could shoot the GPS system out of the sky within the first few hours of any war
I suspect that we could fry satellites from ground if we really wanted to. Take a large dish, point it directly at the satellite, and pump a gigawatt of microwave RF noise into it. And it would be very precise...
Satellites are indeed hardened against radiation of all sorts, and can even reboot themselves if some radiation penetrates the CPU and causes something unexpected, but at some point enough power is going to cause damage.
And of course, with less power you could overload it's receivers, especially if you can transmit on exactly the frequency they're listening to. And it would be hard to track -- it wasn't that long ago that somebody was jamming a specific satellite for quite some time. I think it was determined that the signal was coming from Cuba, but they never did narrow it down further...
Well, remember that it was $5 cards, and relatively slow hardware. The p3/700 had a relatively old Linux kernel -- I don't know if 2.6 kernels on both sides would improve things, but I'd expect it to.
And the hub involved is certainly low end as well.
And even/dev/zero isn't unlimited bandwidth -- ultimately, it's limited by cpu and memory bandwidth.
I was able to pretty much peg the GigE switch (110MB/s, theoretical max being 125MB/s) by adding in other machines pulling down the same file from the 'server' and copying it to/dev/null.
Really, the GigE switch's theoretical maximum should be 125 MB/s per direction per port. If you're benchmarking the switch itself, you'll want to pound on every port in both directions.
And even your ramdrive benchmarking isn't terribly realistic. Most transfers will be from drive to drive, so you'll be limited by the speeds of the drives, though caches will certainly help.
But all in all, my points were that 1) gigE is cheap enough that just about anybody can afford it at home now, and 2) without high-end hardware all around, you won't see the theoretical maximums that gigE can offer.
To hell with that; GigE can totally hammer the dinky PCI bus most systems have these days, you want something with proper interrupt moderation, 100% working checksum offload and decent DMA support; jumbo frames are nice too. Cheapy Realtek cards need not apply
It's not nearly that bad with the $5 cards.
I ran `cat/dev/zero | nc other-host 6666' with a `nc -l 6666 >/dev/null' running between a dual p3/700 and an Athlon XP 2600, with both commands run on both systems, and saw about 27 MB/s going in both directions at the same time. CPU usage on the p3/700 was around 40% of one cpu (and it was less on the faster Athlon) -- which is signifigant, but it was certainly still usable, and the data was flowing quickly enough.
Better cards may perform better, but the cheap cards aren't bad at all. They don't seem to support jumbo frames, however. But that's not essential, just nice. For an enterprise file server, you might want to do better, but for home? This is fine.
Oh, I had to recompile the kernel on the Athlon box to disable the interrupt acceleration stuff on that driver (r8169)... otherwise, the Athlon box would hang under heavy network load until the cable was removed (then it would come back.) Obviously a problem with the driver/kernel somehow -- the p3/700 box (running a 2.4 kernel) had no such problem.
I eventually replaced it with an Athlon64 XP 3000 w/ a sk98lin card built into the motherboard. That one wouldn't work with the FC4 kernel at all (it was seen, but just didn't move any packets) but worked once I built my own kernel. A lot more trouble than it should have been, but...
MAKE SURE YOUR NETWORK THAT THE SERVER IS CONNECTED TO IS 100 MBIT (preferably the client transfering files to/from as well)
Really, at this point in the game, if you've got 2 TB of disk, you should have every computer in your house using 100 Mbit or better networking. (I'll let your slower 802.11* connected computers slide, but you'll find that wireless to be maddenly slow when moving large files...)
100 Mbit equipment is so cheap now, every PC that's at least 100 MHz should have it. If you have some older workstations, 100 Mbit cards may be hard to find, but these would have to be pretty old boxes to not come with 100 Mbit...
Furthermore, if you're using ethernet, remember that usage above 60%, especially with multiple clients (say, two people pulling/pushing lots of the server at once), suffers from rather high latency and packet collision.
That's not true if you've got a switch rather than a dumb hub, and switches are pretty much the norm now. Switched networks have almost zero collisions, no matter how busy they are. (Granted, they should have zero collisions, not almost zero, but switches do occasionally have bugs...)
Sure, latency does go up when you're pounding on the network, but on a 100 Mbit network it's not that much -- just a few miliseconds at most. And for moving lots of data around, latency doesn't matter much anyways -- it's throughput that matters.
as data moves 10 times as fast down the wire.
Not quite. You won't actually see 120 MB/s with today's hardware, but you might see 20-30 MB/s, maybe a little more on really serious hardware, which is still a lot better than the 12 MB/s you'll get out of 100 Mbit ethernet. And it's relatively cheap now -- I recently got gigabit PCI cards for $5 and a 5 port gigabit hub for $20 at Fry's.
The steady state of disks is full --Ken Thompson (?)
It was true when 360K floppies were the norm, and it's true when 400 GB hard drives are commonplace. And it'll probably be true when 80 TB disks start showing up.
Or you could try a tape drive, but large DLT tapes can be expensive.
Right. DLT media costs a good deal more than large IDE drives do per GB nowadays, nevermind the cost of the DLT drive itself.
Really, the only thing that's cheaper per gigabyte than IDE drives is DVD+/-R media. So if you're looking for archival or just backups, your cheapest bets are DVD+/-R (cheaper per GB, don't require rebooting or opening your case to switch media) or large IDE drives (faster, read/write, larger, probably likely to last longer if stored properly.)
According to an electronic memo from FBI headquarters, established legal precedents indicate that conviction is most likely in cases where the content "includes bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior."
I have to admit, the FDNY firefighters selfless heroism during 9/11 gave me a little faith in the authorities.
I was going to bring that example up in my post, but decided it wasn't needed.
In any event, those firefighters who rushed into the building were disobeying direct orders from their superiors. Were they heroes? Sort of -- their hearts were in the right place, but their brains weren't. Unfortunately, in an emergency, people need to listen to their brain more than their hearts...
Publically, they were called heroes. Privately, I suspect that firefighters and policemen everywhere were told `if you pull a stupid stunt like that and survive, I'll kick you out on your ass so fast it'll make your head spin!'
A dead cop or fireman doesn't do anybody any good.
it really pissed me off during the LA riots when the cops just drove by the mob that was kicking the shit out of that trucker.
I vaguely remember what you're referring to, but not the specifics...
But it doesn't matter. Police, firemen and similar people are generally trained to take care of #1 first, not to be a hero. (Now, many people do disregard this and do dangerous things, but they're usually disciplined afterwards, assuming they live.)
If you've got two police officers in a car, and you see a very angry mob beating somebody, intervening immediately is not usually the smartest thing to do. You'd be putting yourself into extreme danger, and may in fact make things worse for the person being beaten.
A much smarter response would be to stay back and call it in and get lots of reinforcements, cops in riot gear, and THEN you can go in. When you're ready, not before. If you're going to enter a battle, make sure it's a battle you're likely to win. If you're not planning to win, don't enter.
Individuals respect cop's authority. Even large crowds generally respect police. But an angry mob? No way would two smart cops do anything about that on their own beyond getting reenforcements.
However, what you seem to have forgotten to mention is that the primary use of these scanners is to scan emails for Windows viruses, not Linux viruses. And while it does look like these scanners have the ability to scan your filesystem for infected binaries, that's probably meant more to scan filesystems mounted by Windows boxes via SMB... for Windows viruses.
Sure, their virus signature databases probably do have some Linux viruses in there, but scanning for them is not the main reason that people install clamav and similar programs.
Yes, there are Linux viruses out there. However, the usual architecture of a Linux installation (restrictive permissions, user processes not having permissions to alter most binaries) makes it very difficult for a virus to propagate the way most Windows viruses do -- by infecting binaries. (Granted, Windows can be run in the same way, but since it breaks so many things, it's rarely done unless programatically enforced by an IT department.)
That, and most *nix mail readers and web browsers are not as willing to execute arbitrary code it finds as IE and Outlook unless explicitly told to do so.
But, if you do find a virus, and run it as root...
First time anybody has ever made poverty sound almost cool.
I know you're making a joke, but ultimately being poor has always been somewhat liberating.
Suppose you lived in New Orleans. You didn't even own your house (it was rented), and now it's ruined. You can just pack up and leave, and go anywhere you want. Compare this to a guy with lots of money -- sure, his house was ruined too, but he owns the land it's own, lots of stuff in the house, the business downtown, etc. He can't just pack up and leave.
And the poor have always been pretty much lawsuit proof. Until recently, they could drive without insurance with impunity -- even if they caused an accident, they wouldn't have to pay anything. (Now, at least licenses are taken away, but even that doesn't really stop them, though impounding cars might if it happens eventually.)
Even minor criminal charges aren't a big concern, as long as they don't become serious enough to end up in jail -- and even then, the state won't want to keep you in jail just because you can't pay fines, and they'll often credit you something like $100/day for each day you're in jail because you can't pay the fines -- which is more than a minumum wage job will pay.
If somebody does loan you money, there's no real need to pay them back. What are they going to do, ruin your credit report? It's already ruined! Sue you? What could they win?
Wrong. Your only choice lies between paying a few k dollars to an extortionist company, or getting many millions to be able to afford lawyers and stand through the trial.
It wouldn't cost millions to defend agaisnt the charges. Thousands, yes -- far more than the RIAA is asking for -- but not millions. Sure, you could spend millions, but you don't have to.
Ultimately, if you're going to fight this sort of thing, you'll want to not have too many assets, so if you do lose, you don't lose much. (Even a billion dollar judgement isn't worth much if the guy the judgement is against only has $6.)
You'll also want to have enough money to get some competent legal representation. The two normally do not go hand in hand -- usually when you have enough to defend yourself, you have so much to lose that it's safer to just pay. In fact, it's generally cheaper to just pay, even if you're poor, which seems to be what our entire civil court system is based on.
In any event, you may not need even thousands of dollars to defend yourself. You can spend as little or as much as you want on your defense -- the more you spend, the better the odds of winning, but even if you spend $0 and represent yourself, there is a chance that you'll win. It's also possible that some lawyers may work on your case pro-bono (since it would be good for a lot of advertising for them, especially if they won) and it's also possible that the EFF or ACLU may help defray your legal expenses if they decide that your case is strong enough to warrant their help.
Of course, there's also a very good chance that the RIAA won't push any cases far enough to actually go to trial. After all, so far they have a perfect record -- no losses -- and they won't want to risk that unless they're sure they can win -- and the people that are sure to lose are not the people who are likely to fight it.
Generally those types of "crash" sales aren't going to happen over the internet - which is where this laptop was sold according to TFA. You'd take it to an aquaintence, or a pawn shop or such, and you'd have no problem leaving a copy of your ID as bona fides that it's not hot.
If you say so. I buy all sorts of stuff cheap on the Internet, and I don't think it's stolen. And I don't usually take or give ID, though I might if something really didn't seem legitimate, though I'd be reluctant to have a complete stranger making a copy of my ID.
Just because smoke is pouring out of a house doesn't mean it's on fire - but a reasonable person would call the fire department anyway.
Bad analogy. In fact, that analogy is worse than most.
And a reasonable person would think this was a stolen laptop.
Nope. I find stuff listed on austin.forsale and the local craigslist that's sold for a small fraction of what it's worth on a regular basis. I generally don't think it's stolen, even though I know I could turn around and sell it on eBay for 3x what I bought it for. Sometimes I even buy it, much to my wife's dismay.
Of course, in these cases, I usually know their email address, often a phone number, where they live (since I picked it up)... it's hardly anonymous.
About two years ago I picked up a 20/40 GB DLT drive at a garage sale for $10. Works fine. To buy one would cost hundreds of dollars, perhaps close to $1000, yet I have no reason to believe it to be stolen.
Now, if somebody were to come up to me on the street and say `psst, want to buy a laptop?' then I'd be very suspicious. The odds would be very good that it's stolen, or that it's a block of wood wrapped up in paper (preying on my greed.) I don't usually work that way.
But just because something is cheap, that does not mean it's stolen.
Quite often people will bugger up a perfectly good laptop and assume it was 'broken.' Some of these people sell at a fairly low price... but a little easy tech-work or just even a reinstall will have it working just spiffy.
That is an excellent point. Remember
this article from the recent past? If somebody's computer is spyware-riddled, they may just think it's broken beyond repair, and buy a new one. The old computer will be sold, probably very cheaply, even though all it really needs is just a new format and install.
You might feel bad about buying it from somebody for so cheaply, when it's so easily fixed, but there's nothing illegal about it. Immoral, maybe (especially if the seller is poor), but not illegal. (And of course, you don't actually know what's wrong with it until you try and fix it. It may be that the computer is truly buggered -- it's a gamble.)
A woman shows up with a laptop worth 4 times the price (in used condition, never mind new) and that would not raise a red flag or two?
Yes, but people do sell stuff for a fraction of it's value on a regular basis. If you need $250 right now to bail your boyfriend out of jail, you might sell a laptop for $250 when you know that you might get $1000 for it on eBay if you listed it now and waited seven days. Or maybe she just has no idea what it's actual value is, and just think `it's an old laptop, can't be worth much.'
Or maybe she doesn't doesn't really care -- after all, getting top dollar for something is a lot of work, and requires some skill. If you're selling on eBay, you have to write up a good description, work out your exact specifications of what you're selling, have a good feedback rating, etc. `Top dollar' rarely just falls into your lap, unless you find a sucker. And lots of people are unwilling to go to the extra trouble, even if doing the math means that your two hours of extra work gets you $400 extra, meaning you made $200/hr. People rarely work out the math like that.
Just because something is cheap, that doesn't mean it's stolen. Yes, it should make you consider that as a possiblity, but it's certainly not a given.
Though the lines between microcomputers, minicomputers and mainframes are not lines at all. Perhaps they once were, but now it's one big blur. In any event, Sun makes machines that fit into all three categories (and so does most everybody else.)
x86 is merely taking the place once occupied by Alpha.
Taking? They've been competing since the Alpha was introduced, and it's pretty obvious who won.
Unless you meant that x86_64 is taking the niche once occupied by Alpha -- fast, but still low end 64 bit cpus. In which case I'd have to say `thank you, Captain Obvious!'
Yes, but if I'm interested in high-performance computing, I'd go with the Dell. I wouldn't touch Sun with a barge-pole performance wise; they're strictly for those who need high availability.
Odd. In my experience, if you need `high performance computing', you've outgrown x86 entirely and so have to ditch Dell and instead get Suns (or IBMs or HPs.) And high availability is thrown in for free...
Yes, high end PCs are fast as hell now, and they're competing directly with Suns and IBM's fastest processors, and in the case of raw cpu speed, sometimes they even win. However, PCs have never been able to compete with the I/O bandwidth of the best servers out there, and they still can't.
(Though I don't know how the new Sun x86_64 boxes do. I suspect they compete nicely with other x86_64 boxes, but that the big Sun machines still beat them, especially in I/O. But when it comes to performance for a given price, it's been hard to beat a good PC for quite some time now, and I don't see this changing any time soon.)
As for high availability, you can have that with x86, x86_64, Sparc, RS6K, PPC, whatever. The good server boxes have basically caught up with what the servers have had for a long time -- redundant power supplies, RAID, etc. And of course you can't really have a high availability environment with a single computer anyways...
It'd be interesting to see a program that creates a pipe and forwards/dev/urandom, deleting some 'random' 5% of the data pushed through.
I don't understand. Why would this be interesting? Would it be useful somehow?
I mean, on most standard linux kernels (not using GRSec or such), the PRNG isn't 100% random, so there'll be some fixed patterns.
Well,/dev/random is supposed to be truly random, but will block if it runs out of entropy. Which means it's really slow./dev/urandom does not block, and just keeps re-using the entropy pool (which should keep changing as interrupts come in from the disk access) so the data isn't truly random. But it should look random as long as you aren't doing some sort of statistical analysys on it.
But you want your drive to be erased in less than a month, right? Use/dev/urandom. It's more than random enough. (Use/dev/random when you need small amounts of `true' randomness.)
/dev/zero is good enough to stop 99+% of the people out there who might want to read your data. To get data out of a drive that's been zeroed like that is not a simple matter anymore. But beyond that, any random-ish pattern is good enough. And if your data is so sensitive that you're still nervous, just physically destroy the disk already.
I haven't tried it myself but I am willing to bet that a standard tape bulk eraser will render most hard drives inoperable, as it will not only zap the data but also the zone markers that are magnetically placed on the media by the drive's low-level format.
I have. It didn't work. Not on DLT tapes, and not on a 500 MB hard drive I was playing with.
I had to send the DLT tapes off to a professional service to have them erased (they had to be erased for the new tape drive to make them work in the new high density mode.) The hard drive was just me seeing if I could do it:)
The tigher your cram data in there, the higher the magnetic fields needed to make changes. And modern media has it cramed VERY tightly...
In this case, "writing" zeroes to a drive would indeed wipe it clean. Anyone know if such a thing
exists?
I imagine there's some market for such a drive, but the problem is that this drive would have 1/4th the writing performance of a standard drive, since every write command would cause four write operations. All that to make a known poor data erasing method more secure?
Only the uninformed paranoids would really be interested in it. And the truly paranoid would probably find an encrypted filesystem to be far more useful. (Though a hard drive that had good encryption in firmware, that worked just like an unecrypted drive once the key was loaded somehow (and forgot the key once power was lost), THAT could have quite a market.)
Even the government doesn't even really need it, because they don't ever sell or send back drives that previously ever had classified data on them -- they physically destroy them. In fact, they generally stay in locked safes when not in use.
Have they made some change to zero in the last 8 years that makes it less constant?
No, but at the lowest level, your hard drive is analog, not digital. It's not just 0s and 1s anymore.
To give an example, suppose a part of your drive had this pattern written on it --
1 0 1 0 1
and you overwrote that with 0s. So you'd expect to see
0 0 0 0 0
and you would, if you read the drive in the normal way. However, underneath the covers, the data on the drive would really look more like this --
0.11 0.02 0.11 0.02 0.09
the exact values are just guesses, but there is a pattern here -- if a bit used to be 0, it's very close to 0 now. If the bit used to be 1, it's still close to 0 now, but a good deal further than if it was a 0.
With some different firmware, one could read most of the data that was on a drive that had been erased like this.
This is why people 1) write random or semi-random patterns to the disk to erase it, and 2) do it more than once.
Still, writing 0's just once to the entire disk will stop 99% of people who might read your disk. Writing random patterns several times will probably stop even the NSA, but if they want you bad enough, they'll stick probes into your brain and extract it that way:)
You need far stronger static magnetic fields to damage a drive without opening it than you can buy.
Mod parent up. He's spot-on here.
Strong magnets (as strong as you're likely to have at home anyways) will erase (ruin) floppy media just fine. And cassette tape media. And probably 8 tracks. I don't know what they'll do to QIC-150, 4 mm or 8 mm media. But they won't erase DLT media, and won't erase modern hard drives, probably not even if you put it right next to the platter itself.
(Now, opening the drive up and scraping the magnet over the drum, physically damaging it, that may be effective. But a non-magnetic wire brush would work as well.)
Personally, I erase my media with some variation of this --
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdc bs=102400
and let that go until it's done. Repeat if you're extra paranoid. Sure, there may be some data left in sectors that have been re-allocated by the firmware. Sure, the NSA might be able to recontruct my data bit by bit with microscopes. But if I'm really worried about that, I'm not going to sell my disk -- I'm going to physically destroy it.
As for warranty repair, that's a tough call. If the dd can't be done, the odds are good that the company can recover almost everything on the disk. You'll have to consider the pros (you get a new disk! free!) vs. the cons (they might be able to recover all of your data.)
If you're using gcc's "long long" extension to achieve 64-bitness in 32-bit environments, then recompiling will indeed make your code take advantage of real 64-bitness.
In that case, yes. Perhaps integer math was a poor example. Encryption and compression would be better examples.
Oh, and longs will automatically become 64-bit as well, so you get a bonus there. Unless you're using them in structures that you're storing directly to disk, in which case you've got work to do.:-)
Indeed. And the idea is `just recompile in 64 bit mode, and it'll be faster.' But in this case, it either won't compile, will compile but will crash, or will compile and will run, but will step over itself as it saves data to disk, corrupting it.
Hopefully most of the programs out there, open source at least, are 64 bit friendly by now. Certainly, we've had 64 bit cpus for a long time, it's just that now they're becoming common for PCs.
Of course, just because they're `64 bit friendly', that doesn't mean they take full advantage of a 64 bit cpu.
They have the source code, you got back, you recompile, you get at 64-bit binary.
To a degree. Sure, the compiler will create code that only runs on a 64 bit cpu if that's what it's supposed to do, and it may use the extra registers and the like to improve performance, but that doesn't really mean your code is really using 64 bits now.
(Granted, you didn't say it was, but I thought I'd be a bit more explicit.)
For example, if the application did a lot of integer math, and it was programmed to use 32 bit ints, merely recompiling won't make it use 64 bit ints. In theory, merely being able to use 64 bit ints could double the performance of your application right there (because rather than doing two 32 bit operations, it could do just one 64 bit operation), but that's only if your application knows how to do it.
Linux is 64-bit kernel and userland.
`Linux' is a pretty big brush there...
If you're running an application that's only available in binary form, and was not recompiled in 64 bit more, it'll still be running in 32 bit mode. And if I understand correctly, it won't be able to link against 64 bit libraries, so even your 64-bit only Linux installation might have 32 bit versions of glibc and the like so that you can run applications that were compiled on other (32 bit) systems.
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Satellites are indeed hardened against radiation of all sorts, and can even reboot themselves if some radiation penetrates the CPU and causes something unexpected, but at some point enough power is going to cause damage.
And of course, with less power you could overload it's receivers, especially if you can transmit on exactly the frequency they're listening to. And it would be hard to track -- it wasn't that long ago that somebody was jamming a specific satellite for quite some time. I think it was determined that the signal was coming from Cuba, but they never did narrow it down further ...
And the hub involved is certainly low end as well.
And even /dev/zero isn't unlimited bandwidth -- ultimately, it's limited by cpu and memory bandwidth.
Really, the GigE switch's theoretical maximum should be 125 MB/s per direction per port. If you're benchmarking the switch itself, you'll want to pound on every port in both directions.And even your ramdrive benchmarking isn't terribly realistic. Most transfers will be from drive to drive, so you'll be limited by the speeds of the drives, though caches will certainly help.
But all in all, my points were that 1) gigE is cheap enough that just about anybody can afford it at home now, and 2) without high-end hardware all around, you won't see the theoretical maximums that gigE can offer.
I ran `cat /dev/zero | nc other-host 6666' with a `nc -l 6666 > /dev/null' running between a dual p3/700 and an Athlon XP 2600, with both commands run on both systems, and saw about 27 MB/s going in both directions at the same time. CPU usage on the p3/700 was around 40% of one cpu (and it was less on the faster Athlon) -- which is signifigant, but it was certainly still usable, and the data was flowing quickly enough.
Better cards may perform better, but the cheap cards aren't bad at all. They don't seem to support jumbo frames, however. But that's not essential, just nice. For an enterprise file server, you might want to do better, but for home? This is fine.
Oh, I had to recompile the kernel on the Athlon box to disable the interrupt acceleration stuff on that driver (r8169) ... otherwise, the Athlon box would hang under heavy network load until the cable was removed (then it would come back.) Obviously a problem with the driver/kernel somehow -- the p3/700 box (running a 2.4 kernel) had no such problem.
I eventually replaced it with an Athlon64 XP 3000 w/ a sk98lin card built into the motherboard. That one wouldn't work with the FC4 kernel at all (it was seen, but just didn't move any packets) but worked once I built my own kernel. A lot more trouble than it should have been, but ...
100 Mbit equipment is so cheap now, every PC that's at least 100 MHz should have it. If you have some older workstations, 100 Mbit cards may be hard to find, but these would have to be pretty old boxes to not come with 100 Mbit ...
That's not true if you've got a switch rather than a dumb hub, and switches are pretty much the norm now. Switched networks have almost zero collisions, no matter how busy they are. (Granted, they should have zero collisions, not almost zero, but switches do occasionally have bugsSure, latency does go up when you're pounding on the network, but on a 100 Mbit network it's not that much -- just a few miliseconds at most. And for moving lots of data around, latency doesn't matter much anyways -- it's throughput that matters.
Not quite. You won't actually see 120 MB/s with today's hardware, but you might see 20-30 MB/s, maybe a little more on really serious hardware, which is still a lot better than the 12 MB/s you'll get out of 100 Mbit ethernet. And it's relatively cheap now -- I recently got gigabit PCI cards for $5 and a 5 port gigabit hub for $20 at Fry's.Really, the only thing that's cheaper per gigabyte than IDE drives is DVD+/-R media. So if you're looking for archival or just backups, your cheapest bets are DVD+/-R (cheaper per GB, don't require rebooting or opening your case to switch media) or large IDE drives (faster, read/write, larger, probably likely to last longer if stored properly.)
Stick with the single layer media, even if your DVD drive is dual layer, unless you've got something that needs to be on one DVD.
In any event, those firefighters who rushed into the building were disobeying direct orders from their superiors. Were they heroes? Sort of -- their hearts were in the right place, but their brains weren't. Unfortunately, in an emergency, people need to listen to their brain more than their hearts ...
Publically, they were called heroes. Privately, I suspect that firefighters and policemen everywhere were told `if you pull a stupid stunt like that and survive, I'll kick you out on your ass so fast it'll make your head spin!'
A dead cop or fireman doesn't do anybody any good.
But it doesn't matter. Police, firemen and similar people are generally trained to take care of #1 first, not to be a hero. (Now, many people do disregard this and do dangerous things, but they're usually disciplined afterwards, assuming they live.)
If you've got two police officers in a car, and you see a very angry mob beating somebody, intervening immediately is not usually the smartest thing to do. You'd be putting yourself into extreme danger, and may in fact make things worse for the person being beaten.
A much smarter response would be to stay back and call it in and get lots of reinforcements, cops in riot gear, and THEN you can go in. When you're ready, not before. If you're going to enter a battle, make sure it's a battle you're likely to win. If you're not planning to win, don't enter.
Individuals respect cop's authority. Even large crowds generally respect police. But an angry mob? No way would two smart cops do anything about that on their own beyond getting reenforcements.
However, what you seem to have forgotten to mention is that the primary use of these scanners is to scan emails for Windows viruses, not Linux viruses. And while it does look like these scanners have the ability to scan your filesystem for infected binaries, that's probably meant more to scan filesystems mounted by Windows boxes via SMB ... for Windows viruses.
Sure, their virus signature databases probably do have some Linux viruses in there, but scanning for them is not the main reason that people install clamav and similar programs.
Yes, there are Linux viruses out there. However, the usual architecture of a Linux installation (restrictive permissions, user processes not having permissions to alter most binaries) makes it very difficult for a virus to propagate the way most Windows viruses do -- by infecting binaries. (Granted, Windows can be run in the same way, but since it breaks so many things, it's rarely done unless programatically enforced by an IT department.)
That, and most *nix mail readers and web browsers are not as willing to execute arbitrary code it finds as IE and Outlook unless explicitly told to do so.
But, if you do find a virus, and run it as root ...
Suppose you lived in New Orleans. You didn't even own your house (it was rented), and now it's ruined. You can just pack up and leave, and go anywhere you want. Compare this to a guy with lots of money -- sure, his house was ruined too, but he owns the land it's own, lots of stuff in the house, the business downtown, etc. He can't just pack up and leave.
And the poor have always been pretty much lawsuit proof. Until recently, they could drive without insurance with impunity -- even if they caused an accident, they wouldn't have to pay anything. (Now, at least licenses are taken away, but even that doesn't really stop them, though impounding cars might if it happens eventually.)
Even minor criminal charges aren't a big concern, as long as they don't become serious enough to end up in jail -- and even then, the state won't want to keep you in jail just because you can't pay fines, and they'll often credit you something like $100/day for each day you're in jail because you can't pay the fines -- which is more than a minumum wage job will pay.
If somebody does loan you money, there's no real need to pay them back. What are they going to do, ruin your credit report? It's already ruined! Sue you? What could they win?
It sucks being poor, yes, but there are benefits.
Ultimately, if you're going to fight this sort of thing, you'll want to not have too many assets, so if you do lose, you don't lose much. (Even a billion dollar judgement isn't worth much if the guy the judgement is against only has $6.)
You'll also want to have enough money to get some competent legal representation. The two normally do not go hand in hand -- usually when you have enough to defend yourself, you have so much to lose that it's safer to just pay. In fact, it's generally cheaper to just pay, even if you're poor, which seems to be what our entire civil court system is based on.
In any event, you may not need even thousands of dollars to defend yourself. You can spend as little or as much as you want on your defense -- the more you spend, the better the odds of winning, but even if you spend $0 and represent yourself, there is a chance that you'll win. It's also possible that some lawyers may work on your case pro-bono (since it would be good for a lot of advertising for them, especially if they won) and it's also possible that the EFF or ACLU may help defray your legal expenses if they decide that your case is strong enough to warrant their help.
Of course, there's also a very good chance that the RIAA won't push any cases far enough to actually go to trial. After all, so far they have a perfect record -- no losses -- and they won't want to risk that unless they're sure they can win -- and the people that are sure to lose are not the people who are likely to fight it.
Of course, in these cases, I usually know their email address, often a phone number, where they live (since I picked it up) ... it's hardly anonymous.
About two years ago I picked up a 20/40 GB DLT drive at a garage sale for $10. Works fine. To buy one would cost hundreds of dollars, perhaps close to $1000, yet I have no reason to believe it to be stolen.
Now, if somebody were to come up to me on the street and say `psst, want to buy a laptop?' then I'd be very suspicious. The odds would be very good that it's stolen, or that it's a block of wood wrapped up in paper (preying on my greed.) I don't usually work that way.
But just because something is cheap, that does not mean it's stolen.
You might feel bad about buying it from somebody for so cheaply, when it's so easily fixed, but there's nothing illegal about it. Immoral, maybe (especially if the seller is poor), but not illegal. (And of course, you don't actually know what's wrong with it until you try and fix it. It may be that the computer is truly buggered -- it's a gamble.)
Or maybe she doesn't doesn't really care -- after all, getting top dollar for something is a lot of work, and requires some skill. If you're selling on eBay, you have to write up a good description, work out your exact specifications of what you're selling, have a good feedback rating, etc. `Top dollar' rarely just falls into your lap, unless you find a sucker. And lots of people are unwilling to go to the extra trouble, even if doing the math means that your two hours of extra work gets you $400 extra, meaning you made $200/hr. People rarely work out the math like that.
Just because something is cheap, that doesn't mean it's stolen. Yes, it should make you consider that as a possiblity, but it's certainly not a given.
Though the lines between microcomputers, minicomputers and mainframes are not lines at all. Perhaps they once were, but now it's one big blur. In any event, Sun makes machines that fit into all three categories (and so does most everybody else.)
Taking? They've been competing since the Alpha was introduced, and it's pretty obvious who won.Unless you meant that x86_64 is taking the niche once occupied by Alpha -- fast, but still low end 64 bit cpus. In which case I'd have to say `thank you, Captain Obvious!'
Yes, high end PCs are fast as hell now, and they're competing directly with Suns and IBM's fastest processors, and in the case of raw cpu speed, sometimes they even win. However, PCs have never been able to compete with the I/O bandwidth of the best servers out there, and they still can't.
(Though I don't know how the new Sun x86_64 boxes do. I suspect they compete nicely with other x86_64 boxes, but that the big Sun machines still beat them, especially in I/O. But when it comes to performance for a given price, it's been hard to beat a good PC for quite some time now, and I don't see this changing any time soon.)
As for high availability, you can have that with x86, x86_64, Sparc, RS6K, PPC, whatever. The good server boxes have basically caught up with what the servers have had for a long time -- redundant power supplies, RAID, etc. And of course you can't really have a high availability environment with a single computer anyways ...
But you want your drive to be erased in less than a month, right? Use /dev/urandom. It's more than random enough. (Use /dev/random when you need small amounts of `true' randomness.)
I had to send the DLT tapes off to a professional service to have them erased (they had to be erased for the new tape drive to make them work in the new high density mode.) The hard drive was just me seeing if I could do it :)
The tigher your cram data in there, the higher the magnetic fields needed to make changes. And modern media has it cramed VERY tightly ...
Only the uninformed paranoids would really be interested in it. And the truly paranoid would probably find an encrypted filesystem to be far more useful. (Though a hard drive that had good encryption in firmware, that worked just like an unecrypted drive once the key was loaded somehow (and forgot the key once power was lost), THAT could have quite a market.)
Even the government doesn't even really need it, because they don't ever sell or send back drives that previously ever had classified data on them -- they physically destroy them. In fact, they generally stay in locked safes when not in use.
To give an example, suppose a part of your drive had this pattern written on it --
and you overwrote that with 0s. So you'd expect to seeand you would, if you read the drive in the normal way. However, underneath the covers, the data on the drive would really look more like this --the exact values are just guesses, but there is a pattern here -- if a bit used to be 0, it's very close to 0 now. If the bit used to be 1, it's still close to 0 now, but a good deal further than if it was a 0.With some different firmware, one could read most of the data that was on a drive that had been erased like this.
This is why people 1) write random or semi-random patterns to the disk to erase it, and 2) do it more than once.
Still, writing 0's just once to the entire disk will stop 99% of people who might read your disk. Writing random patterns several times will probably stop even the NSA, but if they want you bad enough, they'll stick probes into your brain and extract it that way :)
Strong magnets (as strong as you're likely to have at home anyways) will erase (ruin) floppy media just fine. And cassette tape media. And probably 8 tracks. I don't know what they'll do to QIC-150, 4 mm or 8 mm media. But they won't erase DLT media, and won't erase modern hard drives, probably not even if you put it right next to the platter itself.
(Now, opening the drive up and scraping the magnet over the drum, physically damaging it, that may be effective. But a non-magnetic wire brush would work as well.)
Personally, I erase my media with some variation of this --
and let that go until it's done. Repeat if you're extra paranoid. Sure, there may be some data left in sectors that have been re-allocated by the firmware. Sure, the NSA might be able to recontruct my data bit by bit with microscopes. But if I'm really worried about that, I'm not going to sell my disk -- I'm going to physically destroy it.As for warranty repair, that's a tough call. If the dd can't be done, the odds are good that the company can recover almost everything on the disk. You'll have to consider the pros (you get a new disk! free!) vs. the cons (they might be able to recover all of your data.)
Hopefully most of the programs out there, open source at least, are 64 bit friendly by now. Certainly, we've had 64 bit cpus for a long time, it's just that now they're becoming common for PCs.
Of course, just because they're `64 bit friendly', that doesn't mean they take full advantage of a 64 bit cpu.
(Granted, you didn't say it was, but I thought I'd be a bit more explicit.)
For example, if the application did a lot of integer math, and it was programmed to use 32 bit ints, merely recompiling won't make it use 64 bit ints. In theory, merely being able to use 64 bit ints could double the performance of your application right there (because rather than doing two 32 bit operations, it could do just one 64 bit operation), but that's only if your application knows how to do it.
`Linux' is a pretty big brush thereIf you're running an application that's only available in binary form, and was not recompiled in 64 bit more, it'll still be running in 32 bit mode. And if I understand correctly, it won't be able to link against 64 bit libraries, so even your 64-bit only Linux installation might have 32 bit versions of glibc and the like so that you can run applications that were compiled on other (32 bit) systems.