Excuse me, but if someone is merely threatening your property, you have no business threatening their life.
Life is more valuable than property. By a factor of infinity. There are no exceptions. Property can be replaced, living things can't.
And yes, that does mean that the life of the scummiest sleazeball you can imagine is worth more than the Crown Jewels and the Windows Longhorn Source Code put together. But you'd better get used to it. Because if you can imagine a single case where a piece of property is worth more than a life, someone else can "rationalise" that there's a piece of property worth more than your life. That's a very slippery slope indeed.....
You can be arrogant and right. Being arrogant and right is a pretty quick way of making everyone hate you.
Yes, but there's a difference between the way people hate you for being arrogant and right, and the way people hate you for being arrogant and wrong.
In my former job, I had a boss who was annoyingly always right, quick-witted, better-looking than me..... And he knew it, and he shew it. {Actually I think now, looking back, that part of the reason he rubbed me up the wrong way so much was that he represented a bad side to some of my aspirations. I wanted to do better for myself but I didn't like the thought that I might turn into him.} He moved out of that place to make way for another boss {imported from elsewhere; it might have improved the engineers' morale, which would have run counter to the directors' masterplan, if one of them had actually been promoted to management} who was a complete tosser. He wasn't even a particularly good manager. {One of the things I firmly believe, as a manager, is that it's my job to side with my staff in any dispute with the higher-ups, even to the point of laying my job on the line. All I expect in return is to be able to ask for anything that I would be prepared to do myself, and get it; and I usually do. Maybe I got this from canis lupus.} This guy was just a yes-man for the top brass. He couldn't practice creative disobedience to save his own miserable skin, and ended up asking his staff to do stuff he wouldn't touch himself with a barge pole. I also know from many conversations with my co-workers that I was not the only person to feel this way.
Anyway, the point is that while Boss #1 was not liked, he was almost universally respected {at least, from below}. Whereas Boss #2 was just despised. You knew Boss #1 would at least piss on you if you caught fire. You couldn't say the same about Boss #2. And that's the difference.
Remapped sectors aren't so much of a concern precisely because they've been remapped {hence, hidden from the clueless} and they're only sectors {hence, not likely to be easy to determine much from them..... even what they're supposed to be part of}.
Encryption, on the other hand, is a good idea. I really wonder why it isn't done in the drive at the firmware level. The key could be on something like a telephone SIM card -- if the card is absent the drive is unencrypted, if it's there then everything is encrypted, but either way it behaves the same as far as the host OS is concerned. The decrypted data is buffered into RAM {and so gets lost with power}. When you replace a drive with a new one, you can put the old keycard in the new drive and can pass on the old drive with the new keycard {or no keycard at all} without fear of anything being discovered that you'd rather wasn't. Although it'd still be worthwhile filling it with encrypted random stuff, just in order to see the look on some poor idiot's face if he thinks he's managed to decrypt it.....
My mortgage, rates, TV licence, cable TV and insurance are paid by direct debit. My gas, water and landline bills -- which are variable -- are paid by payment card {out of my housekeeping money} at the post office about 400m. from my home. My electricity, which is the second most variable amount, is on a meter, and my mobile phone, which is the most variable bill of all, I can top up almost anywhere.
I like pound notes, because it's next to impossible to tell where they've been without the co-operation of more people that is feasible {and anyway, nobody records the serial numbers of the notes you spend; they just stick them in a till with all the others}. I like coins even more, because they don't even have serial numbers.
IAAITM and my company use Linux almost throughout; all except the beancounters who need to run SAGE {and hence Windows} to maintain compatibility with Group Head Office. {Hacking its file formats is a longer term project}. Most of the software we use on a day-to-day basis is homebrew, written in Perl or PHP and accessed through a web browser. If we have user-interface issues, we resolve them, -- either by editing the software, or by applying a cluebat as appropriate.
But then again, my company was founded by a hacker.
The NHS is more than big enough to afford to run its own IT department, and every penny it spends there is going to be an investment which will pay a dividend in the future, not an expense sent overseas never to be seen again. As a taxpayer, I resent my government wasting money that they only have in the first place because I am out earning a living as opposed to sitting on my arse claiming the dole.
There is a definite business opportunity selling Open Source migration services to organisations too small to have their own IT department. <menacing guy in expensive suit>'Cause it's going to work out much cheaper than getting busted for running pirated Microsoft software, isn't it?</menacing guy in expensive suit>
Come to think of it, why do Governments have to respect copyright in software at all? They make the freakin' laws!
One of the things I first started noticing with the strange KDE/Gnome hybrid I ran on my first "proper" Linux box {this was in the KDE2 days, i.e. before KDE was actually any use by itself}, was the way that the button to get rid of a requester, especially one bringing bad news, was usually labelled "dismiss".
I actually think it's quite sensible. After all, once I've read the message and maybe written it down on a convenient piece of scrap paper, there's not much else I can do apart from get rid of the requester. If I was wearing a tinfoil hat and looking out for black helicopters, though, I'd say labelling the button as "OK" was a way of getting users tacitly to approve of error messages such as "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" and accept them as a fact of life.
This is another example of Microsoft's flawed security model -- which, no doubt, has its origin in the supremely arrogant and short-sighted idea that ultimately it should be Microsoft, and not the user, who has the last say on what happens to a computer.
No regular user should ever need write access to the hostsfile. That's the way Linux works by default. If you do need to modify it, you probably are root anyway.
To allow ordinary users to edit the hostsfile is stupid, but to allow some random person on the far end of a long piece of wire to edit it is bloody suicidal. Yet this is exactly what is happening here -- the user is effectively executing dangerous, unknown programs at their own privilege level {which is likely administrator}.
And what is the attraction of online banking anyway? There are precisely two reasons why I ever visit a bank. One is to deposit cash or cheques through the hole-in-the-wall, and the other is to withdraw cash through the hole-in-the-wall. Unless there has been an improvement in Windows software of late, that allows you to print pound notes out of your own printer, but I don't think so. I know how much I'm getting paid and how much my direct debits are for, so that tells me how much I can withdraw each month; multiply by 12, divide by 52 and round down to the nearest whole *10 and I get a weekly entitlement. As long as I don't withdraw more than that, I know I'm fine {and anyway I can always check my balance at the HITW next time I go there}.
You can unmount an ext3 file system, and remount it as an ext2 file system. Then you'll get known in-situ overwrites. But if you didn't increase the length of a file, there's no reason for the OS not to write it back right where it used to be, so sync ought to force it to complete the operation. Although some of the writes may be optimised away.
And I'm not so sure about the viability of recovering overwritten data anyway, even with electron microscopes and whatnot. Let's face it, if it was at all practical, someone, somewhere would have used the techniques to build a high-capacity drive that worked by storing new data "over the top of" old data, and there'd be a fanfare of press releases about it -- and no end of debate on Slashdot over whether the patent was enforcible.
Microscopic techniques might have worked once with low density devices, but today's drives can easily pack 2000x as much information into the same amount of space as was common just 10 years ago. It's my assertion that all claims regarding the recoverability of overwritten data are hopelessly exaggerated if not absolute bullshit. I'd like to see a proper scientific study, but I have a feeling there are more compelling reasons not to do one..... For one, the authorities would like to pretend they can recover data even if they couldn't {even if only to give plausible deniability to some of their operations; they'd prefer you to think they got that data from your used hard disk than to find out how they really got it}. For another, HDD manufacturers sell more new units if there aren't so many second hand ones on the market. And for the kicker, if it can be shown that the Government has been needlessly destroying valuable goods bought with taxpayers' money, it's going to be every lawyer's birthday at once.
I've always thought that it should be the recipient of a used storage device, howsoever acquired, who should be bound to secrecy in respect of its contents. If their intentions are honest, and all they want to do is store stuff on it, fine. If they want a little peek, well, that's pushing it. But the minute they base a decision on something they discovered there, or communicate it to a third party, they've definitely crossed a line.
Also, if you don't do a bad block scan {which wipes out any pre-existing data good and proper} on a used hard drive when you create the file system{s} on it, you're just asking for trouble.
I recommend dd if=/dev/audio of=/dev/hda1 {or whatever; but basically you want to get the raw data coming in from the sound card and write it straight to the disk partition} before passing on a used drive. Crank up the input gains to the max, but don't actually plug anything in..... let the static and power hum do their job, which is to create entropy. After one overwrite cycle, there is no way the drive can recover the data by itself; specialised techniques are required whose cost is prohibitive and whose reliability is questionable. After two overwrite cycles {with high-enough entropy data}, even they don't work. Anything more than two overwrites is a waste of effort, and resources; there is always an easier way to reconstruct data when just one copy of it has been overwritten magnetically.
I did think seriously about that. I also thought of doing a few deep discharge / recharge cycles on the battery pack. Anyone have any luck with this method?
I'm currently after a new mobile. All it needs to be able to do is: take an already-connected SIM card; send and receive SMS messages, allowing me to type one letter at a time without an annoying predictive dictionary; answer and make voice calls; and connect to a USB port on a laptop running Linux, in order to go on the internet. I specifically do not need, and would be prepared to forego for the sake of cutting costs: polyphonic ring tones, a camera, a high-res colour display, downloadable Java games, multimedia player or PDA functionality.
My ancient Nokia 3210 fulfils all but the data criterion, but its battery is getting lazy and doesn't hold a charge as long as it used to -- sometimes conking out in the middle of the first call.
(and just in case anyone doesn't know how to determine what country somebody is in from their e-mail address, I'm in the UK; so it's got to be available in the UK.)
Which version? "Complex Spiral" seems to render fine in Konqueror 3.2.1 / KDE 3.3.0 on Debian SID.
Konqueror is definitely getting better IMHO. Unfortunately for me as a developer of Intranet apps, its default security setting is a little towards the paranoid side; and it won't let a pop-up window alter form contents in the opener, even if the page was off the same server. Which is a bit of a bummer when that's exactly what your app depends on. (Also, slightly unrelatedly, a tab doesn't automatically come to the front when it launches a JavaScript prompt. This was the point of a recent Secunia "alert", as in certain highly-convoluted scenarios it could be used to mount an attack against gullible people who deserve to be taught a lesson.)
Anyone know how to make Konqueror just vulnerable enough to cross-site script exploits so my Intranet apps will work on it? (It's quite safe in this context, as the clients are on a subnet with no gateway outside of the intranet, not even a Squid proxy.)
That's another reason to scatter the delaying gates throughout the core, and use enough of them. You have to hope that you don't get too many instances of a logic element and one of its associated delaying gates falling on the opposite sides of a process variation boundary. Especially where the effects favour faster propagation in the delaying gate. So, my intention was to aim for the clock delay being slightly but definitely longer than, and not exactly equal to, the logic delay. It would still respond to dynamic effects like temperature better than an external clock oscillator.
This would also be one of those kinds of circuits that, if it's not built on the same silicon substrate, won't work at all. Power op-amps are another good example: they rely on better thermal coupling than you can achieve with discrete components, and better properties-matching than you can achieve by just pulling transistors out of a bag at random without doing any tests on them. {You can't control the absolute values of most on-chip components precisely, but you can be fairly sure of the relative similarities between them}. Build one out of carefully-gain-matched transistors exactly according to the schematic in the data book, and it might just about work if you put it in a constant-temperature oven. In the best case it will distort like hell, and in the worst case it will go literally into meltdown.
The reason why a clock is commonly used in microprocessor circuits is to try to synchronise everything, because different logic elements take a different amount of time for the outputs to reach a stable state after the inputs change. This is known as "propagation delay" and is what ultimately limits the speed of a processor. With CMOS, you can actually reduce the propagation delay a little by increasing the supply voltage, but then your processor will be dissipating more power. {CMOS logic gates dissipate the most power when they are actually changing state, and almost no power at all while stable, whether they are sitting at 1 or 0. This is in contrast to TTL, which usually dissipates more power in a 0 state than in a 1 state, but there are some oddball devices that are the other way around}.
The clock is run at a speed that allows for the slowest propagation, with data being transferred in or out of the processor only on the rising or falling edges. This allows time for everything to get stable. It's also horrendously inefficient because propagation delays are actually variable, not fixed.
If you wire an odd number of NOT gates in series, you end up with an oscillator whose period is twice the sum of the propagation delays of all the gates. If you replace one of the NOT gates with a NAND or NOR gate, then you can stop or start the oscillator at will. Furthermore, by extra-cunning use of NAND/NOR and EOR gates, you can lengthen or shorten the delay in steps of a few gates. Obviously at least one of the gates should have a Schmitt trigger input to keep the edges nice and sharp; but that's just details.
My idea was to scatter a bunch of NOT gates throughout the core of a processor, so as to get a propagation delay through the chain that is just longer than the slowest bit of logic. Any thermal effects that slow down or speed up the propagation will affect these gates as much as the processing logic. Now you use these NOT gates as the clock oscillator. If you want to try being clever, you could even include the ability to shorten the delay if you were not using certain "slow" sections such as the adder. This information would be available on an instruction-by-instruction basis, from the order field of the instruction word. The net result of all this fancy gatey trickery is that if the processor slows down, the clock slows down with it. It never gets too fast for the rest of the processor to keep up with. Most I/O operations can be buffered, using latches as a sort of electronic Oldham coupling; one end presents the data as it comes, the other takes it when it's ready to deal with it, and as long as the misalignment is not too great, it will work. For seriously time-critical I/O operations that can't be buffered, you can just stop the clock momentarily.
The longer I think about this, the deeper I regret abandoning it.
Exactly! It's my belief that the universe is "just" a huge automatic machine, but one that's so automatic that it actually created itself {hence the speech marks, I realise it's actually a pretty big just}. That to me is a far more exciting proposition than the idea that someone just made it one day. Also, the whole idea of a creator is problematic because there would have to be two separate sets of laws of physics -- one for the creator, and one for the universe just created. And although I can just about get my head around the idea of alternative sets of laws of physics, anything that obeyed a different set than the ones we know about would be totally unobservable to us, and might as well not exist for all intents and purposes. Matter as it was being created would have to switch from obeying one set of laws to the other.
And then you have the problem of how a creator would be created, and why create a creator and a bunch of raw materials rather than an actual ready-made universe? The Big bang was a sudden input of energy, and the Universe is just a means for that energy to distribute itself evenly. Matter always favours the lowest energy state; that explains everything from the spherical shape of soap bubbles to the death of stars.
I'm not the first person to point out that 20 layers is nothing. It's unusual, for sure; most "low-tech" boards in appliances are just 2-layer, or even 1-layer. It takes a lot of wire links to make it worth going to double-sided; not only have you got to do two lots of photography and line them up to within a few um. and plate through the holes, but double-sided PCB material is almost always FR4 {glass fibre} whereas single-sided boards may be FR2 {SRBP} or CEM1 {paper / woven ceramic fibre}. The problem is that the through-hole plating -- which joins one layer to another -- doesn't take well in the cheaper materials. So, unless you have good creepage and clearance or physical space reasons, it's preferable to use wire links. If your VCD machine {Variable Centres Distance -- i.e. two-ended through-hole placement} has the capability to cut wire links off a reel of bare tinned copper wire, as opposed to requiring wire links on tape and reel, so much the better. {When you're not populating PCBs with the VCD machine, or if you have a lot of radial [single ended] parts on your boards such as electrolytic capacitors, you can use the sequencer for assembling kits of parts for hand placement.}
Another problem with multi-layer boards is vias {a via is a plated-through hole just used for connecting one layer to another, not carrying a component lead}. The way the plating process works means that all copper layers will be joined to each other. So you can't join, say 1-2 and 4-5 at the same hole; and you soon run out of sites if you aren't very careful. So more than 10 layers is rare, because there is usually a better way to do what you were trying to do.
Still, with 20 layers it's possible to print actual coils, not just bent bits of wire that only look like a coil at UHF and above, and capacitors. A printed coil ought to be more reliable than a wound one. Perhaps we'll start seeing more circuits that use real inductances!
The trouble with the BSD licence is that it does not oblige you to distribute the source code with any derivative work {unless you go for the two-clause, source-only distribution licence..... which is fine for stuff written in an interpreted language, but not much cop for something like an OS kernel}. This means that someone else can take all your hard work -- which you intended to be for the benefit of everyone -- and "fence it in" by distributing a modified version in binary form only, and not giving anybody the source code. While it may well be a trivial matter to reproduce their effort and release a functional equivalent in source code form, it's still work that you shouldn't have to do. This is one of the things meant by "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" -- in this case, if you give other people too much freedom with your code, then you have to watch over them forever to make sure they don't compromise any further people's freedom.
Of course, not everyone who uses the BSD licence is a fencer-in. But why give them the chance? If you think the right of the majority to make use of the code you wrote overrides the supposed right of a minority to keep that code to themselves, then use a strong copyleft licence such as the GPL or ShareAlike. If on the other hand you think that the owner of a knife {howsoever it may have come into their possession} has the right to decide who they stab with it, and you don't mind that it might be you or your friends or family they stab, then go ahead and use a weak copyleft licence such as the BSD licence. And watch your back.
The Linux kernel developers collectively want to guarantee the freedom of their source code, so they have chosen the GPL. If you want a BSD-licenced kernel {and why would you want a BSD-licenced kernel anyway, if not to fence it in? What else does the BSD licence permitthat the GPL does not?}, then you have a choice: FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD.
I'm an unashamed penguin-shagger; all my boxes are running some sort of Linux. Just for shits and giggles {a motivating factor only ever underestimated by fools}, I checked the site using Konqueror; but it was having none of it. But I know my Debian is genuine anyway, since it's damn nigh impossible to have such a thing as an infringing copy of Open Source software!
If I want a free photo slideshow, I'll use animate foo.jpg bar.jpg baz.jpg qux.jpg quux.jpg. I know enough about perl and MySQL to write a free mailing list manager {because I already have}. If I want screensavers and wallpaper, I can find plenty. Hell, by the time KDE4 is out, it'll be possible to specify an ftp:// or a http:// URL for a desktop wallpaper.
The only advantage of using genuine Microsoft software is that you don't get hassled off Ballmer's goon squad. But then again, if you use Open Source software, you don't get hassled off Ballmer's goon squad either and you save a fortune on licencing. And when you've got two dozen PCs running literally just a Javascript-capable web browser which interfaces with a server-side script, and a dozen more running just a JS-capable web browser, word processor and spreadsheet, then why pay through the arsehole for Microsoft licences?
br> By the way, I have just one word for anyone who whines that OpenOffice.org doesn't have a replacement for Microsoft Access: PHPMyAdmin. Alright, alright, Apache, PHP and MySQL as well; but they're all on your distro CDs and if the dependencies are done properly, PHPMyAdmin will ask for them.
Well, we're running Mandrake, which lets regular users issue a poweroff command. But most of them don't know how to:)
Still, you've given me an idea. I'll write an rcscript of my own that copies some defaults over the top of some of the configuration files. That way, if^Wwhen they mung things up really badly, with the launch bar up the side of the screen and an eye-straining screensaver kicking in after half a picosecond without a keystroke or mouse movement and they expect someone to get them out of this 'unusable computer' situation that they set up for themselves, it's at least easily recoverable.
No. But as long as the reason given is not related to race, sex or disability, then it's valid. Point is, being on someone else's property is a privilege not a right. If you are a shopkeeper, and a black woman in a wheelchair is annoying you, and the cause of the annoyance is nothing to do with her blackness, her femininity nor her disability, you can quite legally kick her out. That's what 42 USC 21, II, 2000a seems to say, anyway; referring as it does to "discrimination..... on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin". Discrimination on other grounds is not mentioned.
I don't know whether "innocent until proven guilty" still applies in the USA; but if that was the case, it would be up to the ejectee and her legal representatives to prove that you discriminated on one of the proscribed grounds and not some other reason.
This is true. Linux systems only go wrong for a good reason; so you need people who understand deeply how they work to maintain them. Whereas Windows falls over all the time for no known reason {other than bad configuration; or possibly some interaction issues that no-one could have foreseen, due to writing software which interfaces to other software for which you haven't got the source code, just a description that may or may not be strictly accurate} and so can be kept going simply by de-powering a machine for awhile every time it packs up. Where I work, we're already close to 100% Linux {the only Windows boxes are used by the beancounters}; and my assistant {raised on Windows} is gradually learning the hard way that, if you just reset a misbehaving Linux box in the vague hope of effecting some kind of magical cure, it generally carries on misbehaving when it starts up again.
One thing I didn't do, but should have done, was put sshd on every workstation, just to make it easy to log in as root and see what might be going wrong. Not that it happens often enough to be worth it, though, really. And, of course, for scaring the crap out of people by opening and closing their CD-ROM drives.....
It would not surprise me in the least to learn of a company having trained an animal to reset Windows boxes as they fall over.
When I was taking my A-levels, I helped out in my school's remedial studies unit. On the walls in there were a set of colourful cartoon posters drawing attention to commonly-mixed-up words.
One was of a stereotypical 50kg weakling in a gym, about to lift a set of weights and saying "Will this affect me?" And the answer from his muscle-bound colleague was "Look at the effect it had on me!"
Another one was a kid with an untied shoe, and a teacher calling after her, "Your lace is loose! You might lose a shoe!" At the time, I never thought that was particularly relevant; since around my particular neck of the woods, "lose" {as in "I don't care if the Rams don't win, just as long as Forest lose"} is often pronounced so as to rhyme with "nose".
US laws are generally based on UK laws pre-1776. There's a saying, "an Englishman's home is his castle", which goes back to long before then {and note, it's your home by virtue of you living there, not by virtue of owning the building or the land it stands on -- an absentee landlord requires the consent of a (rightful) tenant before visiting the property}.
Since shopkeepers in the UK have enjoyed the right to exclude any person for any reason since before 1776, it's entirely reasonable to suppose that right also applies transatlantically. What post-1776 legislation are you referring to that changes this? Chapter and verse, please.
Bzzzzzt! Wrong. It was in a shop, which is private property. Members of the public are admitted strictly by invitation of the rightful occupier -- and can be excluded for any reason they like.
I don't know about US law, but in the UK, trespass goes from being a simple civil offence to a full-blown criminal offence once you start disrupting a lawful activity {Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 s.61, from memory}.
NTL:home's pay-per-view movies are delivered with Macrovision or something similar {a picture stabiliser or timebase corrector is required in order to record them properly}. Their argument is that you get to pick the starting time for yourself {granularity dependent upon popularity; every 15' for a really popular film, every hour or two hours for a less popular one} -- so whyever would you need to record it just to watch another time?
It's a short step from there, to requiring Destructive Playback.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but if someone is merely threatening your property, you have no business threatening their life.
.....
Life is more valuable than property. By a factor of infinity. There are no exceptions. Property can be replaced, living things can't.
And yes, that does mean that the life of the scummiest sleazeball you can imagine is worth more than the Crown Jewels and the Windows Longhorn Source Code put together. But you'd better get used to it. Because if you can imagine a single case where a piece of property is worth more than a life, someone else can "rationalise" that there's a piece of property worth more than your life. That's a very slippery slope indeed
In my former job, I had a boss who was annoyingly always right, quick-witted, better-looking than me
Anyway, the point is that while Boss #1 was not liked, he was almost universally respected {at least, from below}. Whereas Boss #2 was just despised. You knew Boss #1 would at least piss on you if you caught fire. You couldn't say the same about Boss #2. And that's the difference.
Remapped sectors aren't so much of a concern precisely because they've been remapped {hence, hidden from the clueless} and they're only sectors {hence, not likely to be easy to determine much from them ..... even what they're supposed to be part of}.
.....
Encryption, on the other hand, is a good idea. I really wonder why it isn't done in the drive at the firmware level. The key could be on something like a telephone SIM card -- if the card is absent the drive is unencrypted, if it's there then everything is encrypted, but either way it behaves the same as far as the host OS is concerned. The decrypted data is buffered into RAM {and so gets lost with power}. When you replace a drive with a new one, you can put the old keycard in the new drive and can pass on the old drive with the new keycard {or no keycard at all} without fear of anything being discovered that you'd rather wasn't. Although it'd still be worthwhile filling it with encrypted random stuff, just in order to see the look on some poor idiot's face if he thinks he's managed to decrypt it
My mortgage, rates, TV licence, cable TV and insurance are paid by direct debit. My gas, water and landline bills -- which are variable -- are paid by payment card {out of my housekeeping money} at the post office about 400m. from my home. My electricity, which is the second most variable amount, is on a meter, and my mobile phone, which is the most variable bill of all, I can top up almost anywhere.
I like pound notes, because it's next to impossible to tell where they've been without the co-operation of more people that is feasible {and anyway, nobody records the serial numbers of the notes you spend; they just stick them in a till with all the others}. I like coins even more, because they don't even have serial numbers.
IAAITM and my company use Linux almost throughout; all except the beancounters who need to run SAGE {and hence Windows} to maintain compatibility with Group Head Office. {Hacking its file formats is a longer term project}. Most of the software we use on a day-to-day basis is homebrew, written in Perl or PHP and accessed through a web browser. If we have user-interface issues, we resolve them, -- either by editing the software, or by applying a cluebat as appropriate.
But then again, my company was founded by a hacker.
The NHS is more than big enough to afford to run its own IT department, and every penny it spends there is going to be an investment which will pay a dividend in the future, not an expense sent overseas never to be seen again. As a taxpayer, I resent my government wasting money that they only have in the first place because I am out earning a living as opposed to sitting on my arse claiming the dole.
There is a definite business opportunity selling Open Source migration services to organisations too small to have their own IT department. <menacing guy in expensive suit>'Cause it's going to work out much cheaper than getting busted for running pirated Microsoft software, isn't it?</menacing guy in expensive suit>
Come to think of it, why do Governments have to respect copyright in software at all? They make the freakin' laws!
One of the things I first started noticing with the strange KDE/Gnome hybrid I ran on my first "proper" Linux box {this was in the KDE2 days, i.e. before KDE was actually any use by itself}, was the way that the button to get rid of a requester, especially one bringing bad news, was usually labelled "dismiss".
I actually think it's quite sensible. After all, once I've read the message and maybe written it down on a convenient piece of scrap paper, there's not much else I can do apart from get rid of the requester. If I was wearing a tinfoil hat and looking out for black helicopters, though, I'd say labelling the button as "OK" was a way of getting users tacitly to approve of error messages such as "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" and accept them as a fact of life.
This is another example of Microsoft's flawed security model -- which, no doubt, has its origin in the supremely arrogant and short-sighted idea that ultimately it should be Microsoft, and not the user, who has the last say on what happens to a computer.
No regular user should ever need write access to the hostsfile. That's the way Linux works by default. If you do need to modify it, you probably are root anyway.
To allow ordinary users to edit the hostsfile is stupid, but to allow some random person on the far end of a long piece of wire to edit it is bloody suicidal. Yet this is exactly what is happening here -- the user is effectively executing dangerous, unknown programs at their own privilege level {which is likely administrator}.
And what is the attraction of online banking anyway? There are precisely two reasons why I ever visit a bank. One is to deposit cash or cheques through the hole-in-the-wall, and the other is to withdraw cash through the hole-in-the-wall. Unless there has been an improvement in Windows software of late, that allows you to print pound notes out of your own printer, but I don't think so. I know how much I'm getting paid and how much my direct debits are for, so that tells me how much I can withdraw each month; multiply by 12, divide by 52 and round down to the nearest whole *10 and I get a weekly entitlement. As long as I don't withdraw more than that, I know I'm fine {and anyway I can always check my balance at the HITW next time I go there}.
You can unmount an ext3 file system, and remount it as an ext2 file system. Then you'll get known in-situ overwrites. But if you didn't increase the length of a file, there's no reason for the OS not to write it back right where it used to be, so sync ought to force it to complete the operation. Although some of the writes may be optimised away.
..... For one, the authorities would like to pretend they can recover data even if they couldn't {even if only to give plausible deniability to some of their operations; they'd prefer you to think they got that data from your used hard disk than to find out how they really got it}. For another, HDD manufacturers sell more new units if there aren't so many second hand ones on the market. And for the kicker, if it can be shown that the Government has been needlessly destroying valuable goods bought with taxpayers' money, it's going to be every lawyer's birthday at once.
And I'm not so sure about the viability of recovering overwritten data anyway, even with electron microscopes and whatnot. Let's face it, if it was at all practical, someone, somewhere would have used the techniques to build a high-capacity drive that worked by storing new data "over the top of" old data, and there'd be a fanfare of press releases about it -- and no end of debate on Slashdot over whether the patent was enforcible.
Microscopic techniques might have worked once with low density devices, but today's drives can easily pack 2000x as much information into the same amount of space as was common just 10 years ago. It's my assertion that all claims regarding the recoverability of overwritten data are hopelessly exaggerated if not absolute bullshit. I'd like to see a proper scientific study, but I have a feeling there are more compelling reasons not to do one
I've always thought that it should be the recipient of a used storage device, howsoever acquired, who should be bound to secrecy in respect of its contents. If their intentions are honest, and all they want to do is store stuff on it, fine. If they want a little peek, well, that's pushing it. But the minute they base a decision on something they discovered there, or communicate it to a third party, they've definitely crossed a line.
..... let the static and power hum do their job, which is to create entropy. After one overwrite cycle, there is no way the drive can recover the data by itself; specialised techniques are required whose cost is prohibitive and whose reliability is questionable. After two overwrite cycles {with high-enough entropy data}, even they don't work. Anything more than two overwrites is a waste of effort, and resources; there is always an easier way to reconstruct data when just one copy of it has been overwritten magnetically.
Also, if you don't do a bad block scan {which wipes out any pre-existing data good and proper} on a used hard drive when you create the file system{s} on it, you're just asking for trouble.
I recommend dd if=/dev/audio of=/dev/hda1 {or whatever; but basically you want to get the raw data coming in from the sound card and write it straight to the disk partition} before passing on a used drive. Crank up the input gains to the max, but don't actually plug anything in
I did think seriously about that. I also thought of doing a few deep discharge / recharge cycles on the battery pack. Anyone have any luck with this method?
I'm currently after a new mobile. All it needs to be able to do is: take an already-connected SIM card; send and receive SMS messages, allowing me to type one letter at a time without an annoying predictive dictionary; answer and make voice calls; and connect to a USB port on a laptop running Linux, in order to go on the internet. I specifically do not need, and would be prepared to forego for the sake of cutting costs: polyphonic ring tones, a camera, a high-res colour display, downloadable Java games, multimedia player or PDA functionality.
My ancient Nokia 3210 fulfils all but the data criterion, but its battery is getting lazy and doesn't hold a charge as long as it used to -- sometimes conking out in the middle of the first call.
(and just in case anyone doesn't know how to determine what country somebody is in from their e-mail address, I'm in the UK; so it's got to be available in the UK.)
Which version? "Complex Spiral" seems to render fine in Konqueror 3.2.1 / KDE 3.3.0 on Debian SID.
Konqueror is definitely getting better IMHO. Unfortunately for me as a developer of Intranet apps, its default security setting is a little towards the paranoid side; and it won't let a pop-up window alter form contents in the opener, even if the page was off the same server. Which is a bit of a bummer when that's exactly what your app depends on. (Also, slightly unrelatedly, a tab doesn't automatically come to the front when it launches a JavaScript prompt. This was the point of a recent Secunia "alert", as in certain highly-convoluted scenarios it could be used to mount an attack against gullible people who deserve to be taught a lesson.)
Anyone know how to make Konqueror just vulnerable enough to cross-site script exploits so my Intranet apps will work on it? (It's quite safe in this context, as the clients are on a subnet with no gateway outside of the intranet, not even a Squid proxy.)
That's another reason to scatter the delaying gates throughout the core, and use enough of them. You have to hope that you don't get too many instances of a logic element and one of its associated delaying gates falling on the opposite sides of a process variation boundary. Especially where the effects favour faster propagation in the delaying gate. So, my intention was to aim for the clock delay being slightly but definitely longer than, and not exactly equal to, the logic delay. It would still respond to dynamic effects like temperature better than an external clock oscillator.
This would also be one of those kinds of circuits that, if it's not built on the same silicon substrate, won't work at all. Power op-amps are another good example: they rely on better thermal coupling than you can achieve with discrete components, and better properties-matching than you can achieve by just pulling transistors out of a bag at random without doing any tests on them. {You can't control the absolute values of most on-chip components precisely, but you can be fairly sure of the relative similarities between them}. Build one out of carefully-gain-matched transistors exactly according to the schematic in the data book, and it might just about work if you put it in a constant-temperature oven. In the best case it will distort like hell, and in the worst case it will go literally into meltdown.
The reason why a clock is commonly used in microprocessor circuits is to try to synchronise everything, because different logic elements take a different amount of time for the outputs to reach a stable state after the inputs change. This is known as "propagation delay" and is what ultimately limits the speed of a processor. With CMOS, you can actually reduce the propagation delay a little by increasing the supply voltage, but then your processor will be dissipating more power. {CMOS logic gates dissipate the most power when they are actually changing state, and almost no power at all while stable, whether they are sitting at 1 or 0. This is in contrast to TTL, which usually dissipates more power in a 0 state than in a 1 state, but there are some oddball devices that are the other way around}.
The clock is run at a speed that allows for the slowest propagation, with data being transferred in or out of the processor only on the rising or falling edges. This allows time for everything to get stable. It's also horrendously inefficient because propagation delays are actually variable, not fixed.
If you wire an odd number of NOT gates in series, you end up with an oscillator whose period is twice the sum of the propagation delays of all the gates. If you replace one of the NOT gates with a NAND or NOR gate, then you can stop or start the oscillator at will. Furthermore, by extra-cunning use of NAND/NOR and EOR gates, you can lengthen or shorten the delay in steps of a few gates. Obviously at least one of the gates should have a Schmitt trigger input to keep the edges nice and sharp; but that's just details.
My idea was to scatter a bunch of NOT gates throughout the core of a processor, so as to get a propagation delay through the chain that is just longer than the slowest bit of logic. Any thermal effects that slow down or speed up the propagation will affect these gates as much as the processing logic. Now you use these NOT gates as the clock oscillator. If you want to try being clever, you could even include the ability to shorten the delay if you were not using certain "slow" sections such as the adder. This information would be available on an instruction-by-instruction basis, from the order field of the instruction word. The net result of all this fancy gatey trickery is that if the processor slows down, the clock slows down with it. It never gets too fast for the rest of the processor to keep up with. Most I/O operations can be buffered, using latches as a sort of electronic Oldham coupling; one end presents the data as it comes, the other takes it when it's ready to deal with it, and as long as the misalignment is not too great, it will work. For seriously time-critical I/O operations that can't be buffered, you can just stop the clock momentarily.
The longer I think about this, the deeper I regret abandoning it.
Exactly! It's my belief that the universe is "just" a huge automatic machine, but one that's so automatic that it actually created itself {hence the speech marks, I realise it's actually a pretty big just}. That to me is a far more exciting proposition than the idea that someone just made it one day. Also, the whole idea of a creator is problematic because there would have to be two separate sets of laws of physics -- one for the creator, and one for the universe just created. And although I can just about get my head around the idea of alternative sets of laws of physics, anything that obeyed a different set than the ones we know about would be totally unobservable to us, and might as well not exist for all intents and purposes. Matter as it was being created would have to switch from obeying one set of laws to the other.
And then you have the problem of how a creator would be created, and why create a creator and a bunch of raw materials rather than an actual ready-made universe? The Big bang was a sudden input of energy, and the Universe is just a means for that energy to distribute itself evenly. Matter always favours the lowest energy state; that explains everything from the spherical shape of soap bubbles to the death of stars.
I'm not the first person to point out that 20 layers is nothing. It's unusual, for sure; most "low-tech" boards in appliances are just 2-layer, or even 1-layer. It takes a lot of wire links to make it worth going to double-sided; not only have you got to do two lots of photography and line them up to within a few um. and plate through the holes, but double-sided PCB material is almost always FR4 {glass fibre} whereas single-sided boards may be FR2 {SRBP} or CEM1 {paper / woven ceramic fibre}. The problem is that the through-hole plating -- which joins one layer to another -- doesn't take well in the cheaper materials. So, unless you have good creepage and clearance or physical space reasons, it's preferable to use wire links. If your VCD machine {Variable Centres Distance -- i.e. two-ended through-hole placement} has the capability to cut wire links off a reel of bare tinned copper wire, as opposed to requiring wire links on tape and reel, so much the better. {When you're not populating PCBs with the VCD machine, or if you have a lot of radial [single ended] parts on your boards such as electrolytic capacitors, you can use the sequencer for assembling kits of parts for hand placement.}
Another problem with multi-layer boards is vias {a via is a plated-through hole just used for connecting one layer to another, not carrying a component lead}. The way the plating process works means that all copper layers will be joined to each other. So you can't join, say 1-2 and 4-5 at the same hole; and you soon run out of sites if you aren't very careful. So more than 10 layers is rare, because there is usually a better way to do what you were trying to do.
Still, with 20 layers it's possible to print actual coils, not just bent bits of wire that only look like a coil at UHF and above, and capacitors. A printed coil ought to be more reliable than a wound one. Perhaps we'll start seeing more circuits that use real inductances!
The trouble with the BSD licence is that it does not oblige you to distribute the source code with any derivative work {unless you go for the two-clause, source-only distribution licence ..... which is fine for stuff written in an interpreted language, but not much cop for something like an OS kernel}. This means that someone else can take all your hard work -- which you intended to be for the benefit of everyone -- and "fence it in" by distributing a modified version in binary form only, and not giving anybody the source code. While it may well be a trivial matter to reproduce their effort and release a functional equivalent in source code form, it's still work that you shouldn't have to do. This is one of the things meant by "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" -- in this case, if you give other people too much freedom with your code, then you have to watch over them forever to make sure they don't compromise any further people's freedom.
Of course, not everyone who uses the BSD licence is a fencer-in. But why give them the chance? If you think the right of the majority to make use of the code you wrote overrides the supposed right of a minority to keep that code to themselves, then use a strong copyleft licence such as the GPL or ShareAlike. If on the other hand you think that the owner of a knife {howsoever it may have come into their possession} has the right to decide who they stab with it, and you don't mind that it might be you or your friends or family they stab, then go ahead and use a weak copyleft licence such as the BSD licence. And watch your back.
The Linux kernel developers collectively want to guarantee the freedom of their source code, so they have chosen the GPL. If you want a BSD-licenced kernel {and why would you want a BSD-licenced kernel anyway, if not to fence it in? What else does the BSD licence permitthat the GPL does not?}, then you have a choice: FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD.
I'm an unashamed penguin-shagger; all my boxes are running some sort of Linux. Just for shits and giggles {a motivating factor only ever underestimated by fools}, I checked the site using Konqueror; but it was having none of it. But I know my Debian is genuine anyway, since it's damn nigh impossible to have such a thing as an infringing copy of Open Source software!
If I want a free photo slideshow, I'll use animate foo.jpg bar.jpg baz.jpg qux.jpg quux.jpg. I know enough about perl and MySQL to write a free mailing list manager {because I already have}. If I want screensavers and wallpaper, I can find plenty. Hell, by the time KDE4 is out, it'll be possible to specify an ftp:// or a http:// URL for a desktop wallpaper.
The only advantage of using genuine Microsoft software is that you don't get hassled off Ballmer's goon squad. But then again, if you use Open Source software, you don't get hassled off Ballmer's goon squad either and you save a fortune on licencing. And when you've got two dozen PCs running literally just a Javascript-capable web browser which interfaces with a server-side script, and a dozen more running just a JS-capable web browser, word processor and spreadsheet, then why pay through the arsehole for Microsoft licences? br>
By the way, I have just one word for anyone who whines that OpenOffice.org doesn't have a replacement for Microsoft Access: PHPMyAdmin. Alright, alright, Apache, PHP and MySQL as well; but they're all on your distro CDs and if the dependencies are done properly, PHPMyAdmin will ask for them.
Well, we're running Mandrake, which lets regular users issue a poweroff command. But most of them don't know how to :)
Still, you've given me an idea. I'll write an rcscript of my own that copies some defaults over the top of some of the configuration files. That way, if^Wwhen they mung things up really badly, with the launch bar up the side of the screen and an eye-straining screensaver kicking in after half a picosecond without a keystroke or mouse movement and they expect someone to get them out of this 'unusable computer' situation that they set up for themselves, it's at least easily recoverable.
No. But as long as the reason given is not related to race, sex or disability, then it's valid. Point is, being on someone else's property is a privilege not a right. If you are a shopkeeper, and a black woman in a wheelchair is annoying you, and the cause of the annoyance is nothing to do with her blackness, her femininity nor her disability, you can quite legally kick her out. That's what 42 USC 21, II, 2000a seems to say, anyway; referring as it does to "discrimination ..... on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin". Discrimination on other grounds is not mentioned.
I don't know whether "innocent until proven guilty" still applies in the USA; but if that was the case, it would be up to the ejectee and her legal representatives to prove that you discriminated on one of the proscribed grounds and not some other reason.
This is true. Linux systems only go wrong for a good reason; so you need people who understand deeply how they work to maintain them. Whereas Windows falls over all the time for no known reason {other than bad configuration; or possibly some interaction issues that no-one could have foreseen, due to writing software which interfaces to other software for which you haven't got the source code, just a description that may or may not be strictly accurate} and so can be kept going simply by de-powering a machine for awhile every time it packs up. Where I work, we're already close to 100% Linux {the only Windows boxes are used by the beancounters}; and my assistant {raised on Windows} is gradually learning the hard way that, if you just reset a misbehaving Linux box in the vague hope of effecting some kind of magical cure, it generally carries on misbehaving when it starts up again.
.....
One thing I didn't do, but should have done, was put sshd on every workstation, just to make it easy to log in as root and see what might be going wrong. Not that it happens often enough to be worth it, though, really. And, of course, for scaring the crap out of people by opening and closing their CD-ROM drives
It would not surprise me in the least to learn of a company having trained an animal to reset Windows boxes as they fall over.
When I was taking my A-levels, I helped out in my school's remedial studies unit. On the walls in there were a set of colourful cartoon posters drawing attention to commonly-mixed-up words.
One was of a stereotypical 50kg weakling in a gym, about to lift a set of weights and saying "Will this affect me?" And the answer from his muscle-bound colleague was "Look at the effect it had on me!"
Another one was a kid with an untied shoe, and a teacher calling after her, "Your lace is loose! You might lose a shoe!" At the time, I never thought that was particularly relevant; since around my particular neck of the woods, "lose" {as in "I don't care if the Rams don't win, just as long as Forest lose"} is often pronounced so as to rhyme with "nose".
US laws are generally based on UK laws pre-1776. There's a saying, "an Englishman's home is his castle", which goes back to long before then {and note, it's your home by virtue of you living there, not by virtue of owning the building or the land it stands on -- an absentee landlord requires the consent of a (rightful) tenant before visiting the property}.
Since shopkeepers in the UK have enjoyed the right to exclude any person for any reason since before 1776, it's entirely reasonable to suppose that right also applies transatlantically. What post-1776 legislation are you referring to that changes this? Chapter and verse, please.
I don't know about US law, but in the UK, trespass goes from being a simple civil offence to a full-blown criminal offence once you start disrupting a lawful activity {Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 s.61, from memory}.
NTL:home's pay-per-view movies are delivered with Macrovision or something similar {a picture stabiliser or timebase corrector is required in order to record them properly}. Their argument is that you get to pick the starting time for yourself {granularity dependent upon popularity; every 15' for a really popular film, every hour or two hours for a less popular one} -- so whyever would you need to record it just to watch another time?
It's a short step from there, to requiring Destructive Playback.