My Citroen C4 is currently getting 5.5l/100km (42.8mpg) according to the onboard computer. On paper it gets under 4l/100km highway (~60mpg) and now that it's run in i'm starting to see those sorts of figures for highway travel.
Hell yeah. They can have my tabs when they pry them from my cold dead hands. My browsing habit is basically to google something, middle click a bunch of likely looking links and then go look at them - hopefully they've loaded up by then.
Still... if they can come up with something better i'm willing to give it a go.
That raises an intersting point. There have been various cases of serial killers eating their victims. Who's to say that we didn't just stumble across one of Hannabil Lecter's ancestors*, and that eating Neanderthal's was a rare, nay freak occurence?
(* yes I know that he's fictional, and that his tendancy to eat people probably wasn't genetic anyway)
Of course it's a fake. The sky in the background is black, so obviously it's night, but for the sun to be out the sky would have to be blue. Duh!
(kidding of course. It's a fantastic picture and reminds me of how small we really are compared to the rest of the universe. Kind of like stepping into the Total Perspective Vortex except it doesn't fry your brain.)
In other, unrelated news, Penn State researchers have released an online image voting system called 'Aesthetic or not' where users are presented with a random image and have to give it a score of between 0 and 100.
Initial user participation was good until for some completely unknown reason, 90% of images presented to users for rating were goatse, tubgirl, or other shock images.
From a packet lag (rtt) point of view, does physical geography enter into it at all? I see 200ms ping times once my packets start getting around to the other side of the world...
There are no reports anyone would be even able to restore data after rewriting them with simple/dev/zero. OTOH rewriting by/dev/urandom and/dev/zero costs mostly the same so why to care if/dev/zero is enough.
Well, yes. And in fact due to the way data is encoded (MFM, RLL, whatever they use these days) a zero bit of data in a sector does not necessarily correspond to a physical zero bit in a magnetic sense.
And given that one of the theories about how to recover data is "subtract the 'perfect' waveform of the track from the actual waveform of the track, and the difference will be some indication of the data that was there previously", it doesn't matter if a single pass is random, all 1's, or all 0's. If you were doing multiple passes then random data would be better, but psuedorandom would probably suffice as long as it was different with each rewrite because the objective is to push the variations well under the noise floor.
cat/dev/something >/dev/sda is enough/easier on any Linux kernel, dd had to be used on some old commercial Unices nobody has seen for 30 years now.
When I was writing floppies under AIX about 10 years ago, 'dd' with a suitable block size was many times faster than 'cat'. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference for a harddisk though.
Police forces do recover data from overwritten disks and even formatted hard disks.
Assuming we are talking about a disk that has been entirely written with zero's or random data, eg a deliberate attempt to render the disk unreadable - citation needed (or are you just repeating something you heard from someone who heard it from someone else?)
The 'black boxes' are designed to ensure the survival of the internal medium, so it's no surprise that the data is recoverable (don't they use analogue tape on a loop? or is that just for the voice recorder? or is my knowledge way out of data:)
When inter track spacings were wider and density in other dimensions was lower (20 years ago?) it was possible to recover data after a complete write with zero's, but not now.
While Wikipedia isn't the definitive answer on anything, it clearly states in several places that a single pass of the entire disk is enough to erase the disk with no chance of recovery.
Who really needs their services knows howe to contact them and knows that if he has to ask the price, then it's too expensive for his needs.
Sounds awfully like an urban legend. Are the illuminati involved somehow?:p
Unless you have overwritten the area on the physical disk that contained the data, multiple times, the data can still be recovered.
People keep repeating that mantra to each other, but is it really true? Getting data off a 'formatted' disk is pretty easy as a format rarely does more than write a few sectors at the start of the disk. Getting data off of a disk that has had 'dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda' done to it is a different matter altogether.
There have been papers written about getting some data out of the inter-track space, and scraping it off the noise floor etc with electron microscopes, but as far as I have researched, nobody has actually done it.
I put it to you that more people have had their kidney's stolen after meeting a pretty girl at a party than there have been disks recovered after being completely overwritten with random data.
Provided that your internal dns zone is a subdomain of your external dns zone, just make it world reachable. IMVHO the days where 'hiding' your internal DNS zone adds any security are long gone - any external attacker who is in a position to make use of this information can already get it anyway.
I don't mind. I have karma to burn. My response should have been "Phrenology was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago" anyway, so I probably deserve it:)
paying retailers not to sell AMD-based computer systems
1. Start up a retail store 2. Get varrious large organisations to pay you to not sell stuff. 3. Profit!
. Intel could pay you to not sell AMD products. . Microsoft could pay you to not sell your products with Linux on them. . Jack Thompson could pay you to not sell your products with violent or sexually explicit software on them . Pepsi could pay you to not sell Coke . McDonalds could pay you to not have a Hungry Jacks (Burger King) store in your food court
Meh, how good can they be if this is the stuff that was thrown out?
You're kidding right? (of course you are:) Just imagine the sort of stuff that's going to be in the rubbish!
. Report cards that kids didn't want their parents to find . Shopping lists . Angry letters that were written and then thrown out as a form of symbolism . Overdue bills . Drafts of existing legendary documents (It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times, etc)
My mother also made a point of not allowing any kind of guns. I made guns out of lego, and then graduated to making rubber band guns out of random wood and clothes pins I found around the house. I ended up arming about half my neighborhood before my mother figured out where all the clothes pins ended up.
I'd forgotten all about that. My biggest rubber band gun was an 8 foot garden stake with a clothes peg up one end and a groove in the far end and a heap of rubber bands joined together. It actually performed worse than the 1 foot one i'd made earlier but it was sure cool to fire:)
Just what I was thinking. My 4yo son (3yo at the time) was picking out a toy in a lucky dip (he didn't quite get the concept of the 'lucky' bit and just peered in and chose what he wanted). He chose the toy cap gun. I don't particularly remember him watching any tv shows with guns with them, and his older sisters never played any gun games, but he picked it out and knew exactly what it was for, and for the next few weeks went around 'killing' everyone and everyone until he got bored with it.
Good thing we aren't in Germany or he'd be in jail now:)
When I was a kid, my mum specifically never bought any toy guns of any sort. So we made them out of lego. Or paper. Or sticks.
I think paintballing is far better than playing with imaginary guns. For one thing you don't have any "you're dead!" "no i'm not", etc. When you get hit by a paintball it leaves a mark, and it hurts. People would pretty quickly figure out that if there was a real shootout they'd get pretty dead pretty fast.
Umm.. no, they deliberately sent a message that said "send me the confidential information you have collected"
They only reverse engineered the software for interoperability reasons though. Botnet's are a monopoly so I think it's reasonable to allow them to develop a competing product, especially for research purposes:)
Who would bring criminal charges against the researchers though...
The botnet operators? Unlikely.
The owners of the computers that were unknowingly running the botnet trojans? Also unlikely, even if such research caused some major problems at a bank somewhere, what bank is going to put it's hand up and say "Our computers were infected with malicious software and your playing with it broke it"
the next day, she came home with a note from her teacher requesting that she be properly caffeinated from now on
That made me laugh - we had the exact same experience with our daughter - some protesting from her teacher until we sent her one day without her ritalin:)
Oddly enough, now that I'm on Prozac, they have the opposite (i.e. normal effects); alcohol makes me drunk, caffeine makes me hyper, etc.
I believe that SSRI's compete with alcohol in the liver which leaves the alcohol in your body for longer, which would explain the former. Possibly caffeine is affected in the same way.
I also believe that self medication with caffeine is the reason that most computer nerds drink coffee to excess:)
I wonder if I could make Riddalin(sp?][TM] bottled water?
'Ritalin' is how you spell it, and it's just a stimulant. You can already get it in a can or brew it yourself (although in that form it's spelled and pronounced differently - 'Caffeine' - but the effect is the same:)
Seriously, I've been on Ritalin before and the effect isn't a lot different to a strong can of Red Bull or similar.
Slashdot Mirror
No. At the end of the match they _stop_ drinking alcohol to make themselves incoherent.
My Citroen C4 is currently getting 5.5l/100km (42.8mpg) according to the onboard computer. On paper it gets under 4l/100km highway (~60mpg) and now that it's run in i'm starting to see those sorts of figures for highway travel.
Hell yeah. They can have my tabs when they pry them from my cold dead hands. My browsing habit is basically to google something, middle click a bunch of likely looking links and then go look at them - hopefully they've loaded up by then.
Still... if they can come up with something better i'm willing to give it a go.
That raises an intersting point. There have been various cases of serial killers eating their victims. Who's to say that we didn't just stumble across one of Hannabil Lecter's ancestors*, and that eating Neanderthal's was a rare, nay freak occurence?
(* yes I know that he's fictional, and that his tendancy to eat people probably wasn't genetic anyway)
Of course it's a fake. The sky in the background is black, so obviously it's night, but for the sun to be out the sky would have to be blue. Duh!
(kidding of course. It's a fantastic picture and reminds me of how small we really are compared to the rest of the universe. Kind of like stepping into the Total Perspective Vortex except it doesn't fry your brain.)
[citation needed]
It was a programme on TV the other week about some guy in Canada and an experimental drug with a name of some sort. What more do you need???
Sleep deprivation also causes you to miss jokes, and often also miss the whooshing noise that occurs after you miss them.
In other, unrelated news, Penn State researchers have released an online image voting system called 'Aesthetic or not' where users are presented with a random image and have to give it a score of between 0 and 100.
Initial user participation was good until for some completely unknown reason, 90% of images presented to users for rating were goatse, tubgirl, or other shock images.
From a packet lag (rtt) point of view, does physical geography enter into it at all? I see 200ms ping times once my packets start getting around to the other side of the world...
Well, yes. And in fact due to the way data is encoded (MFM, RLL, whatever they use these days) a zero bit of data in a sector does not necessarily correspond to a physical zero bit in a magnetic sense.
And given that one of the theories about how to recover data is "subtract the 'perfect' waveform of the track from the actual waveform of the track, and the difference will be some indication of the data that was there previously", it doesn't matter if a single pass is random, all 1's, or all 0's. If you were doing multiple passes then random data would be better, but psuedorandom would probably suffice as long as it was different with each rewrite because the objective is to push the variations well under the noise floor.
When I was writing floppies under AIX about 10 years ago, 'dd' with a suitable block size was many times faster than 'cat'. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference for a harddisk though.
And just so I don't wallow in hypocrisy with a lack of citations:
Recovering overwritten data
Number of overwrites needed
Assuming we are talking about a disk that has been entirely written with zero's or random data, eg a deliberate attempt to render the disk unreadable - citation needed (or are you just repeating something you heard from someone who heard it from someone else?)
The 'black boxes' are designed to ensure the survival of the internal medium, so it's no surprise that the data is recoverable (don't they use analogue tape on a loop? or is that just for the voice recorder? or is my knowledge way out of data :)
When inter track spacings were wider and density in other dimensions was lower (20 years ago?) it was possible to recover data after a complete write with zero's, but not now.
While Wikipedia isn't the definitive answer on anything, it clearly states in several places that a single pass of the entire disk is enough to erase the disk with no chance of recovery.
Sounds awfully like an urban legend. Are the illuminati involved somehow? :p
People keep repeating that mantra to each other, but is it really true? Getting data off a 'formatted' disk is pretty easy as a format rarely does more than write a few sectors at the start of the disk. Getting data off of a disk that has had 'dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda' done to it is a different matter altogether.
There have been papers written about getting some data out of the inter-track space, and scraping it off the noise floor etc with electron microscopes, but as far as I have researched, nobody has actually done it.
I put it to you that more people have had their kidney's stolen after meeting a pretty girl at a party than there have been disks recovered after being completely overwritten with random data.
But remember, we're Australians and we're already upside down. The sort of engineering we'll be doing is most likely 'reverse' engineering.
Provided that your internal dns zone is a subdomain of your external dns zone, just make it world reachable. IMVHO the days where 'hiding' your internal DNS zone adds any security are long gone - any external attacker who is in a position to make use of this information can already get it anyway.
I don't mind. I have karma to burn. My response should have been "Phrenology was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago" anyway, so I probably deserve it :)
And you have the brainwave patterns of a stagecoach tilter!
1. Start up a retail store
2. Get varrious large organisations to pay you to not sell stuff.
3. Profit!
. Intel could pay you to not sell AMD products.
. Microsoft could pay you to not sell your products with Linux on them.
. Jack Thompson could pay you to not sell your products with violent or sexually explicit software on them
. Pepsi could pay you to not sell Coke
. McDonalds could pay you to not have a Hungry Jacks (Burger King) store in your food court
I'm sure there's money to be made here!
You're kidding right? (of course you are :) Just imagine the sort of stuff that's going to be in the rubbish!
. Report cards that kids didn't want their parents to find
. Shopping lists
. Angry letters that were written and then thrown out as a form of symbolism
. Overdue bills
. Drafts of existing legendary documents (It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times, etc)
And you me :)
I'd forgotten all about that. My biggest rubber band gun was an 8 foot garden stake with a clothes peg up one end and a groove in the far end and a heap of rubber bands joined together. It actually performed worse than the 1 foot one i'd made earlier but it was sure cool to fire :)
Lucky I didn't lose an eye.
Just what I was thinking. My 4yo son (3yo at the time) was picking out a toy in a lucky dip (he didn't quite get the concept of the 'lucky' bit and just peered in and chose what he wanted). He chose the toy cap gun. I don't particularly remember him watching any tv shows with guns with them, and his older sisters never played any gun games, but he picked it out and knew exactly what it was for, and for the next few weeks went around 'killing' everyone and everyone until he got bored with it.
Good thing we aren't in Germany or he'd be in jail now :)
When I was a kid, my mum specifically never bought any toy guns of any sort. So we made them out of lego. Or paper. Or sticks.
I think paintballing is far better than playing with imaginary guns. For one thing you don't have any "you're dead!" "no i'm not", etc. When you get hit by a paintball it leaves a mark, and it hurts. People would pretty quickly figure out that if there was a real shootout they'd get pretty dead pretty fast.
which is, coincidentally, a very small fraction of the energy of the big bang :)
They only reverse engineered the software for interoperability reasons though. Botnet's are a monopoly so I think it's reasonable to allow them to develop a competing product, especially for research purposes :)
Who would bring criminal charges against the researchers though...
The botnet operators? Unlikely.
The owners of the computers that were unknowingly running the botnet trojans? Also unlikely, even if such research caused some major problems at a bank somewhere, what bank is going to put it's hand up and say "Our computers were infected with malicious software and your playing with it broke it"
The feds? What a PR disaster that would be!
That made me laugh - we had the exact same experience with our daughter - some protesting from her teacher until we sent her one day without her ritalin :)
I believe that SSRI's compete with alcohol in the liver which leaves the alcohol in your body for longer, which would explain the former. Possibly caffeine is affected in the same way.
I also believe that self medication with caffeine is the reason that most computer nerds drink coffee to excess :)
'Ritalin' is how you spell it, and it's just a stimulant. You can already get it in a can or brew it yourself (although in that form it's spelled and pronounced differently - 'Caffeine' - but the effect is the same :)
Seriously, I've been on Ritalin before and the effect isn't a lot different to a strong can of Red Bull or similar.