Yes, that post sums it up pretty much, other than that 'probably' should be replaced with 'absolutely'.
Basically this idiot has found an incredibly cumbersome way to screw up his partition table. (see below for more details)
Then of course this gets posted and linked to all over the planet for everyone to try for themselves. Who are these fucking idiots that post this kinda stuff? They should get 'gullible' tatood on their forehead.
Hint: nowhere in the article is it said that they actually tried to use all the space and verify all data remained intact. Wouldn't that be the first thing you'd do before posting something like this online?
Anyways, I've written several IDE drivers (and worked on the IDE core for BIOSs) and I can tell you that there is NO way you can increase the size of a 200GB drive to 510GB, especially not with the tools that are described (Ghost).
Look at the 80GB example: they got 150GB? That's interesting, because that would mean that the drive all of a sudden became a 48-bit LBA drive. Older drives are limited to 137.4GB in size and to get 150GB capacity you need 48-bit LBA. I don't think Ghost is going to reflash the firmware of the drive to add support for that (yes, that's meant to sound sarcastic).
Ghost works at the partition level. A drive reports it's size in sectors. This is basically a lower (or closer to the hardware) level.
All they do is move partitions around. But the drive will keep reporting the same number of sectors. Where do the extra sectors come from?
Why don't these people run an IDE identify program on those harddrives. They'll see that the drive still reports the original number of sectors. Exactly the same amount of sectors you can get to through/dev/hda.
It's true that some OSs don't create the most ideal partitions so you lose _some_ sectors but nothing in the order of magnitude described though.
Initially I thought maybe they where using the extra error-detection/recovery bytes that each sector has (which would be a very stupid idea), but that would never give you that much increase.
Or that they were removing some factory/OEM predefined partition, which is basically the only relatively safe thing you can do to reclaim some disk space. Again, not the same order of magnitude, plus you'd never go over the size that the disk is sold as.
about 12 years ago when I told people that I wanted to learn Assembler (or Assembly as most people insist), most folks I spoke with declared I was foolish. (which was largely true)
Now bringing home about twice the bacon those same folks did, writing BIOS code, I just smile.
And as you see, we got the world by the bawls, us BIOS guys!;-)
(seriously though, I think the BIOS is a piece of legacy crap that we need to get rid off... too bad it pays my bills)
The rest of the FSF might hope to leave RMS out of there because of BO considerations, but, alas, he is too important not to attend. It would be like Dick Cheney staying away from State of the Union.
Wouldn't it be more like Dubya staying away from the State of the Union?
In any case, the BO jokes are getting old. For you to be complaining about it suggests a certain proximity. In other words: maybe you should take your nose out of his ass.
I'm no fan of RMS, but that's because I personally saw him rip a young kid a new one during a Linux Expo in San Jose, CA. There was no excuse for him to do that and PR-wise was plain stoopid. I guess that's what he's known for and he probably got sick of the same silly comment made again. Still not the most diplomatic person you'd want to meet.
In any case, you got to respect the man for what he's done.
Re:Sad.. - Real is like a little puppy
on
Real's Reality
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· Score: 1
When someone asks me about installing Real, I tell them:
Real is like a little puppy, they shit all over the place.
Further, "re-charging" the fuel tank can be done in 2 minutes, while the batteries take... who knows, certainly hours.
There's no reason why the battery couldn't be something that you remove from the car and replace with a charged one at the 'gas' station.
Instead of storing fuel, the 'gas' station would be storing charged batteries (well, they'd probably be charging them). I envision a conveyer belt type of system where the empty batteries enter on one side and the full ones come out the other.
All it requires is a paradigm shift.
Re:What about large spam networks?
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Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
whew. I can't wait for that.
Yeah, and that 2006 figure is just a ball-park, they may just pull it in a year or two. Who knows?
Seriously though, Bill Gates should shut the fuck up about spam and start fixing those damn bugs.
What the hell are they doing, daydreaming about these outdated solutions for spam. If they would fix their freaking OS, then we actually could start working on spam solutions, but the way it's going now there's no hope. So long as spammers can control these zombies, there's really not a whole lot that can be done about spam.
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail
So how hard can it be to find exactly the companies that sold this stuff?
These are ultimately the companies that are responsible for spam. Why don't we hold them liable? I think I can proof that spam is costing me a significant amount of money (mostly lost time) even though I do have a fairly good working filter.
I hear all the time that we can't really get the spammers because they are in China, or recently because they use zombies/compromised boxes all over the internet. Well, at the end of the day, it's not the spamhouses that are responsible for this. If no-one paid them to spam, it wouldn't be a business.
So someone is paying money to get this spam to you. How come we can't go after them and make them pay?!
The only thing thats actually big about this notebook (other than the size ofcourse) is the hard-drive
Yeah, and did you notice the article says this relating to the harddrive:
Although Acer simply dipped into the desktop PC parts bin to get the two components
I certainly hope that's not true. Your typical desktop harddrive has nowhere near the shock and vibration resistance as a notebook harddrive. I think we are talking almost an order of magnitude.
It's hard to believe that they actually stuck a 3.5" HDD in there, but looking at my (relatively big, but not too crazy) notebook, I suppose it's possible. And incredibly stoopid.
If you want a 7200 RPM drive, just get the 2.5" 60GB Hitachi one. I have one of those and it works as a charm. Still the notebook drive shock and vibration though.
The stock answer to this would be "go ahead and fix it then".
So basically you are saying that I should use the software of your choice, and when I consider it broken I should shut the fuck up and fix it.
Even after I told you that my answer is "I'll go ahead and not use it then".
What's so hard with respecting that choice? I mean I'm not complaining here. He said that people who consider Linux not user friendly enough never say what exactly is wrong. Well, I gave one example of why I don't consider Linux not user friendly enough, yet. It's not a complaint, it's an observation.
My real point being that at my last evaluation I just found too many of these kind of issues for me to consider using Linux on the desktop. I don't think that leaves me with an obligation to fix those issues.
Have you tried filling a bug report instead of ranting at Slashdot?
I love how you guys always turn things around. First you ask us to be specific and when I do I'm ranting.
As I indicated, in the couple of hours I spent evaluating I ran into a lot of these kind of issues. Several dozen possibly. No, I did not file a bug report on those. Once things get beyond a certain threshold I will be more than happy to spend time on it, until then, I'm sorry, but I don't have the time to find the 20 different people responsible for this or that piece of software and then contact them in whatever way they prefer to be communicated with.
I mean should I email the people that have the Cancel button in dialog boxes on the left side or the ones that have it on the right side? Should I send an email to the OpenOffice to say that when I clicked on the icon, the OO splash screen appeared for several seconds, then disappeared and then nothing? And when I think it's bizare that the icons in the start menu appear rather slow (because they are apparently fetched from disk one by one, everytime I click on the start menu), should I contact Red Hat, the X team, the Gnome team or the QT team?
But sorry, I'm ranting again.
Back to MC, yes, I know that F10 is the key to quit. But Esc can be used in NC, Far, VC and several others to exit the editor and viewer and to clear the command line.
I have actually inquired about this with some Linux guys and they seem to think it has to do with terminal emulation, which they explained is a feature, not a bug... seriously.
Anyways, I'm sure I'm doing incredibly stupid, but all I did was download the ISOs, stuck them in a 1GHz P3 with an Intel Mobo system and chose defaults as much as possible.
People always say "no Linux is not userfriendly enough" but they never say what EXACTLY is wrong! It's exactly because of this kind of trollish attitude that critics aren't being taken seriously anymore.
I'll give you an EXACT example. This was one of the MANY things I ran into when considering switching to Linux on the desktop for the Nth time. I installed Red Hat 9.
Under WinXP I run a program called Far. It's like the good ole Norton Commander, but then better. It's a Win32 console application and largely keyboard driven. I like it that way.
So, for ages, there has been Midnight Commander for Linux. I tried it again. I was impressed to see that the internal (or default) editor did syntax highlighting. So I tooled around a couple of minutes until I noticed that if I hit the Esc key, weird things would happen. Either the next key got ignored or something weird got printed on the command line.
Now in Far (and most other NC clones), the Esc key clears the command line. It also exits the viewer and the editor. So I tend to use it a lot.
I know the 'appology' for the MC behaviour has to do with terminal emulation. But why the hell should I give a flying fuck? There seems to be no use for whatever is happening when I hit the Esc key. I'm sure the BIG advantage is that MC works really well on a terminal. You know what? I'm not using a terminal.
There's probably some way to actually fix this, like a line in/etc/mc.conf that says termcaps=keyb101 or something even more intuitive. Well, if that's the case, I have to ask, why is that not the freaking default?
But don't get me wrong, although this is one of the many little things that make me not want to shift to Linux, I still respect the coders of MC.
I think they are doing a great job, and maybe someday I will use their program as much as I do Far now. Or maybe I will actually spend the time to try to fix this. It's just that at the moment I find that there's too many of these types of issues to make the switch.
Next time I'm trying Linux, again, I will keep a list of things I run into. Better yet, I will post it on a blog somewhere. I hope the list is short enough to at least start dual-booting.
Whatever. I think there's a 'slightly' higher risk here than one would perceive from the original post.
But since you all are so fucking smart, go ahead and dismantle your UPS. Make sure to lick your fingers before you reach in.
I think if you read the original poster's reply you'd see how it wouldn't hurt to point out some of the caveats. But of course you and everyone else on the planet already knew that.
I suppose your tendency to sue is inversely proportional to your intelligence. Interesting.
Yeah, I'd say. I've never sued anyone, and probably never will.
What's much more detrimental to experimenting and playing with cool toys than people complaining about "hacking cookbooks" is the pervasive fear of liability and lawyers.
I'm not afraid of fucking lawyers. Sometimes, however, it is in place to warn people of the danger because they _may_ not realize it.
Do you know exactly what the risks are of 'playing' (your words) with the stuff we are talking about here?
Hint: we're not talking hooking up an LED to a battery.
Complete Liquidation of 100,000 sq ft facility - 100s of Servers (Sun, Compaq, HP, & Dell) Clarion EMC Storage - 100s of PCs, Notebooks, Printers - 100s of Herman Miller Aeron Chairs - 10,000 sq ft health club - Pool Table, Foosball, Video Arcade Games, Ping Pong. Artwork, Collectable Musical instruments, Contemporary Furniture & more...
Dude, the most important thing that everyone seems to be missing is that there's TONS of recording equipment there.
I'm totally surprised by the amount of studio equipment that's in the pictures. They must have had some pretty decent setups to do recordings.
Someone @ MP3.com was obviously fascinated by it, but I don't recall ever hearing about artists actually recording at their facilities.
I was going to reply to your post yesterday, but then got distracted.
Anyways, you do realize the liability aspects of a project like that, right?
I mean, it's one thing to point people over to some fun hardware diddly doo, but it's something else for people to start messing with fairly high capacity bateries and chargers for such.
I guess what I'm saying is that, it is actually possible for someone with more than half a brain to (unintentionally) mess up the project you are describing and do a significant amount of damage.
I'm normally not the first person to get worried about stuff like that, but I'd hate to see a battery blow up in someone's face. You should probably at least make people aware of that possibility.
Out of curiousity, do you have TV out from your storage server, or do you have a separate machine to playback?
The server is just a cheap box, with as many drives as I can fit in it (it's noisy). I've been swapping drives a lot because I used to have a lot (4) of those IBM GXP drives that sooner or later will fail (one did so far). Anyways, you are right, 10Mb/s is _easy_ to sustain for this box, and although I've never tried it, I doubt it would have trouble providing streams to multiple boxes.
The box has a RPC-2 drive converted to RPC-1 so I can rip any region code DVD to the harddrives.
The client that I use has a Calm PC enclosure. This one has no fans at all. The power supply, CPU and graphics card have an evaporative cooling system which is dead-silent. (it looks like the company may be out of business though...)
I have a 1GHz P3 in there with 512MB of RAM. Plenty powerful to decode DVDs (although most of that's handled by the graphics chip anyway), but I don't know about Divx.
I use a 512MB CompactFlash with Win98 on it right now, which means, no moving parts at all. I'm using Win98 because at the time I couldn't find enough parts of the puzzle for Linux (I've started this well over 2 years ago). A Linux box could be network booted, which is my ultimate goal.
The video card I use is an ATI All-in-Wonder RADEON 8500DV, with the optional component video output. It actually is quite dissapointing. I'm very critical about video quality, and this thing just doesn't match up with my Toshiba progressive scan DVD player. I've messed with the card for days and days, trying all sorts of things, but I can't get it to output a high quality progressive scan picture. Although in some modes, the TV behaves funny, so maybe it's a problem with the TV as well...
Anyways, I'm sure if you are not _that_ picky, there's video cards out there with reasonable video quality. I'm just waiting until I have enough money to buy a decent overhead projector with a high resolution DVI input. That way the signal stays digital all the way to the LCD.
So, the playback unit is entirely quiet. However, it's buttugly and big. You can move things into a smaller/nicer enclosure with a little creativity.
with the cheapest hard disk based solution costing over $30,000 (3x Xserve RAID 3.5 TB
What are you talking about?
I recently bough 250GB drives at Frys for $179.-. That's $716/TB, or $7160/10TB. Even if you put just 4 drives in one system, you could get a 10TB setup for $10K. Of course he says he only wants to rip a couple hundred. In other words, $2000 gives him 2TB of storage.
Combine that with your too high estimation of 7-9GB for DVDs average, which should really be more like 6-7GB average, (I've actually been storing DVDs like this for a year now) and for $2K he can store 300 DVDs.
Slightly different story, and I know this from experience, not guessing.
The DVD playing software will legally decrypt the ripped images. No illegality there. I do that with my DVDs so that I don't have to carry them with my laptop.
Yeah, but you are using a program like DVDDecrypter to copy the images to your HD. Which removes CSS. You can't just copy the VOBs to your HD.
Now for the legality of removing CSS, I thought that it was finaly agreed upon that it was not a trade secret.
(after all, buyviagra@biggerpenis.org is most likely sending you spam).
That statement would have made sense in 2002 perhaps, but today a _very_ large portion of email is sent through hijacked machines.
It's just as easy for the hijacking spammer to sign the outgoing email on the hijacked machine.
Consider it similar to a telemarketer that goes from house to house to find unlocked doors. When the door is open, he goes in and makes the phone call from the phone in the residence. The caller ID is not going to identify the phone call as a telemarketer call.
In the real world this would be absurd, but unfortunately there's tons of machines out there with SMTP backdoors.
you can also employ RFC-compiliant suffixes to your e-mail address. For example: foobar+dellorders@mydomain.com.
What's the use of that? Wouldn't it be trivial for spammers to write a filter that converts foobar+dellorders@mydomain.com to foobar@mydomain.com? In which case they have your 'real' email address.
An OS would then use this to mark pure data page and areas like the stack as NX so that overflowing datastructures doesn't allow arbitrary malicious code to be run.
The problem still being that the stack is not pure data, in that it is used for temporary data AND the return address to the caller. The return address really is code, not data.
You could potentially still set up a stack frame and return to a known piece of code in the code segment with the stack frame of choice.
In other words, it's still not protection for buffer overflows, it's just a little harder because you don't get to load your own code on the stack and execute it. Instead you will have to find a piece of code that will do the work for you.
To _really_ solve this problem, there should be two different stacks: one code stack which contains the return addresses and one data stack.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that post sums it up pretty much, other than that 'probably' should be replaced with 'absolutely'.
/dev/hda.
Basically this idiot has found an incredibly cumbersome way to screw up his partition table. (see below for more details)
Then of course this gets posted and linked to all over the planet for everyone to try for themselves. Who are these fucking idiots that post this kinda stuff? They should get 'gullible' tatood on their forehead.
Hint: nowhere in the article is it said that they actually tried to use all the space and verify all data remained intact. Wouldn't that be the first thing you'd do before posting something like this online?
Anyways, I've written several IDE drivers (and worked on the IDE core for BIOSs) and I can tell you that there is NO way you can increase the size of a 200GB drive to 510GB, especially not with the tools that are described (Ghost).
Look at the 80GB example: they got 150GB? That's interesting, because that would mean that the drive all of a sudden became a 48-bit LBA drive. Older drives are limited to 137.4GB in size and to get 150GB capacity you need 48-bit LBA. I don't think Ghost is going to reflash the firmware of the drive to add support for that (yes, that's meant to sound sarcastic).
Ghost works at the partition level. A drive reports it's size in sectors. This is basically a lower (or closer to the hardware) level.
All they do is move partitions around. But the drive will keep reporting the same number of sectors. Where do the extra sectors come from?
Why don't these people run an IDE identify program on those harddrives. They'll see that the drive still reports the original number of sectors. Exactly the same amount of sectors you can get to through
It's true that some OSs don't create the most ideal partitions so you lose _some_ sectors but nothing in the order of magnitude described though.
Initially I thought maybe they where using the extra error-detection/recovery bytes that each sector has (which would be a very stupid idea), but that would never give you that much increase.
Or that they were removing some factory/OEM predefined partition, which is basically the only relatively safe thing you can do to reclaim some disk space. Again, not the same order of magnitude, plus you'd never go over the size that the disk is sold as.
about 12 years ago when I told people that I wanted to learn Assembler (or Assembly as most people insist), most folks I spoke with declared I was foolish. (which was largely true)
;-)
Now bringing home about twice the bacon those same folks did, writing BIOS code, I just smile.
And as you see, we got the world by the bawls, us BIOS guys!
(seriously though, I think the BIOS is a piece of legacy crap that we need to get rid off... too bad it pays my bills)
The rest of the FSF might hope to leave RMS out of there because of BO considerations, but, alas, he is too important not to attend. It would be like Dick Cheney staying away from State of the Union.
Wouldn't it be more like Dubya staying away from the State of the Union?
In any case, the BO jokes are getting old. For you to be complaining about it suggests a certain proximity. In other words: maybe you should take your nose out of his ass.
I'm no fan of RMS, but that's because I personally saw him rip a young kid a new one during a Linux Expo in San Jose, CA. There was no excuse for him to do that and PR-wise was plain stoopid. I guess that's what he's known for and he probably got sick of the same silly comment made again. Still not the most diplomatic person you'd want to meet.
In any case, you got to respect the man for what he's done.
When someone asks me about installing Real, I tell them:
Real is like a little puppy, they shit all over the place.
Haha!! Haha!!
A Duke Nukem Forever Joke!!! Haaahaaa!
Wow, I just had to pick myself up from the floor from laughing so hard. This has got to be the funniest joke I've read. In a long long time!
It's almost as funny as incidentally reading Flying Cars instead of just Cars. Which _really_ cracked me up.
I think I'm going to take a cold shower, because I just can't stop laughing.
How do you come up with stuff like that?
Further, "re-charging" the fuel tank can be done in 2 minutes, while the batteries take ... who knows, certainly hours.
There's no reason why the battery couldn't be something that you remove from the car and replace with a charged one at the 'gas' station.
Instead of storing fuel, the 'gas' station would be storing charged batteries (well, they'd probably be charging them). I envision a conveyer belt type of system where the empty batteries enter on one side and the full ones come out the other.
All it requires is a paradigm shift.
whew. I can't wait for that.
Yeah, and that 2006 figure is just a ball-park, they may just pull it in a year or two. Who knows?
Seriously though, Bill Gates should shut the fuck up about spam and start fixing those damn bugs.
What the hell are they doing, daydreaming about these outdated solutions for spam. If they would fix their freaking OS, then we actually could start working on spam solutions, but the way it's going now there's no hope. So long as spammers can control these zombies, there's really not a whole lot that can be done about spam.
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail
So how hard can it be to find exactly the companies that sold this stuff?
These are ultimately the companies that are responsible for spam. Why don't we hold them liable? I think I can proof that spam is costing me a significant amount of money (mostly lost time) even though I do have a fairly good working filter.
I hear all the time that we can't really get the spammers because they are in China, or recently because they use zombies/compromised boxes all over the internet. Well, at the end of the day, it's not the spamhouses that are responsible for this. If no-one paid them to spam, it wouldn't be a business.
So someone is paying money to get this spam to you. How come we can't go after them and make them pay?!
The only thing thats actually big about this notebook (other than the size ofcourse) is the hard-drive
Yeah, and did you notice the article says this relating to the harddrive:
Although Acer simply dipped into the desktop PC parts bin to get the two components
I certainly hope that's not true. Your typical desktop harddrive has nowhere near the shock and vibration resistance as a notebook harddrive. I think we are talking almost an order of magnitude.
It's hard to believe that they actually stuck a 3.5" HDD in there, but looking at my (relatively big, but not too crazy) notebook, I suppose it's possible. And incredibly stoopid.
If you want a 7200 RPM drive, just get the 2.5" 60GB Hitachi one. I have one of those and it works as a charm. Still the notebook drive shock and vibration though.
And lots of truckers transport fruit from California.
er... OK.
The stock answer to this would be "go ahead and fix it then".
So basically you are saying that I should use the software of your choice, and when I consider it broken I should shut the fuck up and fix it.
Even after I told you that my answer is "I'll go ahead and not use it then".
What's so hard with respecting that choice? I mean I'm not complaining here. He said that people who consider Linux not user friendly enough never say what exactly is wrong. Well, I gave one example of why I don't consider Linux not user friendly enough, yet. It's not a complaint, it's an observation.
My real point being that at my last evaluation I just found too many of these kind of issues for me to consider using Linux on the desktop. I don't think that leaves me with an obligation to fix those issues.
Have you tried filling a bug report instead of ranting at Slashdot?
I love how you guys always turn things around. First you ask us to be specific and when I do I'm ranting.
As I indicated, in the couple of hours I spent evaluating I ran into a lot of these kind of issues. Several dozen possibly. No, I did not file a bug report on those. Once things get beyond a certain threshold I will be more than happy to spend time on it, until then, I'm sorry, but I don't have the time to find the 20 different people responsible for this or that piece of software and then contact them in whatever way they prefer to be communicated with.
I mean should I email the people that have the Cancel button in dialog boxes on the left side or the ones that have it on the right side? Should I send an email to the OpenOffice to say that when I clicked on the icon, the OO splash screen appeared for several seconds, then disappeared and then nothing? And when I think it's bizare that the icons in the start menu appear rather slow (because they are apparently fetched from disk one by one, everytime I click on the start menu), should I contact Red Hat, the X team, the Gnome team or the QT team?
But sorry, I'm ranting again.
Back to MC, yes, I know that F10 is the key to quit. But Esc can be used in NC, Far, VC and several others to exit the editor and viewer and to clear the command line.
I have actually inquired about this with some Linux guys and they seem to think it has to do with terminal emulation, which they explained is a feature, not a bug... seriously.
Anyways, I'm sure I'm doing incredibly stupid, but all I did was download the ISOs, stuck them in a 1GHz P3 with an Intel Mobo system and chose defaults as much as possible.
People always say "no Linux is not userfriendly enough" but they never say what EXACTLY is wrong! It's exactly because of this kind of trollish attitude that critics aren't being taken seriously anymore.
/etc/mc.conf that says termcaps=keyb101 or something even more intuitive. Well, if that's the case, I have to ask, why is that not the freaking default?
I'll give you an EXACT example. This was one of the MANY things I ran into when considering switching to Linux on the desktop for the Nth time. I installed Red Hat 9.
Under WinXP I run a program called Far. It's like the good ole Norton Commander, but then better. It's a Win32 console application and largely keyboard driven. I like it that way.
So, for ages, there has been Midnight Commander for Linux. I tried it again. I was impressed to see that the internal (or default) editor did syntax highlighting. So I tooled around a couple of minutes until I noticed that if I hit the Esc key, weird things would happen. Either the next key got ignored or something weird got printed on the command line.
Now in Far (and most other NC clones), the Esc key clears the command line. It also exits the viewer and the editor. So I tend to use it a lot.
I know the 'appology' for the MC behaviour has to do with terminal emulation. But why the hell should I give a flying fuck? There seems to be no use for whatever is happening when I hit the Esc key. I'm sure the BIG advantage is that MC works really well on a terminal. You know what? I'm not using a terminal.
There's probably some way to actually fix this, like a line in
But don't get me wrong, although this is one of the many little things that make me not want to shift to Linux, I still respect the coders of MC.
I think they are doing a great job, and maybe someday I will use their program as much as I do Far now. Or maybe I will actually spend the time to try to fix this. It's just that at the moment I find that there's too many of these types of issues to make the switch.
Next time I'm trying Linux, again, I will keep a list of things I run into. Better yet, I will post it on a blog somewhere. I hope the list is short enough to at least start dual-booting.
Whatever. I think there's a 'slightly' higher risk here than one would perceive from the original post.
But since you all are so fucking smart, go ahead and dismantle your UPS. Make sure to lick your fingers before you reach in.
I think if you read the original poster's reply you'd see how it wouldn't hurt to point out some of the caveats. But of course you and everyone else on the planet already knew that.
I suppose your tendency to sue is inversely proportional to your intelligence. Interesting.
Yeah, I'd say. I've never sued anyone, and probably never will.
What's much more detrimental to experimenting and playing with cool toys than people complaining about "hacking cookbooks" is the pervasive fear of liability and lawyers.
I'm not afraid of fucking lawyers. Sometimes, however, it is in place to warn people of the danger because they _may_ not realize it.
Do you know exactly what the risks are of 'playing' (your words) with the stuff we are talking about here?
Hint: we're not talking hooking up an LED to a battery.
Complete Liquidation of 100,000 sq ft facility - 100s of Servers (Sun, Compaq, HP, & Dell) Clarion EMC Storage - 100s of PCs, Notebooks, Printers - 100s of Herman Miller Aeron Chairs - 10,000 sq ft health club - Pool Table, Foosball, Video Arcade Games, Ping Pong. Artwork, Collectable Musical instruments, Contemporary Furniture & more...
Dude, the most important thing that everyone seems to be missing is that there's TONS of recording equipment there.
I'm totally surprised by the amount of studio equipment that's in the pictures. They must have had some pretty decent setups to do recordings.
Someone @ MP3.com was obviously fascinated by it, but I don't recall ever hearing about artists actually recording at their facilities.
I can't wait to get my hands on the camera that took the pictures of the Hummer.
Not one freaking clear picture, that's got to be a record of some sort.
I was going to reply to your post yesterday, but then got distracted.
Anyways, you do realize the liability aspects of a project like that, right?
I mean, it's one thing to point people over to some fun hardware diddly doo, but it's something else for people to start messing with fairly high capacity bateries and chargers for such.
I guess what I'm saying is that, it is actually possible for someone with more than half a brain to (unintentionally) mess up the project you are describing and do a significant amount of damage.
I'm normally not the first person to get worried about stuff like that, but I'd hate to see a battery blow up in someone's face. You should probably at least make people aware of that possibility.
Out of curiousity, do you have TV out from your storage server, or do you have a separate machine to playback?
The server is just a cheap box, with as many drives as I can fit in it (it's noisy). I've been swapping drives a lot because I used to have a lot (4) of those IBM GXP drives that sooner or later will fail (one did so far). Anyways, you are right, 10Mb/s is _easy_ to sustain for this box, and although I've never tried it, I doubt it would have trouble providing streams to multiple boxes.
The box has a RPC-2 drive converted to RPC-1 so I can rip any region code DVD to the harddrives.
The client that I use has a Calm PC enclosure. This one has no fans at all. The power supply, CPU and graphics card have an evaporative cooling system which is dead-silent. (it looks like the company may be out of business though...)
I have a 1GHz P3 in there with 512MB of RAM. Plenty powerful to decode DVDs (although most of that's handled by the graphics chip anyway), but I don't know about Divx.
I use a 512MB CompactFlash with Win98 on it right now, which means, no moving parts at all. I'm using Win98 because at the time I couldn't find enough parts of the puzzle for Linux (I've started this well over 2 years ago). A Linux box could be network booted, which is my ultimate goal.
The video card I use is an ATI All-in-Wonder RADEON 8500DV, with the optional component video output. It actually is quite dissapointing. I'm very critical about video quality, and this thing just doesn't match up with my Toshiba progressive scan DVD player. I've messed with the card for days and days, trying all sorts of things, but I can't get it to output a high quality progressive scan picture. Although in some modes, the TV behaves funny, so maybe it's a problem with the TV as well...
Anyways, I'm sure if you are not _that_ picky, there's video cards out there with reasonable video quality. I'm just waiting until I have enough money to buy a decent overhead projector with a high resolution DVI input. That way the signal stays digital all the way to the LCD.
So, the playback unit is entirely quiet. However, it's buttugly and big. You can move things into a smaller/nicer enclosure with a little creativity.
3x changers @ $700 each + 1 manager @ $1800 = $3900. More expensive than 4x250GB drives + computer
250GB HD == $166
4 * $166 = $664
that leaves $3236 for a PC and shipping. I'd say it can be done.
with the cheapest hard disk based solution costing over $30,000 (3x Xserve RAID 3.5 TB
What are you talking about?
I recently bough 250GB drives at Frys for $179.-. That's $716/TB, or $7160/10TB. Even if you put just 4 drives in one system, you could get a 10TB setup for $10K. Of course he says he only wants to rip a couple hundred. In other words, $2000 gives him 2TB of storage.
Combine that with your too high estimation of 7-9GB for DVDs average, which should really be more like 6-7GB average, (I've actually been storing DVDs like this for a year now) and for $2K he can store 300 DVDs.
Slightly different story, and I know this from experience, not guessing.
The DVD playing software will legally decrypt the ripped images. No illegality there. I do that with my DVDs so that I don't have to carry them with my laptop.
Yeah, but you are using a program like DVDDecrypter to copy the images to your HD. Which removes CSS. You can't just copy the VOBs to your HD.
Now for the legality of removing CSS, I thought that it was finaly agreed upon that it was not a trade secret.
Sorry, but your solution is NOT the solution.
(after all, buyviagra@biggerpenis.org is most likely sending you spam).
That statement would have made sense in 2002 perhaps, but today a _very_ large portion of email is sent through hijacked machines.
It's just as easy for the hijacking spammer to sign the outgoing email on the hijacked machine.
Consider it similar to a telemarketer that goes from house to house to find unlocked doors. When the door is open, he goes in and makes the phone call from the phone in the residence. The caller ID is not going to identify the phone call as a telemarketer call.
In the real world this would be absurd, but unfortunately there's tons of machines out there with SMTP backdoors.
you can also employ RFC-compiliant suffixes to your e-mail address. For example:
foobar+dellorders@mydomain.com.
What's the use of that? Wouldn't it be trivial for spammers to write a filter that converts foobar+dellorders@mydomain.com to foobar@mydomain.com? In which case they have your 'real' email address.
An OS would then use this to mark pure data page and areas like the stack as NX so that overflowing datastructures doesn't allow arbitrary malicious code to be run.
The problem still being that the stack is not pure data, in that it is used for temporary data AND the return address to the caller. The return address really is code, not data.
You could potentially still set up a stack frame and return to a known piece of code in the code segment with the stack frame of choice.
In other words, it's still not protection for buffer overflows, it's just a little harder because you don't get to load your own code on the stack and execute it. Instead you will have to find a piece of code that will do the work for you.
To _really_ solve this problem, there should be two different stacks: one code stack which contains the return addresses and one data stack.