No one... not even democracy.. has the right to ask someone to hand over their private thoughts. Not even if they are in a written letter. Not even if they are in an electronic email. Not even if that person is a President of a country.
Consider it public if you type it into a system that is public or owned by someone else. While I agree if it is say a persons personal computer whholey owned and operated by themselves I do not buy into privacy if it is the government's or companies computer. If you want privacy, a certain prudence on the individuals part goes a long way.
For example, use PGP. I do as I don't even trust my own PC for some things. BTW works on Linux and Macs too. And make sure to put the keyring on a thumb drive you hide or carry with you. That is, privacy is easy with due diligence.
Never put anything in plain text mail you can't answer to or others to see. Remember the other person can forward it and it is easy to intercept it.
When this crashes it will be loud and hard. Hopefully you guys working at Google are going to do the smart thing and save as much money as you can while you can.
I highly doubt google stock is going to go down, in fact I foresee it doubling or tripling inside a decade or less. Why you ask? Lets look at how google has positioned themselves:
They have massive bandwidth and are increasing it daily.
YouTube gives them a A/V branch, want to pick on ABC/MSNBC/CBS/FOX...certainly MTV is dead.
They have the tech and the storage to entertain and do it well.
Say a gLinux to download and replace failing Vista, comes with Open Office.
Services, they could make the biggest outsourcer look like a mom and pop shop.
They have amassed probably the most astute application programming talent and environment int he world. Scary part, it works.
Google has spent a lot of time positioning themselves perfectly. They have invested in their intrinsic growth to be strong enough to go up against the likes of Microsoft and squash them like a bug.
But they are too smart to hit too many fronts at once. They are in fact highly focused on their vision and direction. Slowly sensing out new avenues and testing the waters.
Microsoft, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, Sony, MGM even the RIAA wants to side step this machine called Google. If Ballmer thinks Linux is the enemy, think again. Linux might be the knife but Google will be the one to thrust it hard into Microsoft. Ballmer will one day wake up and will find their mail products, office products and OS sales are all no longer selling.
Oh, Microsoft knows this too. Vista might be just the trip google is looking for.
If that's not racial profiling, I don't know what is?
Don't think I would argue that. But were not all of the 9/11 terrorists Muslim of the same/similar race? I didn't see Spanish Catholics, Jewish, United or Presbyterians on the list of people who did the terrorist act did you? If you want to find them you have to look for what they can't hide.
And if it isn't about race and religion, you should read middle east history. It is all about racial (intolerance) and religious (cleansing).
There is certainly causality in uses of credit cards, terrorist meetings and relationships. Read a Wiki Causality. Think, if you know the times, dates and places of credit card use and where known terrorists have been, get an exceptional amount of coincidences in co-location of two people with a seaming unknown relationship can lead to discovery of a real terrorist or criminal element.
Good to see they are actually, as a government agency no less, trying to be effective against an enemy that hides in amongst us including children. They generally want to destroy our lives because of our affluence, race and religion.
Race is part of it. Get over it. Not my choice, just how they want it.
So my love of Lebanese food will make me a marked man?
Doubtful. Lots of people eat the stuff.
But think, they are actually targeting the terrorists. I doubt they eat beef hot dogs from Costco or buy Kentucky Bourbon. Terrorists are also transient. So a lot of one time purchases, or 2-3 week visits might indicate something. Combine this with other sources and at least you have a smaller, likely better list than going after Christian grandmothers looking for a nip at Bob's liqueur emporium. At least it isn't someone who is wearing a turban patting down the ladies at the airport.
At some point profiling is necessary if you want to be at all effective in identification of terrorists. But would agree if such evidence be used in court, it would be racist even to bring it up.
You are presuming who we contact can travel space in a similar way as we want to but are too busy fighting wars. While we grow technically we are still a bunch of out of control apes and fanatical types. My guess is even if they heard our EMF going out, yes we glow in the signals we send, they would not want anything to do with us.
While I believe Carl Segan was right, there is lots of life out there, it is like a pyramid. Lots of low life like man kind, preoccupied with fanatical religion, greed and control. We could not meaningfully travel the stars in our current state as someone would make a war out of it.
But this does not mean some society out there hasn't evolved up the pyramid to be benevolent, peaceful, curious and technically advanced. My guess their rules would forbid interfering contact.
Besides, it is just listening, and if your not listen you will never hear it. Most of mankind hears OK, but does not listen. It isn't first contact to eves drop. Besides, it would be so kewl to see mankind enlightened to proved we are not the only ones. Another myth to see conquered.
Probably not but you could likely port it. Or...
Soekris" has a nice package that runs a variety of FOSS OSes and is very power friendly. A friend uses OpenBSD and has quite good success with it.
That unless they can find a way for Big Oil (c)(tm) to get a huge slice of the revenue pie, there will be no electric cars in our future...
Big oil is not responsible for the devaluation of the US currency. Gasoline in Europe and Canada has remained almost the same price as 6-12 months ago! Oil is most often quoted in USD but the value of a barrel of oil is really much more stable than that.
The US Fed (Congress) has likely "create" too much money and diluted the US currency. Thus giving the appearance of a higher price. When really it is the currency buying it that has lost value.
Electric cars are not really efficient requiring coal or natural gas in many places to generate it. And there are losses in recharging and discharge. Besides, a F150 V8 engine block is more recyclable in the dumps than a composite engine. That is, steel is recyclable where as many plastics and composites are not.
Car companies like composites and plastics because they can make the cars cheaper. And sell it as "green". People don't look at the chemical lists used in it's creation. The result is you're paying a lot for the preception of being green.
OpenFiler sounds interesting. But I have always just loaded Samba. With NFS already part of the xNIX OS it is easy to do. But nice to see it packaged in one nice tidy bundle.
It does amaze me why companies can make so much in the storage area. Then try to get a lousy 50gb from the administrator of the storage. Being it is so expensive, it is often micro-managed to no-end. I would like to see some honest cost estimates of storage...where does a big box actually make sense, 20TB, 100TB, 1000TB?
I suspect far too many shops buy big box when really just take out the old 80GB drives and slap in 3 x 1TBs ($350 ea) will do. That is, if a system only needs 2TB to run, why not just provide 4TB? Local storage is almost always faster, and if a vendor claims they are faster, measure it and verify that claim for yourself. In at least you always want Oracle redo/logs on local disk. And never put the OS/swap on these big boxes.
BTW, 3 disks can be fully mirrored, a common PC issue if you only have 4 slots and one is a DVD. Hint, 2 equal sized partitions per disk and striping can make a 1.5TB mirrored volume of 3 1TB disks. Turns old PCs into storage units.
In an age of terrorism, being distributed is better than being centralized.
Problem is most people can't think distributed. Including management and programmers.
Now imagine all that idle, untapped compute power on all the desktops in any organization. All goes to waste. Add it up, a wasted super computer.
Besides, it will never be successfully and fully centralized again, the overhead of.NET, Java and today's programming methods would require too much CPU/memory/I-O. In our organization it has been tried using various technologies, Citrix, Solaris zones, VMWare and the same story happens every time. It gets over allocated until it doesn't work correctly. Then you have to explain to deaf management why you don't want to put a real time data input app on the same host as a OLTP or data warehouse.
As much as folks here love to think that MSFT is a sinking ship, it's having its healthiest growth in years.
It will be short lived. People are running out and buying XP to replace Vista, and many are not happy about it. Am I glad I bought my last PC just before Vista came out.
I assume those numbers also include the copy I received (and promptly wiped) when I bought my new Thinkpad.
Yes, you know it does. You also know it includes those that got wiped for XP or Linux. What would be a good indicator is how many have shipped versus how many "called home" last week for updates. The actual numbers of running Vista instances is greatly exaggerated.
My guess is Microsoft will keep that number very very quiet. If Vista was a car, it would be known as an Edsel.
One wonders, too, just how well Linux would survive an economic downturn. With mixed economic signs coming out of the west, one has to imagine that previously generous developers will descend on each other like wolves, when time comes to make mortgage payments.
Linux always makes it's best gains when Microsoft changes their OS. And with an economic downturn, companies will be looking to tighten up the budgets, this will include the cost of the OS. And the TCO of well run Linux can go up against MS-Windows anytime.
Only problem with your theory is that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. There would be an amazing number of regulatory hurdles it would have to jump through even to think about buying a company that makes a competing OS.
I don't think M$ buying a Linux company is the end of FLOSS. In fact FLOSS will take off like a bullet should M$ so that. It would validate what most truly technically astute already know, Linux is a better OS, and unquestionably as a server.
I wonder how much open source, likely heavily modified open source broken just enough not to work with others is already in Windows anyway. Given protocols/services like SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, POP3, MIT Kerberos, LDAP, XML libraries, PNG, on and on are used by Windows. One can bet they didn't "clean room" their development. Because Redmond has the same problem as anyone else, finding competence.
2. The bill in question is the wrong way to address the issue. The card associations have a solution to the problem except they won't implement it because it cuts into their fraud revenue and the costs are much higher per-card than dumb plastic/mag-stripe. The standard is called EMV. It solves 98% of fraud issues. Today. The other 2% I'll blame on bad coding.
Then let the law pass. It will MOTIVATE the twigs at the top to get off their lethargic butts and put a stop to it. What you are saying is that they profit from abuse. I wouldn't doubt it, but I wish the law had teeth. I would have added "punitive damages where they were either not responsively or criminally negligent can go up to $20M or 10 times the card holders cost to fix it, whichever is greater.". That would wake the CEO up.
I'm Brazilian, so if you wanna hear the REAL history: Yes, Brazil has a lot of corruption, everybody knows... But that has NOTHING to do with what happened with Cisco and a lot of other companies...
It has everything to do with corruption. Corruption isn't limited to the handouts at the airports. It goes far deeper than that. One could even say it is cultural. For example, if a drug lord pays his corruption taxes he is much less likely to get pinched.
My guess, and just a guess, is some competitor just bribed someone higher on the food chain and some big fat juicy contract is coming up. "Hey, get rid of Cisco, keep prices high on the upcoming contract and I have a gift for you at Christmas.". That is, the competition just bribed the right government officials.
You need to choose the right time to wise-crack them. Only ever had one opportunity and took it.
Needed to renew a TN-1 visa. While entering Canada, grinding her teeth she asked "What is your purpose of visiting Canada?" My reply, "To turn around and get hell back out.". She promptly said go and watched as I did. Hey, what was she going to do? Kick me out?
I suspect she called the US side and told them about me. I was in and out with my new TN-1 in a record 7 minutes.
My friend just bought a copy of XP Pro because he has so much problems with Vista.
No surprise here, M$ has found a way to make the manufactures pay and fatten up the profits. Bet Microsoft does not want to publish downgrade and after market sales replacing Vista. But making lots of money in the process.
They are probably broke but getting cash infusions indirectly from Micro$oft. Thus if they lose and are liable for damages they can't get to Micro$oft's pockets.
Considering we pay her half what a BA in the business world would make because she works in education.. her quitting is not a option for my district.
Yep. But why don't we say it like it really is. Gross management incompetence. I have consulted for a major college and could not believe the lack of depth in the head of I/T. Totally freaking clueless to to I/T and industry best practices. Not one molecule in his head was into I/T and being irrational and political type no hope too either. A freshman in CompSci in the same institution would be better qualified to run the department.
For they are political institutions run by politicians that set aside all the money for pet projects, or slush it to "more important needs". The head of I/T is often just a "yes" man/woman patronage appointment that never says what should be done because they don't know. I/T has no representation to the heads of the institution, as if they would care even if they had. I could crack a joke about sex and I/T "yes" but it is exemplified in government and educational institutions.
Since then I have talked to others. And similar experiences can be told from almost every educational institution around. A personification of Dilbert at best.
But they care once they have been hacked an payroll is down.
A RAM failure, depending on severity, is a right PITA to diagnose.
Next time you boot, press F2 and turn on memory check.
If you know squat about hex, you can guess 50/50 which slot it is on a 4 bank mobo without looking at the bank numbers. Many mobos even give you the beeps to tell you. Enough for a monkey to learn in 3 weeks.
I only had one memory problem that took me more than 10 minutes to diagnose in 30 years. It was on a disk controller with cache, if it stayed in cache for more than 1-2 seconds it flipped a bit every 32Kbits about once per day. Took me 3 weeks. But that is rare, a once in a 30 year career. Memory usually goes hard. Grab a old LinuxCare or newer Linux CD and many contain diag right on it. Just like the big boys at Sun and IBM use.
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No one... not even democracy.. has the right to ask someone to hand over their private thoughts. Not even if they are in a written letter. Not even if they are in an electronic email. Not even if that person is a President of a country.
Consider it public if you type it into a system that is public or owned by someone else. While I agree if it is say a persons personal computer whholey owned and operated by themselves I do not buy into privacy if it is the government's or companies computer. If you want privacy, a certain prudence on the individuals part goes a long way.
For example, use PGP. I do as I don't even trust my own PC for some things. BTW works on Linux and Macs too. And make sure to put the keyring on a thumb drive you hide or carry with you. That is, privacy is easy with due diligence.
Never put anything in plain text mail you can't answer to or others to see. Remember the other person can forward it and it is easy to intercept it.
When this crashes it will be loud and hard. Hopefully you guys working at Google are going to do the smart thing and save as much money as you can while you can.
I highly doubt google stock is going to go down, in fact I foresee it doubling or tripling inside a decade or less. Why you ask? Lets look at how google has positioned themselves:
Google has spent a lot of time positioning themselves perfectly. They have invested in their intrinsic growth to be strong enough to go up against the likes of Microsoft and squash them like a bug.
But they are too smart to hit too many fronts at once. They are in fact highly focused on their vision and direction. Slowly sensing out new avenues and testing the waters.
Microsoft, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, Sony, MGM even the RIAA wants to side step this machine called Google. If Ballmer thinks Linux is the enemy, think again. Linux might be the knife but Google will be the one to thrust it hard into Microsoft. Ballmer will one day wake up and will find their mail products, office products and OS sales are all no longer selling.
Oh, Microsoft knows this too. Vista might be just the trip google is looking for.
If that's not racial profiling, I don't know what is?
Don't think I would argue that. But were not all of the 9/11 terrorists Muslim of the same/similar race? I didn't see Spanish Catholics, Jewish, United or Presbyterians on the list of people who did the terrorist act did you? If you want to find them you have to look for what they can't hide.
And if it isn't about race and religion, you should read middle east history. It is all about racial (intolerance) and religious (cleansing).
There is certainly causality in uses of credit cards, terrorist meetings and relationships. Read a Wiki Causality. Think, if you know the times, dates and places of credit card use and where known terrorists have been, get an exceptional amount of coincidences in co-location of two people with a seaming unknown relationship can lead to discovery of a real terrorist or criminal element.
Good to see they are actually, as a government agency no less, trying to be effective against an enemy that hides in amongst us including children. They generally want to destroy our lives because of our affluence, race and religion.
Race is part of it. Get over it. Not my choice, just how they want it.
So my love of Lebanese food will make me a marked man?
Doubtful. Lots of people eat the stuff.
But think, they are actually targeting the terrorists. I doubt they eat beef hot dogs from Costco or buy Kentucky Bourbon. Terrorists are also transient. So a lot of one time purchases, or 2-3 week visits might indicate something. Combine this with other sources and at least you have a smaller, likely better list than going after Christian grandmothers looking for a nip at Bob's liqueur emporium. At least it isn't someone who is wearing a turban patting down the ladies at the airport.
At some point profiling is necessary if you want to be at all effective in identification of terrorists. But would agree if such evidence be used in court, it would be racist even to bring it up.
You are presuming who we contact can travel space in a similar way as we want to but are too busy fighting wars. While we grow technically we are still a bunch of out of control apes and fanatical types. My guess is even if they heard our EMF going out, yes we glow in the signals we send, they would not want anything to do with us.
While I believe Carl Segan was right, there is lots of life out there, it is like a pyramid. Lots of low life like man kind, preoccupied with fanatical religion, greed and control. We could not meaningfully travel the stars in our current state as someone would make a war out of it.
But this does not mean some society out there hasn't evolved up the pyramid to be benevolent, peaceful, curious and technically advanced. My guess their rules would forbid interfering contact.
Besides, it is just listening, and if your not listen you will never hear it. Most of mankind hears OK, but does not listen. It isn't first contact to eves drop. Besides, it would be so kewl to see mankind enlightened to proved we are not the only ones. Another myth to see conquered.
Does it run FreeBSD?
Probably not but you could likely port it. Or... Soekris" has a nice package that runs a variety of FOSS OSes and is very power friendly. A friend uses OpenBSD and has quite good success with it.
That unless they can find a way for Big Oil (c)(tm) to get a huge slice of the revenue pie, there will be no electric cars in our future...
Big oil is not responsible for the devaluation of the US currency. Gasoline in Europe and Canada has remained almost the same price as 6-12 months ago! Oil is most often quoted in USD but the value of a barrel of oil is really much more stable than that.
The US Fed (Congress) has likely "create" too much money and diluted the US currency. Thus giving the appearance of a higher price. When really it is the currency buying it that has lost value.
Electric cars are not really efficient requiring coal or natural gas in many places to generate it. And there are losses in recharging and discharge. Besides, a F150 V8 engine block is more recyclable in the dumps than a composite engine. That is, steel is recyclable where as many plastics and composites are not.
Car companies like composites and plastics because they can make the cars cheaper. And sell it as "green". People don't look at the chemical lists used in it's creation. The result is you're paying a lot for the preception of being green.
Maybe made a pass at Balmer when he bent over to pick up a chair.
Or maybe more hideous, he ran Linux at home.
OpenFiler sounds interesting. But I have always just loaded Samba. With NFS already part of the xNIX OS it is easy to do. But nice to see it packaged in one nice tidy bundle.
It does amaze me why companies can make so much in the storage area. Then try to get a lousy 50gb from the administrator of the storage. Being it is so expensive, it is often micro-managed to no-end. I would like to see some honest cost estimates of storage...where does a big box actually make sense, 20TB, 100TB, 1000TB?
I suspect far too many shops buy big box when really just take out the old 80GB drives and slap in 3 x 1TBs ($350 ea) will do. That is, if a system only needs 2TB to run, why not just provide 4TB? Local storage is almost always faster, and if a vendor claims they are faster, measure it and verify that claim for yourself. In at least you always want Oracle redo/logs on local disk. And never put the OS/swap on these big boxes.
BTW, 3 disks can be fully mirrored, a common PC issue if you only have 4 slots and one is a DVD. Hint, 2 equal sized partitions per disk and striping can make a 1.5TB mirrored volume of 3 1TB disks. Turns old PCs into storage units.
In an age of terrorism, being distributed is better than being centralized.
Problem is most people can't think distributed. Including management and programmers.
Now imagine all that idle, untapped compute power on all the desktops in any organization. All goes to waste. Add it up, a wasted super computer.
Besides, it will never be successfully and fully centralized again, the overhead of .NET, Java and today's programming methods would require too much CPU/memory/I-O. In our organization it has been tried using various technologies, Citrix, Solaris zones, VMWare and the same story happens every time. It gets over allocated until it doesn't work correctly. Then you have to explain to deaf management why you don't want to put a real time data input app on the same host as a OLTP or data warehouse.
As much as folks here love to think that MSFT is a sinking ship, it's having its healthiest growth in years.
It will be short lived. People are running out and buying XP to replace Vista, and many are not happy about it. Am I glad I bought my last PC just before Vista came out.
I assume those numbers also include the copy I received (and promptly wiped) when I bought my new Thinkpad.
Yes, you know it does. You also know it includes those that got wiped for XP or Linux. What would be a good indicator is how many have shipped versus how many "called home" last week for updates. The actual numbers of running Vista instances is greatly exaggerated.
My guess is Microsoft will keep that number very very quiet. If Vista was a car, it would be known as an Edsel.
One wonders, too, just how well Linux would survive an economic downturn. With mixed economic signs coming out of the west, one has to imagine that previously generous developers will descend on each other like wolves, when time comes to make mortgage payments.
Linux always makes it's best gains when Microsoft changes their OS. And with an economic downturn, companies will be looking to tighten up the budgets, this will include the cost of the OS. And the TCO of well run Linux can go up against MS-Windows anytime.
Canadian dollars, right? So in American that guy just got back $10k, right? Payday!
Never heard of a Canadian getting a XP or Vista refund have you?
So in Canada is is worth less than $0. Remember you had to pay non refundable GST/PST on that too.
This has Microsoft stink all over it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+Acacia+Research&btnG=Google+Search
Only problem with your theory is that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. There would be an amazing number of regulatory hurdles it would have to jump through even to think about buying a company that makes a competing OS.
I don't think M$ buying a Linux company is the end of FLOSS. In fact FLOSS will take off like a bullet should M$ so that. It would validate what most truly technically astute already know, Linux is a better OS, and unquestionably as a server.
I wonder how much open source, likely heavily modified open source broken just enough not to work with others is already in Windows anyway. Given protocols/services like SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, POP3, MIT Kerberos, LDAP, XML libraries, PNG, on and on are used by Windows. One can bet they didn't "clean room" their development. Because Redmond has the same problem as anyone else, finding competence.
So buying Red Hat or Novell would make sense.
2. The bill in question is the wrong way to address the issue. The card associations have a solution to the problem except they won't implement it because it cuts into their fraud revenue and the costs are much higher per-card than dumb plastic/mag-stripe. The standard is called EMV. It solves 98% of fraud issues. Today. The other 2% I'll blame on bad coding.
Then let the law pass. It will MOTIVATE the twigs at the top to get off their lethargic butts and put a stop to it. What you are saying is that they profit from abuse. I wouldn't doubt it, but I wish the law had teeth. I would have added "punitive damages where they were either not responsively or criminally negligent can go up to $20M or 10 times the card holders cost to fix it, whichever is greater.". That would wake the CEO up.
I'm Brazilian, so if you wanna hear the REAL history: Yes, Brazil has a lot of corruption, everybody knows... But that has NOTHING to do with what happened with Cisco and a lot of other companies...
It has everything to do with corruption. Corruption isn't limited to the handouts at the airports. It goes far deeper than that. One could even say it is cultural. For example, if a drug lord pays his corruption taxes he is much less likely to get pinched.
My guess, and just a guess, is some competitor just bribed someone higher on the food chain and some big fat juicy contract is coming up. "Hey, get rid of Cisco, keep prices high on the upcoming contract and I have a gift for you at Christmas.". That is, the competition just bribed the right government officials.
You need to choose the right time to wise-crack them. Only ever had one opportunity and took it.
Needed to renew a TN-1 visa. While entering Canada, grinding her teeth she asked "What is your purpose of visiting Canada?" My reply, "To turn around and get hell back out.". She promptly said go and watched as I did. Hey, what was she going to do? Kick me out?
I suspect she called the US side and told them about me. I was in and out with my new TN-1 in a record 7 minutes.
My friend just bought a copy of XP Pro because he has so much problems with Vista.
No surprise here, M$ has found a way to make the manufactures pay and fatten up the profits. Bet Microsoft does not want to publish downgrade and after market sales replacing Vista. But making lots of money in the process.
They are probably broke but getting cash infusions indirectly from Micro$oft. Thus if they lose and are liable for damages they can't get to Micro$oft's pockets.
Considering we pay her half what a BA in the business world would make because she works in education.. her quitting is not a option for my district.
Yep. But why don't we say it like it really is. Gross management incompetence. I have consulted for a major college and could not believe the lack of depth in the head of I/T. Totally freaking clueless to to I/T and industry best practices. Not one molecule in his head was into I/T and being irrational and political type no hope too either. A freshman in CompSci in the same institution would be better qualified to run the department.
For they are political institutions run by politicians that set aside all the money for pet projects, or slush it to "more important needs". The head of I/T is often just a "yes" man/woman patronage appointment that never says what should be done because they don't know. I/T has no representation to the heads of the institution, as if they would care even if they had. I could crack a joke about sex and I/T "yes" but it is exemplified in government and educational institutions.
Since then I have talked to others. And similar experiences can be told from almost every educational institution around. A personification of Dilbert at best.
But they care once they have been hacked an payroll is down.
Why is the production company only up to season 4 so far?
Maybe the bit torrent servers they were using were shut down or didn't pay their cable bill?
TFA makes it fairly clear that this operatiion is based in Canada.
But hosted in the USA. A lookup of tvboxset.com shows 72.52.7.20 listed whois says USA hosted.
A RAM failure, depending on severity, is a right PITA to diagnose.
Next time you boot, press F2 and turn on memory check.
If you know squat about hex, you can guess 50/50 which slot it is on a 4 bank mobo without looking at the bank numbers. Many mobos even give you the beeps to tell you. Enough for a monkey to learn in 3 weeks.
I only had one memory problem that took me more than 10 minutes to diagnose in 30 years. It was on a disk controller with cache, if it stayed in cache for more than 1-2 seconds it flipped a bit every 32Kbits about once per day. Took me 3 weeks. But that is rare, a once in a 30 year career. Memory usually goes hard. Grab a old LinuxCare or newer Linux CD and many contain diag right on it. Just like the big boys at Sun and IBM use.
These guys were all amateurs.