Sure you can fallthrough!! I've installed perhaps a dozen servers this way in the last few years, via CD, via PXE, via USB or an attached SCSI device. As long as there's not a boot record and the drive isn't marked with a 'bootable' partition, I've never had a problem doing this: the key is to make sure to do 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[hard drive] count=20' from a Linux environment to be sure of seriously scrubbing any MBR and the partition information.
I'm not sure if marking a partition on that drive 'bootable' causes problems, and installing a boot record certainly does. But the above trick works just fine with brand new drives or drives that have been zeroed.
Wanting to boot from hard drive _first_ has been a basic security configuration issue for many years now, ever since hard drives becahme large and cheap enough to become commonplace. The ability to take over a student cluster machine with a boot floppy, and in this day a CD or a USB drive, has been a security problem in large environments for those many years.
The whole CD card booting oddness you describe has to do with the BIOS itself being able to detect and access the CD drive in a well-defined way: the creation of bootable CD's is a fascinating piece of technology history itself. But the advent of bootable CD, DVD, USB, or other removable issue doesn't change the basic issue of keeping crackers with physical access from booting from their own media.
Yes, and that's been a danger since day one. The removable media should _never_ have been the default: it should have been the fallthrough boot medium, to keep idiots from booting with floppies or later CD's and USB devices automatically to take control of your hardware.
You had something resembling a hardware spec, you lucky beggars. One thing that has slowed Linux development has been the plethora of weird hardware specs that Microsoft and their partners designed and supported, and people in Linux-land are expected to have "just work" despite this kind of specification insanity. In fact, when I can, I prefer to buy hardware that is listed as "Macintosh compatible" because the specs are so much more reliable and the quality is generally higher.
Good point, although in some instances that land was purchased legally, so I'm reluctant to confuse my historical reference with "all but a few percent stolen by theft, invasion, and genocide".
Possibly. But the chilling effect on possible informants is real. And having people with guns show up at your house and root through your possessions is always disturbing. There's also the opportunity to plant evidence, or to find evidence of an unrelated and real offense, however minor, to continue to bother our blogger with.
Oh, please. Tell that to the Nisei (the Japanese-Americans locked up during World War II), the slaves of the USA's first 100 years of existence, women without the vote or property rights, the victim's of the McCarthy era witch hunt against Communists, the hippies of the 1960's, and various people whose have rights have been trammeled since the beginning of the USA.
We're a nation of laws on good days: on bad days, we've been nationalistic thungs.
Yes, they do. They want ISP's to take notice that even allowing clients to host such material, or a failure to prevent such "violations", is a serious business risk.
The Secret Service pulled the same sort of nonsensical, conviction, overstepping raid against alleged crackers around the USA decades ago in the Steve Jackson case.
No. They'd wind up with mission creep, of departments excited to buy their hardware with Vista but not aware that it's not supported or easily supportable and dumping support for it on programmers, contractors, and software vendors who were told they wouldn't have to do that.
I've had to deal with that with both Windows and Linux releases, and the Windows re-engineering of so many undocumented and inexplicable components at once is very dangerous.
IE is its own monstrosity. The security vulnerabilities alone are a massive incentive to keep it up to the latest version, and _never_ worked well enough to be considered stable as was.
In general, I agree that not upgrading contributes to compatibility issues, and eventually maintaining compatibility becomes unreasonable: a complete update becomes necessary, and you can wind up regretting not upgrading gradually. Unfortunately, for a long time, the "upgrade" to Vista actively damaged hardware compatibility, as well as software, due to the extensive rewrite of so much of the system with badly documented or even unpublished API's. And the extent of the rewrites necessary for Vista's security behavior, alone, tends to break compatibility with the older OS, so you can't often do gradual upgrades for Vista compatibility. I can only imagine the additional pain if they'd ever gotten that WinFS monstrosity out of the development lab.
In this case, it's usually safer to wait out Vista entirely and hope that Windows 7 got it somewhat better, if nothing because XP is reaching its real end-of-life.
It's not the paper cuts, it's the sparks from the flint in their toilet paper causing ignition. I actually visited London a few decades ago: unless it's changed, that paper is a violation of the Geneva convention.
And it prevents "upgrade by fiat", when new hardware is ordered and automatically comes with Vista and some poor local admin has to explain to his manager that no, they should _not_ accept that unwanted upgrade and stick with a consistent, existing hardware and software version. It also prevents departments from releasing Vista-only technologies: this is important for Internet Explorer and other applications.
It also keeps the Texas paperwork pushers from playing Halo 2 or Halo 3.
In theory, yes. In practice, they don't dare. It's expensive, it can interfere with legitimate traffic, and you've neglected the problem of botnets which send their spam from thousands or millions of scattered, zombied machines worldwide. Also, taking responsibility for spam from their network directly makes them legally responsible for _failing_ to block spam from their network, and that's an unenviable legal position.
No, Congress _did not_ correctly define spam. Spam is best defined as "unsolicited bulk communications". Congress defined it in the CAN-SPAM act as "stop spamming you if you ask us to stop", which is a completely different definition. And they left in huge exceptions for political, religious, and non-profit spam.
The junk fax laws defined it correctly, basically as "if you didn't ask for it and I don't know you personally, it's spam", and there have been many attempts to extend the junk fax law to combat spam. Congress aimed CAN-SPAM at fraud, not at spam, and prosecuting fraud is far, far more difficult than prosecution or civil suit for spam itself. They were lobbied to do so by companies that send non-fraudulent spam, the Direct Marketing Association's sponsors, and the result was entirely predictable.
Not at all. Spam filters, blacklists, etc., evolve. As a new technique slips past the defenses, spamfilters are under pressure to shift and upgrade to block the latest spam. You see the same sort of thing for all types of diseases and software security vulnerabilities.
Not at all! Just like digging for old or investing in real estate, only enough people have to _believe_ that it is profitable for them to spam, or to pay services that provide spam. And those services are happy to lie about its profitability to the spamming vendors, just as a real estate agent or loan broker are happy to lie about the value of real estate. And you, as a spamming product vendor, may lose plenty of money, but the spamming company itself has already collected enough of your money to stay in business.
Also, remember that many spamming vendors are fraudulent. They collect the cash and run, avoiding taxes, or even doing phishing, installing malware, and credit card fraud to steal directly from customers. So it doesn't take many idiots reading a spam to provide a tidy profit margin for various types of spammers.
But the old Doom is still playable. I just played the 'Sven Coop' version of the Doom map, and took a while to stop laughing at youngsters who'd never seen it. It was a pretty fun rendition, too. Steam has also re-released a bunch of the X-Com, and some Thief games, and they're quite playable.
Go look up http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt. Fill it in for yourself, please, with particular attention to the existence of botnets (which steal email services from zombied machines worldwide), non-profit spam (which will get away with it free as they do under the CAN-SPAM act), and the difficulties of micropayments (handling many thousands of small transactions is extremely expensive when you start handling real money).
In other words, it will hurt legitimate email far, far, far more than spam, which will simply steal the service from others. Or do you somehow think that you personally will magically profit from this one?
There are components that can degrade with time. Cheap capacitors, for example, and overvoltage protection diodes can change over time, especially for a system exposed to very noisy power lines. But in either case, it's a 386 CPU? Duplicate the disk on other hardware for virtualization if you need it, and dump it.
Care to bet on that? I've seen 5 minute boot times for XP on end-of-life hardware, primarily due to massive delays in indexing large disk drives. And no, it's not "booted" until it gives you a usable mouse and keyboard. Printing up the Windows boot screen and ignoring you for another few minutes does not count as "booted". Vista is noticeably worse on the same hardware due to the larger memory footprint: Win9x used to be OK on the hardware.
Yes. It does. It makes Dyson's reasoning more credible both to scientists and to the populace, and makes it more likely to take him seriously. This is because a scientist also has to judge the credibility of his instruments, and of theories proposed in order to allocate time to testing or refuting them.
Many scientists have, historically, gotten very strange and hawked nonsense after their original great revelations of science: Pauling got into the "vitamin C cures everything" cult, and Isaac Newton himself spent much of his later career practicing pretty nonsensical alchemy, seeking transmutation and the Philosopher's Stone. But I've actually met Dyson: he's a strange man, but well worth taking seriously. (His thoughts on how to provide eternal life for organisms are actually a good model of how to extend sensor battery life and laptop battery life.)
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Sure you can fallthrough!! I've installed perhaps a dozen servers this way in the last few years, via CD, via PXE, via USB or an attached SCSI device. As long as there's not a boot record and the drive isn't marked with a 'bootable' partition, I've never had a problem doing this: the key is to make sure to do 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[hard drive] count=20' from a Linux environment to be sure of seriously scrubbing any MBR and the partition information.
I'm not sure if marking a partition on that drive 'bootable' causes problems, and installing a boot record certainly does. But the above trick works just fine with brand new drives or drives that have been zeroed.
Wanting to boot from hard drive _first_ has been a basic security configuration issue for many years now, ever since hard drives becahme large and cheap enough to become commonplace. The ability to take over a student cluster machine with a boot floppy, and in this day a CD or a USB drive, has been a security problem in large environments for those many years.
The whole CD card booting oddness you describe has to do with the BIOS itself being able to detect and access the CD drive in a well-defined way: the creation of bootable CD's is a fascinating piece of technology history itself. But the advent of bootable CD, DVD, USB, or other removable issue doesn't change the basic issue of keeping crackers with physical access from booting from their own media.
Yes, and that's been a danger since day one. The removable media should _never_ have been the default: it should have been the fallthrough boot medium, to keep idiots from booting with floppies or later CD's and USB devices automatically to take control of your hardware.
You had something resembling a hardware spec, you lucky beggars. One thing that has slowed Linux development has been the plethora of weird hardware specs that Microsoft and their partners designed and supported, and people in Linux-land are expected to have "just work" despite this kind of specification insanity. In fact, when I can, I prefer to buy hardware that is listed as "Macintosh compatible" because the specs are so much more reliable and the quality is generally higher.
Good point, although in some instances that land was purchased legally, so I'm reluctant to confuse my historical reference with "all but a few percent stolen by theft, invasion, and genocide".
Possibly. But the chilling effect on possible informants is real. And having people with guns show up at your house and root through your possessions is always disturbing. There's also the opportunity to plant evidence, or to find evidence of an unrelated and real offense, however minor, to continue to bother our blogger with.
Oh, please. Tell that to the Nisei (the Japanese-Americans locked up during World War II), the slaves of the USA's first 100 years of existence, women without the vote or property rights, the victim's of the McCarthy era witch hunt against Communists, the hippies of the 1960's, and various people whose have rights have been trammeled since the beginning of the USA. We're a nation of laws on good days: on bad days, we've been nationalistic thungs.
Yes, they do. They want ISP's to take notice that even allowing clients to host such material, or a failure to prevent such "violations", is a serious business risk. The Secret Service pulled the same sort of nonsensical, conviction, overstepping raid against alleged crackers around the USA decades ago in the Steve Jackson case.
No. They'd wind up with mission creep, of departments excited to buy their hardware with Vista but not aware that it's not supported or easily supportable and dumping support for it on programmers, contractors, and software vendors who were told they wouldn't have to do that.
I've had to deal with that with both Windows and Linux releases, and the Windows re-engineering of so many undocumented and inexplicable components at once is very dangerous.
Diamond burns just fine: it's a bit harder to ignite, is all.
IE is its own monstrosity. The security vulnerabilities alone are a massive incentive to keep it up to the latest version, and _never_ worked well enough to be considered stable as was.
In general, I agree that not upgrading contributes to compatibility issues, and eventually maintaining compatibility becomes unreasonable: a complete update becomes necessary, and you can wind up regretting not upgrading gradually. Unfortunately, for a long time, the "upgrade" to Vista actively damaged hardware compatibility, as well as software, due to the extensive rewrite of so much of the system with badly documented or even unpublished API's. And the extent of the rewrites necessary for Vista's security behavior, alone, tends to break compatibility with the older OS, so you can't often do gradual upgrades for Vista compatibility. I can only imagine the additional pain if they'd ever gotten that WinFS monstrosity out of the development lab.
In this case, it's usually safer to wait out Vista entirely and hope that Windows 7 got it somewhat better, if nothing because XP is reaching its real end-of-life.
It's not the paper cuts, it's the sparks from the flint in their toilet paper causing ignition. I actually visited London a few decades ago: unless it's changed, that paper is a violation of the Geneva convention.
And it prevents "upgrade by fiat", when new hardware is ordered and automatically comes with Vista and some poor local admin has to explain to his manager that no, they should _not_ accept that unwanted upgrade and stick with a consistent, existing hardware and software version. It also prevents departments from releasing Vista-only technologies: this is important for Internet Explorer and other applications.
It also keeps the Texas paperwork pushers from playing Halo 2 or Halo 3.
In theory, yes. In practice, they don't dare. It's expensive, it can interfere with legitimate traffic, and you've neglected the problem of botnets which send their spam from thousands or millions of scattered, zombied machines worldwide. Also, taking responsibility for spam from their network directly makes them legally responsible for _failing_ to block spam from their network, and that's an unenviable legal position.
No, Congress _did not_ correctly define spam. Spam is best defined as "unsolicited bulk communications". Congress defined it in the CAN-SPAM act as "stop spamming you if you ask us to stop", which is a completely different definition. And they left in huge exceptions for political, religious, and non-profit spam.
The junk fax laws defined it correctly, basically as "if you didn't ask for it and I don't know you personally, it's spam", and there have been many attempts to extend the junk fax law to combat spam. Congress aimed CAN-SPAM at fraud, not at spam, and prosecuting fraud is far, far more difficult than prosecution or civil suit for spam itself. They were lobbied to do so by companies that send non-fraudulent spam, the Direct Marketing Association's sponsors, and the result was entirely predictable.
Not at all. Spam filters, blacklists, etc., evolve. As a new technique slips past the defenses, spamfilters are under pressure to shift and upgrade to block the latest spam. You see the same sort of thing for all types of diseases and software security vulnerabilities.
Not at all! Just like digging for old or investing in real estate, only enough people have to _believe_ that it is profitable for them to spam, or to pay services that provide spam. And those services are happy to lie about its profitability to the spamming vendors, just as a real estate agent or loan broker are happy to lie about the value of real estate. And you, as a spamming product vendor, may lose plenty of money, but the spamming company itself has already collected enough of your money to stay in business.
Also, remember that many spamming vendors are fraudulent. They collect the cash and run, avoiding taxes, or even doing phishing, installing malware, and credit card fraud to steal directly from customers. So it doesn't take many idiots reading a spam to provide a tidy profit margin for various types of spammers.
No, no. Most advocates of this don't want anyone to receive the money but themselves. You, as a recipient, get nothing.
But the old Doom is still playable. I just played the 'Sven Coop' version of the Doom map, and took a while to stop laughing at youngsters who'd never seen it. It was a pretty fun rendition, too. Steam has also re-released a bunch of the X-Com, and some Thief games, and they're quite playable.
Go look up http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt. Fill it in for yourself, please, with particular attention to the existence of botnets (which steal email services from zombied machines worldwide), non-profit spam (which will get away with it free as they do under the CAN-SPAM act), and the difficulties of micropayments (handling many thousands of small transactions is extremely expensive when you start handling real money).
In other words, it will hurt legitimate email far, far, far more than spam, which will simply steal the service from others. Or do you somehow think that you personally will magically profit from this one?
There are components that can degrade with time. Cheap capacitors, for example, and overvoltage protection diodes can change over time, especially for a system exposed to very noisy power lines. But in either case, it's a 386 CPU? Duplicate the disk on other hardware for virtualization if you need it, and dump it.
Care to bet on that? I've seen 5 minute boot times for XP on end-of-life hardware, primarily due to massive delays in indexing large disk drives. And no, it's not "booted" until it gives you a usable mouse and keyboard. Printing up the Windows boot screen and ignoring you for another few minutes does not count as "booted". Vista is noticeably worse on the same hardware due to the larger memory footprint: Win9x used to be OK on the hardware.
Just let me know when Objective C succeeds in replacing anything else, first.
Yes. It does. It makes Dyson's reasoning more credible both to scientists and to the populace, and makes it more likely to take him seriously. This is because a scientist also has to judge the credibility of his instruments, and of theories proposed in order to allocate time to testing or refuting them.
Many scientists have, historically, gotten very strange and hawked nonsense after their original great revelations of science: Pauling got into the "vitamin C cures everything" cult, and Isaac Newton himself spent much of his later career practicing pretty nonsensical alchemy, seeking transmutation and the Philosopher's Stone. But I've actually met Dyson: he's a strange man, but well worth taking seriously. (His thoughts on how to provide eternal life for organisms are actually a good model of how to extend sensor battery life and laptop battery life.)
And he doesn't remember the effects of increasing acid rain on marble on bathroom decks, or stone sculpture that had survived thousands of years.