In my experience, floppies outlast the computers that created them. I have a HUGE box of backups I've made through the past 20 years, and they all work, except for the ones that have obviously been crushed, etc. (This stash even helped to kill a stupid patent once.)
I'd guess that the major problem faced here is cleaning and/or alignment of the drives. ANY drive can read it's own output, no matter how goofed up the alignment is. It's time to pull out the alignment disks, and check EVERY machine, about once a year, and the lab machines more often. Keep a large stash of replacement drives.
Fortunately, my corporate setting consumes about 2 disks per week, for the entire staff, so this is way down in my worry list.
"As usual there is little (intelligence) to be found at/. It never fails to amaze me how low the reading comprehension on this site is. I'll bet if you read the second (of three) sentence again, you'll be the first to discover a strain that DOES live in space!
Nothing in the article states that the Fungi live on the outside of MIR. I'm not willing to make the assumption that Hemos made when writing up the header. While it's possible (even likely) for spores to survive exposure to the hard vacuum of space, the lack of an atmosphere should keep them from living in space. If they do find fungii outside, that would be major news, especially if it's growing.
--Mike--
It seems to me that this will be the equivalent of the worlds greatest SQL server. They talk about datasets that are the results of analysis runs, deciding which to keep/toss based on how often the dataset would be needed. This sounds exactly like query results, etc. The scale of this, and the distibuted nature of the computing resources is completely new. To put things into perspective, Napster currently tells me there are 2,716 Gigabytes available on line, but this project intends to work with datasets over 1000 times larger than that!
On a more personal level, It's simply staggering how well everyone has managed to keep Moore's law chugging along since I got into things back in the early 1980s. I wrote a web page to compute disk prices back in 1991, and I keep having to revise it to be more optimistic every 2-4 years!
#1. Try putting a different hard drive in, formatting it with Win98, etc.
#2. Try FDISK/MBR from a Win98 boot disk on the existing drive (warning: may kill linux)
#3. If you have backups elsewhere... download this and run it from the DOS prompt on a WIN98 (or DOS 5.0 for that matter) boot disk, it will ERASE the boot sector, completely. (Killing Linux along the way) zap_part.exe. The source code is in the same directory in TP 7. The password is "amber". Be VERY careful. I wrote this program to remove NT installs.
"128 bit encryption is 128 bit encryption, and baring major advances is unbreakable to hackers."
If there's one thing I learned from reading Secrets and Lies, it's that there is ALWAYS a hole in the system somewhere.
The players for this format will always be unsecure, because we'll have physical access to them, and can take them apart and tweak as much as we want. In order to be playable on an infinite number of players, there has to be a global secret, locked up in the hardware (just like the DVD keys), that secret WILL be reveiled, and probably in a shockingly short amount of time.
It's not possible to lock things up the way the RIAA wants to, they should devote their energies to their original mission, assuming it had something to do with promoting music, and let this issue drop!
I got a great deal of knowledge out of the book, and even more valuable was the fresh perspective that it offers. For example, I never considered "secure server" (SSL) to mean what it implies. I was happy to learn I was right, and that my cynicism (experienced viewpoint??) was justified. But wait.... there's hope... it turns out that the fiscal security you want is guaranteed by the Credit Card companies, who limit the losses, regardless of the swiss cheese nature of Internet security today. (Never use a Debit card online though, losses aren't limited)
This is just one of the many revelations and insights Bruce has to offer in this very well written book. I learned about threat trees, the true nature of the security landscape,... and so much more it's amazing.
Buy it, read it, twice. (I'm about to start again)
While it's theoretically possible to encode many bits into an electron, there are real limits. If for example, you actually could encode the entire DeCSS source into a single electron, (actually a single atom), it would take a very long time to read it back out.
How long? - Let's assume that you can read a single bit out of this electron in one picosecond. (10^-12 seconds). Each additional bit would double the read time (because of Heisenberg, and friends). My copy of DeCSS weighs in at 3145 bytes after being compressed with PKzip 2.50. This is 25160 bits. So, 10^-12 * 2^25160 ==> 8.2*10^7561 Seconds, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the lifespan of the universe. Of course, cutting things down to size by doing parallel processing would help. The most bits that could be read in 1 second would be 39.9, assuming no noise, etc. The practical limits of Analog/Digital conversion technology are past 24 bits of resolution, but not much more, so don't count on getting DeCSS into less than 1049 atoms any time soon.;-)
By now extracting the data correctly, you get a picture with half the resolution and double the dynamic range. Wrong - Dynamic range is generally measured in decibels. This approach would only, at best, add 3dB to the dynamic range, at the cost of 50% of the resolution. It's an interesting idea though, if you set the "grey filter" at 100:1 (20 dB), you could, in theory, add 20dB to the dynamic range of a camera.
--Mike--
What if we just take a nice palladium or nickel target, put it in an aqueous solution of lithium hydroxide, and apply a voltage differential to it? This would cause the metal matrix to load with the available lithium and/or hydrogen ions near the surface. We then just wait for a muon to happen along (cosmic rays, etc)... and watch what happens (aneutronic nuclear fusion). It might happen more frequently at altitude, say Denver or Boulder Colorado. It would be less likely to happen at lower altitudes, and might be very sensitive to impurities (aka Poisons) just like the first nuclear fission reactors were. Similar situations have happened with novel physics before, for example, If it weren't for stubborn engineers from Westinghouse insisting on more room for fuel, all the work at Hanford during WWII would have been waste. It was only later learned that certain products of fission reactions act to poison the reaction.
All the above could be done... any competent chemist could do it, no physicist required. Even the home brew experimenter can get into the game.
It might be interesting to consider the case of this happening with in a metal matrix that has just been so loaded, then compressed quite a bit, using something like a diamond anvil press, etc. It's quite possible it could go BOOM in a big way, converting some mass directly to energy. (If this were possible though, one might expect certain three letter Government agencies to get into the act of surpressing the technology).
It amazes me how the copper heatsink does so much better at cooling the chips. It keeps the temperature down to the point of the idle temps of the competition. I wonder why this hasn't been used before? I know it's hard to machine, causing excessive wear on cutting heads, but couldn't it be extruded or stamped?
Are there any materials people out there who can enlighten us?
I alone have written at least 20 applications, and I'm not a programmer these days. I find the 70,000 number to be amazingly low. I could easily pound out a non-trivial application per week if I were doing commercial programming these days, Delphi makes it so easy. I've done things all over the map, from assembler to teco. There are millions of applications out there that depend on DOS or better. CATO needs to revise this number up to reality.
"That sounds fine to me, but a medical-screening version of the device hidden in the doorway at my insurance company sounds pretty scary"
Yes, that sounds scary to me as well, however there are alternative uses for this technology. Long ago I read that if you sample for the presence of Pentane in exhaled breath, it's a reliable test for heart muscle trauma as the result of a heart attack. A scanner for this mounted over the ER doors would be a good thing.
My knee jerk response is to get the planning done, get the "vision" mapped out. If you've got a firm set of goals and a project plan, you can release as early and often as you like. If you don't, then I believe you'll be pulled in all directions by the rest of us.
Early and often seems to be good except for the pull into other directions.
I hate the marketing folks who decided everything that works is now obsolete, and to be labeled as "legacy". There is a huge amount of DOS based code out there, to do almost anything. I still use "LIST.COM" to figure out what's gone wrong now with file naming, etc.
DOS applications run very quickly... there's none of the GUI overhead in the way, just you, the code, and almost bare metal. Things run so quick it's amazing. These programs are now running on machines that are at least 1000 times faster than the minimum hardware they were meant to run on.
Those who don't learn the lessons of history, are doomed to repeat them. Those who throw out legacy applications, are doomed to rewrite them. I still don't know of anything as simple and quick as EDWIN for working with text files. (The macro features were always just enough to save hours of work)
At first I thought she was dropping literary references by the truckload just to keep me from reading the book... eventually I figured out it's just a culture/background difference. There were a ton of references I just didn't get due to the wide separation of her life and mine in terms of experiences and culture, but it was still a VERY valuable read.
The author has us (slashdotters, and technologists in general) pegged... and has valid concerns about the direction we're going in. We do need to look around, see the bigger picture, and try to plan things out a bit more. (A ton more would be better).
If you can make the culture bridge, and not take it personally, it's a good critique.
It's a sequence. Get CSS accepted as the default way of doing things. Leverage it to exclude all other media from normal production. Extend control to all media produced. Prohibit any other speech.
Because I don't want to waste $17.00 on a CD I might hate! If I can get a reasonable quality copy of a song via Napster (haven't gotten around to getting it yet), then I can try before I buy. If I can't try it, I refuse to buy it.
Well, if the experiments at Department of Physics, University of Geneva, Switzerland work out, there won't have to be any delay, and everyone can be in sync. It turns out that pairs of entangled photons interact with each other at speeds greater than 10^7 times C, at a distance.
All you need is a lot of clear fiber, and a bit of vaporware hardware, and you're set.
I wrote a web page to compute drive prices many moons ago. I keep having to adjust it to make it more optimistic, even though it adjusts for Moore's law. I think it's time again, since I'm almost off by a factor of two in price. It amazes me to see how well the prices keep going down, and down, and down.
Current estimate (7/19/2000) for 80,000 megabytes: $552.39
Slashdot Mirror
The solution lies in minesweeper.... and no real details..
It could just as easily lie in Freecell.
--Mike--
It's aways a sunny day at 50,000 feet. ;-)
--Mike--
I'd guess that the major problem faced here is cleaning and/or alignment of the drives. ANY drive can read it's own output, no matter how goofed up the alignment is. It's time to pull out the alignment disks, and check EVERY machine, about once a year, and the lab machines more often. Keep a large stash of replacement drives.
Fortunately, my corporate setting consumes about 2 disks per week, for the entire staff, so this is way down in my worry list.
--Mike--
"As usual there is little (intelligence) to be found at /. It never fails to amaze me how low the reading comprehension on this site is. I'll bet if you read the second (of three) sentence again, you'll be the first to discover a strain that DOES live in space!
Nothing in the article states that the Fungi live on the outside of MIR. I'm not willing to make the assumption that Hemos made when writing up the header. While it's possible (even likely) for spores to survive exposure to the hard vacuum of space, the lack of an atmosphere should keep them from living in space. If they do find fungii outside, that would be major news, especially if it's growing.
--Mike--
--Mike--
On a more personal level, It's simply staggering how well everyone has managed to keep Moore's law chugging along since I got into things back in the early 1980s. I wrote a web page to compute disk prices back in 1991, and I keep having to revise it to be more optimistic every 2-4 years!
--Mike--
#2. Try FDISK
#3. If you have backups elsewhere... download this and run it from the DOS prompt on a WIN98 (or DOS 5.0 for that matter) boot disk, it will ERASE the boot sector, completely. (Killing Linux along the way) zap_part.exe. The source code is in the same directory in TP 7. The password is "amber". Be VERY careful. I wrote this program to remove NT installs.
--Mike--
If there's one thing I learned from reading Secrets and Lies, it's that there is ALWAYS a hole in the system somewhere.
The players for this format will always be unsecure, because we'll have physical access to them, and can take them apart and tweak as much as we want. In order to be playable on an infinite number of players, there has to be a global secret, locked up in the hardware (just like the DVD keys), that secret WILL be reveiled, and probably in a shockingly short amount of time.
It's not possible to lock things up the way the RIAA wants to, they should devote their energies to their original mission, assuming it had something to do with promoting music, and let this issue drop!
--Mike--
Why do we need "secure digital music"?
CDs and MP3 files seem to do just a fine job of handling my music needs, there seems to be nothing missing.
Would this initiative secure funding for the artists, or offer new capabilities for the listeners that don't currently exist?
Would this allow me to secure my music by getting access to it if the media it came on was damaged?
How does this guarantee my right to fair use under existing copyright laws?
--Mike--
This is just one of the many revelations and insights Bruce has to offer in this very well written book. I learned about threat trees, the true nature of the security landscape, ... and so much more it's amazing.
Buy it, read it, twice. (I'm about to start again)
--Mike--
How long? - Let's assume that you can read a single bit out of this electron in one picosecond. (10^-12 seconds). Each additional bit would double the read time (because of Heisenberg, and friends). My copy of DeCSS weighs in at 3145 bytes after being compressed with PKzip 2.50. This is 25160 bits. So, 10^-12 * 2^25160 ==> 8.2*10^7561 Seconds, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the lifespan of the universe. Of course, cutting things down to size by doing parallel processing would help. The most bits that could be read in 1 second would be 39.9, assuming no noise, etc. The practical limits of Analog/Digital conversion technology are past 24 bits of resolution, but not much more, so don't count on getting DeCSS into less than 1049 atoms any time soon. ;-)
--Mike--
By now extracting the data correctly, you get a picture with half the resolution and double the dynamic range.
Wrong - Dynamic range is generally measured in decibels. This approach would only, at best, add 3dB to the dynamic range, at the cost of 50% of the resolution. It's an interesting idea though, if you set the "grey filter" at 100:1 (20 dB), you could, in theory, add 20dB to the dynamic range of a camera.
--Mike--
All the above could be done... any competent chemist could do it, no physicist required. Even the home brew experimenter can get into the game.
It might be interesting to consider the case of this happening with in a metal matrix that has just been so loaded, then compressed quite a bit, using something like a diamond anvil press, etc. It's quite possible it could go BOOM in a big way, converting some mass directly to energy. (If this were possible though, one might expect certain three letter Government agencies to get into the act of surpressing the technology).
That's my two cents for the day.
--Mike--
PS. Why didn't I see this story on the main page?
Are there any materials people out there who can enlighten us?
--Mike--
--Mike--
Yes, that sounds scary to me as well, however there are alternative uses for this technology. Long ago I read that if you sample for the presence of Pentane in exhaled breath, it's a reliable test for heart muscle trauma as the result of a heart attack. A scanner for this mounted over the ER doors would be a good thing.
--Mike--
Early and often seems to be good except for the pull into other directions.
--Mike--
--Mike--
DOS applications run very quickly... there's none of the GUI overhead in the way, just you, the code, and almost bare metal. Things run so quick it's amazing. These programs are now running on machines that are at least 1000 times faster than the minimum hardware they were meant to run on.
Those who don't learn the lessons of history, are doomed to repeat them. Those who throw out legacy applications, are doomed to rewrite them. I still don't know of anything as simple and quick as EDWIN for working with text files. (The macro features were always just enough to save hours of work)
--Mike--
The author has us (slashdotters, and technologists in general) pegged... and has valid concerns about the direction we're going in. We do need to look around, see the bigger picture, and try to plan things out a bit more. (A ton more would be better).
If you can make the culture bridge, and not take it personally, it's a good critique.
--Mike--
That's the big picture, and it's obscene.
--Mike--
--Mike--
All you need is a lot of clear fiber, and a bit of vaporware hardware, and you're set.
--Mike--
Current estimate (7/19/2000) for 80,000 megabytes: $552.39
--Mike--
I just got rid of a monitor because the 31Khz squeal from it was too annoying to everyone in the the office.
--Mike--