raw data as originally posted at JPL. I suppose this whole issue was a failure of NASA to understand the need for RGB channel images for P.R. purposes. They have probably never had their data examined carefully by so many people.
Now I'm off to look at Opportunity again!
If you use an infrared filter like the L2 filter on Sprit's Pancam, you get data that represents only things which reflect or emit light in that particular region of the spectrum. Anything that emits light ONLY in the red will be absent from the data set. It is possible for something that appears as a fairly monochromatic red to be entirely invisible. How can you use Photoshop to put back something that is invisible? You cannot.
You can adjust an individual colour in the image using a reference image taken with the appropriate filters, and that colour will then appear correct. Other colours, however, will remain distorted.
Worse, you cannot possibly know the emission/reflectivity spectrum of things on Mars, so any image you produce that appears to show the sundial colour chips correctly may distort terribly the Mars components of the image. It is not really very interesting to see a colour corrected photo of the sundial, is it? We could have achieved that without sending the rover all the way to Mars.
Nope, using a relatively narrow-band-pass infrared filter like the L2 simply leaves out information about the red part of the spectrum, and extrapolation only goes so far in recreating that data. Non-linear data - discontinuities within the missing portion of the spectrum - are simply gone, never to be retrieved.
Also, NASA is lying. Perhaps 'lying' is too strong a word, but they are either deceiving us or they are operating under a serious misconception.
"We just made a mistake," said Dr. James F. Bell III, the lead scientist for the camera. "It's really just a mess-up." Well, NASA claims to be releasing the raw data from Spirit on its web site, but the raw data does not contain any image sets for the panoramas taken with the L4, L5, L6 filters. They have almost never used the L4 filter.
So either the "mess up" is that they have forgotten to use the L4 filter from day one (unlikely, since each photograph taken presents another opportunity to switch to the L4) or that they have L4 images but they are not releasing them, in which case they really are not releasing the raw data.
The argument about the L2 being better for science is bogus. There's no way that NASA scientists are doing serious mineral analysis with a pretty, stitched-together wide view panorama. That's just rubbish. they would be looking at detail images, and possibly comparing between detail-level images. The panoramas are strictly for public consumption, and maybe office posters at JPL.
It's probably not a conspiracy, but it is a mystery.
I have been running 1069 for several weeks, and Media Player has been working fine with two exceptions: it has no support for DVDs and I have had some trouble installing nonstandard codecs. I am not sure why.
Build 1069 also includes a 64-bit build of IE, which is noticeably very much faster at drawing and reflowing complicated pages as compared with the 32-bit version on the same machine under old Windows XP.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a single benchmark compiled for AMD64 in order to do further speed testing, nor in fact any other AMD64 applications for real-world type comparisons. Apparently Sisoft Sandra has been released for AMD64, but I cannot find it.
Expanding zip archives with WinRAR is so fast on my AMD 3200+ system with 1GB DDR400 and MSI MB that, at first, I sat there waiting for something to happen, not realizing the operation had completed without raising an hourglass. I suspect that this may be a chip architecture effect, rather than a speed advantage of XP64, however, since it seems fast under XP32 and my version of WinRAR is certainly not complied for AMD64.
The only real problem is drivers. I managed to get a Promise SATA driver running well in SATA (rather than RAID) mode by downloading the very latest drivers from Promise.
This is a bald-faced scam. No matter what the absolute capacity of their network, they can reduce usage by constantly sending out these letters to the top 1% of their customers, based upon traffic measurements.
Each week, or month, they pick the top 1% and send out these letters. Bandwidth usage goes down, response times go up, and the need to upgrade capacity and infrastructure goes away.
There will always be a top 1%, and there will always be a significant difference between the bandwidth requirements of power users versus mom & pop emailing the kids.
Considering that their AUP and EUA agreements do not spell out specific limits on usage, they are using the argument "you are different, so you are bad" in place of a proper contract for service. Offering unlimited bandwidth then playing this game is nothing short of fraud, and I intend to stand up against it.
When Home Depot comes into a community with its deep pockets, undersells the local-owned hardware stores until they are forced to close, then jacks up their prices, I call it obscene. When ISP's like Rogers do the same thing then change their terms of service unilaterally, I call it criminal.
I am sure that they would like nothing better than for me to go away and get DSL, but I shall not offer them the satisfaction. I'll fight these bastards until I'm dead. I have already served notice that they will face legal action if they cut off my connection.
They should stick with purple next time.
Why isn't the Spirit team using the L4 filter?
The L4 filter passes light at 600nm, right on the red channel for RGB. Combine that with L5 + L6 and we have a perfect RGB channel image to end all this bickering.
Yes, it would be a narrower frequency band and less scientifically interesting because of the lack of sensitivity in the near infrared. Yes it would be affected by colour absorption in the martian atmosphere. Yes it would be an RGB channel image rather than a true human visual image (no digital image can be). But it would be the closest thing to the kind of snapshot a human standing on mars with a digital camera would take. It would be something we could all relate to directly.
I thought that the whole idea with Spirit was to make it anthropomorphic: binocular vision, 1.5 metres tall, mobile, etc. So why not do a couple of panoramas in RGB? Why not look around before launching into the science?
In fact, Spirit has taken a couple of images with L4, but mainly for calibration against the sundial or as part of a test rotation through all filters. Almost all of the component images for the panoramas are taken with L2, L5 & L6, resulting in the present confusion when these are mapped back into an RGB image. So we know the L4 filter works.
He said that we need to establish a profit motive for exploring space. He likened the situation to the impetus given to the European exploration and colonization of the world in the 15th-19th centuries by the promise of wealth.
When asked about the X-Prize, however, he said that he thought that the exploration of space was too dangerous for private corporations and individuals, and that it should be left up to governments who could be expected to take "proper safety precautions".
He also praised dubya for clarifying the path to space and said that he hoped that things would move along sharply now that a "popular and well-respected president" had shown us the way.
Sounded to me like a recipe for empire building.
Until the End of the World is my favourite movie of all time. It worth seeing for the scene where William Hurt is flying a small plane over the Australian Outback and an EMP kills the engine. The background music is Peter Gabriel's "Blood Of Eden". That scene, and what Hurt says to Solveig Dommartin is one if the things that will stay with me forever.