And I do mean one time, but three years later I'm still using the thumb drive. The following assumes a Linux environment. First, pull off any data you can (and want to), then unmount it and type:
#badblocks -w -s device-path
Use the entire device, e.g./dev/sdg, not/dev/sdg1. This guarantees that all the Flash blocks on the chip are reset. The patterns 0xAA, 0x55, 0xFF, and 0x00 are written, then checked; "shred" does no checking, and doesn't report errors. The "-s" is to show continuous progress.
If you get any errors (and you probably will, if the device is as weak as you say), simply re-run the "badblocks" command, and note if the error count goes down. The one time I did this, I got a few errors (less than 10) the first time, but zero the second time. Whatever badblocks caused on the low level of the device, it was just what the doctor ordered. I hope it can help you, too.
Facebook went from being a closed network to an open one with several changes to the privacy controls, that awful Beacon feature, etc. They never back down until there's immense pressure. Usually even then they don't back down entirely. And it's all so they can monetize their site.
Change "Facebook" to "Google", drop "that awful Beacon feature", and the above is still true. So what if Google is going to destroy the data they got caught snooping? How much more privacy-violating information did they abuse via Chrome? Via AdSense? Via browser cookies?
"One ice patch doth not a winter make," and one case of Google doing the right thing does not change their overall pattern of behavior. They aren't interested in their users' privacy; they're only interested in getting their users to shut up about it.
The whole german wifi debacle is making this company just as hot to handle as facebook.
I don't think so.
I do. The common mantra seems to be, "Enough privacy to get people to stop complaining." Google, Facebook, Myspace, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe are all guilty of this thinking, and they're showing no sign of letting up.
Some may argue that "people" should be replaced with "governments," but that's a pointless swap. Governments are made of people, and people will complain about privacy abuses to governments, knowing full well that it won't do any good to complain to the abusers.
I have comments all over this discussion, so I can't mod you way up.
As for adding outside stuff to Slackware, that has gotten a lot easier over the past couple years, thanks to SlackBuilds.org and its nice TUI add-on, sbopkg.
Give a man Slackware, and he'll go right back to Microsoft. Good lord those were terrible experiences the two or three times I tried Slackware.
Speak for yourself. In 1998, I was dual-booting Windows 95 and Linux. When my Windows caught the Chernobyl virus, I lost my partition tables, and the rest of my data with it. I went 100% Linux, Slackware at the time, and never looked back. I did explore other Linux distros over a 4-year period (2002-2006), but eventually I came back to Slackware. You never forget your first love.
Amazingly enough, in 2001, I had set up my parents with a Mandrake system. It was my mother's idea, based on my high praise for Linux's transparency and comparative stability. I tried to talk her out of it, but when she pointed out that it wouldn't crash as often as Windows (making lighter support work for me), I was convinced. Today, she uses Fedora 12 and loves it.
Even back in 1998, I could see that there were great possibilities and ideas that could make a wonderful OS, and Linux was a lot closer to them than Windows was. Now, twelve years later, I still haven't seen any reason to allow a Microsoft OS under my roof.
It created a lot of extra test/patch load for Pat. He uses KDE typically, so it gets a lot of daily use on his desktop. Not so much GNOME.
The "lightweight" desktops (of which XFCE is probably the heaviest) don't involve as much code, or configuration management, so they are shipped in their stock forms. Bugs found in Slackware's XFCE/Blackbox/Fluxbox/etc. should be reported to the programmers.
By "interrupt" he really meant the equivalent of a DOS call to the kernel, which was done with the "int21" instruction, not an async interrupt from a hardware device such as a clock.
Ok? And that makes it not preemptive... how?
Because calling that interrupt (or any interrupt so hooked by the Windows DOS box) is something that happens under software control, not hardware. For example, a QBASIC "print" statement, or a C call "fflush(stdout);", will call int 21h, at which point the Windows infrastructure steps in and invokes the scheduler. Because calling that interrupt is a choice exercised by the programmer, not the hardware, it is cooperative, not preemptive multitasking.
If the DOS program goes into an infinite loop, calling no software interrupts for DOS or BIOS services, it will hang Windows 3. The only way out of that is the power button or the reset button. Not even the three-finger salute will rescue the system at that point, because the Windows keyboard handler isn't being invoked, because the DOS box hasn't yielded to the scheduler.
The same thing happens when loading a poorly-designed TSR in a DOS box. When the TSR assumes it can unilaterally hook an interrupt, without taking into account that the DOS box has already hooked it, very Bad Things Happen, usually a BSOD.
In an earlier comment, you referred to "time slices". There was no such thing in Windows 3 for DOS, not in the Windows programs, and not for the DOS programs running in DOS boxes. The scheduler yield points were defined by the Windows "kernel" for Windows programs (but the programmer could yield arbitrarily as well), and the DOS box defined the yield points via the standard software interrupts (that were called under DOS program control, not hardware timer).
And you are welcome to believe whatever you like, but you are merely asserting what you want to believe. I am explaining how it works.
The DOS boxes had their DOS and BIOS service software interrupts hooked by the Windows infrastructure. If a program never invoked int 21h (or int 10h, or int 15h... you get the idea) while in an infinite loop, it would hang Windows 3. No mouse control, no keyboard, because without a call to a standard DOS/BIOS interrupt, there was no yield to the scheduler, and no Windows mouse or keyboard handler would get called.
Parent is modded funny (and I think that was discord5's intention), but some people like myself have a low threshold of heat pain. I've taken crotch shots, broken bones, and blinding headaches, and come away mostly none the worse for wear. Anything above 115 deg F, however, is too hot for me to touch, let alone eat, and I reflexively recoil from it. "Fresh off the grill" is best served on room-temperature bread, with recently refrigerated condiments. And as much as I like Mexican food (well, most any food, ethnic or otherwise), the typical Mexican restaurant chicken fajita has to sit at least 5 minutes before I can even consider taking a bite.
WRT TFA, that's plenty of time to set up a camera and tripod. I'm not going to complain, if I eat food that is at a temperature the cook/chef isn't hot enough. I know my taste buds, and general tastes, better than the cook does.
Almost, but not quite. Native Windows 3.x programs were cooperatively scheduled, and that included the DOS compatibility layer (a.k.a. the DOS box). From the DOS program's perspective, everything appeared to be a normal DOS environment, but the interrupts were hooked by the DOS box. When a DOS program wanted to do I/O to a disk file, or the "display," or the printer, or the modem, or the keyboard, the x86 INT call would be sent to the DOS box, which would yield to the Windows scheduler.
The catch is, if a DOS program went into a long calculation loop, and never made any x86 INT calls, it could effectively block other Windows programs, by never calling the scheduler. I tried this in WfW 3.11, and even the mouse stopped moving.
So, from the DOS program's perspective, the scheduling could appear to be preemptive, but the actual Windows scheduling behind it was still cooperative.
It's a sales term. While it's in the box, it's a salad spinner, but once the box is opened and the product removed, who knows what the end user will do with it? That's "thinking outside the box."
When people who want to be law-abiding citizens, can't go about their daily business without being looked at by their government as criminals, then those people eventually stop caring about what is criminal and what isn't.
It is a symptom of severe economic decay when crime becomes a rational choice.
Or, it is a symptom of a broken legal system, in which anyone, on any given day, commits dozens of "crimes."
As was pointed out right here on/., Terry Childs' reckless accusers did far more damage to the security of the SF emergency network, but he was the one convicted of a "crime."
Not that Microsoft cares, but Free Culture just took a big hit. Money quote:
there is something very important, that the vast majority of both consumers and video professionals don't know: ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes (go on, read your manuals). I was first made aware of such a restriction when someone mentioned that in a forum, about the Canon 7D dSLR. I thought it didn't apply to me, since I had bought the double-the-price, professional (or at least prosumer), Canon 5D Mark II. But looking at its license agreement last night (page 241), I found out that even my $3000 camera comes with such a basic license. So, I downloaded the manual for the Canon 1D Mark IV, which costs $5000, and where Canon consistently used the word "professional" and "video" on the same sentence on their press release for that camera. Nope! Same restriction: you can only use your professional video dSLR camera (professional, according to Canon's press release), for non-professional reasons. And going even further, I found that even their truly professional video camcorder, the $8000 Canon XL-H1A that uses mpeg2, also comes with a similar restriction. You can only use your professional camera for non-commercial purposes. For any other purpose, you must get a license from MPEG-LA and pay them royalties for each copy sold. I personally find this utterly unacceptable.
And no, this is not just a Canon problem (which to me sounds like false advertising). Sony and Panasonic, and heck, even the Flip HD, have the exact same licensing restriction.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent funny, please. Some thin-skinned dolt doesn't like being the butt of a joke.
And I do mean one time, but three years later I'm still using the thumb drive. The following assumes a Linux environment. First, pull off any data you can (and want to), then unmount it and type:
/dev/sdg, not /dev/sdg1. This guarantees that all the Flash blocks on the chip are reset. The patterns 0xAA, 0x55, 0xFF, and 0x00 are written, then checked; "shred" does no checking, and doesn't report errors. The "-s" is to show continuous progress.
#badblocks -w -s device-path
Use the entire device, e.g.
If you get any errors (and you probably will, if the device is as weak as you say), simply re-run the "badblocks" command, and note if the error count goes down. The one time I did this, I got a few errors (less than 10) the first time, but zero the second time. Whatever badblocks caused on the low level of the device, it was just what the doctor ordered. I hope it can help you, too.
Facebook went from being a closed network to an open one with several changes to the privacy controls, that awful Beacon feature, etc. They never back down until there's immense pressure. Usually even then they don't back down entirely. And it's all so they can monetize their site.
Change "Facebook" to "Google", drop "that awful Beacon feature", and the above is still true. So what if Google is going to destroy the data they got caught snooping? How much more privacy-violating information did they abuse via Chrome? Via AdSense? Via browser cookies?
"One ice patch doth not a winter make," and one case of Google doing the right thing does not change their overall pattern of behavior. They aren't interested in their users' privacy; they're only interested in getting their users to shut up about it.
The whole german wifi debacle is making this company just as hot to handle as facebook.
I don't think so.
I do. The common mantra seems to be, "Enough privacy to get people to stop complaining." Google, Facebook, Myspace, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe are all guilty of this thinking, and they're showing no sign of letting up.
Some may argue that "people" should be replaced with "governments," but that's a pointless swap. Governments are made of people, and people will complain about privacy abuses to governments, knowing full well that it won't do any good to complain to the abusers.
I have comments all over this discussion, so I can't mod you way up.
As for adding outside stuff to Slackware, that has gotten a lot easier over the past couple years, thanks to SlackBuilds.org and its nice TUI add-on, sbopkg.
Only if you can't do it in C or C++ and you need the speed.
On behalf of Patrick:
Hey, no problem. Have a lot of fun!
Give a man Slackware, and he'll go right back to Microsoft. Good lord those were terrible experiences the two or three times I tried Slackware.
Speak for yourself. In 1998, I was dual-booting Windows 95 and Linux. When my Windows caught the Chernobyl virus, I lost my partition tables, and the rest of my data with it. I went 100% Linux, Slackware at the time, and never looked back. I did explore other Linux distros over a 4-year period (2002-2006), but eventually I came back to Slackware. You never forget your first love.
Amazingly enough, in 2001, I had set up my parents with a Mandrake system. It was my mother's idea, based on my high praise for Linux's transparency and comparative stability. I tried to talk her out of it, but when she pointed out that it wouldn't crash as often as Windows (making lighter support work for me), I was convinced. Today, she uses Fedora 12 and loves it.
Even back in 1998, I could see that there were great possibilities and ideas that could make a wonderful OS, and Linux was a lot closer to them than Windows was. Now, twelve years later, I still haven't seen any reason to allow a Microsoft OS under my roof.
It created a lot of extra test/patch load for Pat. He uses KDE typically, so it gets a lot of daily use on his desktop. Not so much GNOME.
The "lightweight" desktops (of which XFCE is probably the heaviest) don't involve as much code, or configuration management, so they are shipped in their stock forms. Bugs found in Slackware's XFCE/Blackbox/Fluxbox/etc. should be reported to the programmers.
Phoebe Prince.
By "interrupt" he really meant the equivalent of a DOS call to the kernel, which was done with the "int21" instruction, not an async interrupt from a hardware device such as a clock.
Ok? And that makes it not preemptive... how?
Because calling that interrupt (or any interrupt so hooked by the Windows DOS box) is something that happens under software control, not hardware. For example, a QBASIC "print" statement, or a C call "fflush(stdout);", will call int 21h, at which point the Windows infrastructure steps in and invokes the scheduler. Because calling that interrupt is a choice exercised by the programmer, not the hardware, it is cooperative, not preemptive multitasking.
If the DOS program goes into an infinite loop, calling no software interrupts for DOS or BIOS services, it will hang Windows 3. The only way out of that is the power button or the reset button. Not even the three-finger salute will rescue the system at that point, because the Windows keyboard handler isn't being invoked, because the DOS box hasn't yielded to the scheduler.
The same thing happens when loading a poorly-designed TSR in a DOS box. When the TSR assumes it can unilaterally hook an interrupt, without taking into account that the DOS box has already hooked it, very Bad Things Happen, usually a BSOD.
In an earlier comment, you referred to "time slices". There was no such thing in Windows 3 for DOS, not in the Windows programs, and not for the DOS programs running in DOS boxes. The scheduler yield points were defined by the Windows "kernel" for Windows programs (but the programmer could yield arbitrarily as well), and the DOS box defined the yield points via the standard software interrupts (that were called under DOS program control, not hardware timer).
And you are welcome to believe whatever you like, but you are merely asserting what you want to believe. I am explaining how it works.
The DOS boxes had their DOS and BIOS service software interrupts hooked by the Windows infrastructure. If a program never invoked int 21h (or int 10h, or int 15h... you get the idea) while in an infinite loop, it would hang Windows 3. No mouse control, no keyboard, because without a call to a standard DOS/BIOS interrupt, there was no yield to the scheduler, and no Windows mouse or keyboard handler would get called.
Well, they do publish their ingredients, at least in the USA. They have to, for people with food allergies.
As for the actual preparations, well, nobody will stop you from reverse-engineering them. After all, that's the Open Source way.
Parent is modded funny (and I think that was discord5's intention), but some people like myself have a low threshold of heat pain. I've taken crotch shots, broken bones, and blinding headaches, and come away mostly none the worse for wear. Anything above 115 deg F, however, is too hot for me to touch, let alone eat, and I reflexively recoil from it. "Fresh off the grill" is best served on room-temperature bread, with recently refrigerated condiments. And as much as I like Mexican food (well, most any food, ethnic or otherwise), the typical Mexican restaurant chicken fajita has to sit at least 5 minutes before I can even consider taking a bite.
WRT TFA, that's plenty of time to set up a camera and tripod. I'm not going to complain, if I eat food that is at a temperature the cook/chef isn't hot enough. I know my taste buds, and general tastes, better than the cook does.
Almost, but not quite. Native Windows 3.x programs were cooperatively scheduled, and that included the DOS compatibility layer (a.k.a. the DOS box). From the DOS program's perspective, everything appeared to be a normal DOS environment, but the interrupts were hooked by the DOS box. When a DOS program wanted to do I/O to a disk file, or the "display," or the printer, or the modem, or the keyboard, the x86 INT call would be sent to the DOS box, which would yield to the Windows scheduler.
The catch is, if a DOS program went into a long calculation loop, and never made any x86 INT calls, it could effectively block other Windows programs, by never calling the scheduler. I tried this in WfW 3.11, and even the mouse stopped moving.
So, from the DOS program's perspective, the scheduling could appear to be preemptive, but the actual Windows scheduling behind it was still cooperative.
Aaaand we have two totally contradictory answers to the parent question. It's a "plausible natural phenomenon" that's "essentially impossible."
Yay, Slashdot.
It looks like the list of CScope's pipe commands.
Do I also get an extra point for not having to look it up?
And who decides the value of your home and land?
The very ones who charge you that tax.
Market value? Bah! Who needs that?
Or, as Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
"hardware hacking".
Up next: how to split an SD card into two mini-SD cards, using "git bisect."
It's a sales term. While it's in the box, it's a salad spinner, but once the box is opened and the product removed, who knows what the end user will do with it? That's "thinking outside the box."
When people who want to be law-abiding citizens, can't go about their daily business without being looked at by their government as criminals, then those people eventually stop caring about what is criminal and what isn't.
It is a symptom of severe economic decay when crime becomes a rational choice.
Or, it is a symptom of a broken legal system, in which anyone, on any given day, commits dozens of "crimes."
As was pointed out right here on /., Terry Childs' reckless accusers did far more damage to the security of the SF emergency network, but he was the one convicted of a "crime."
Fair enough, although *I* use it only about once a year.