http://diskzapper.com/ Ten pass high security erase (not DoD compliant, but very good), linux based, on either floppy or CD boot. I've been using it for a couple of years and keep copies around to give to friends at work for when they're selling PCs.
Make sure your friends realize that it wipes EVERYTHING, even partition and boot records, and the "restore" area that many manufacturers put on the drives these days.
Well, according to my stats and review page, most people think I do. Sorry if I diverge occasionally. That's a beautiful bit of prose that you've constructed, by the way, Mister A.C.
it's is a contraction of "it is", therefore: [uses] metal as [it is] source for power.
Of course, that leads to: The editor's didn't have their coffee this morning.
The editor's WHAT didn't have coffee?
That probably should be source OF power, as long as we're picking nits.
Knowing the english language isn't really a requirement for the job of Slashdot editor. That's been apparent for quite a long time now.
Actually, I don't think the "editors" are editors at all. They sift through the submissions pile, and accept stories, seemingly at random. They don't really seem to actually even read slashdot themselves; just look at the number of duplicate articles. They certainly don't spell- or grammar-check the articles.
But I'm about done with slashdot anyway. It's getting to be rare that I see an article that I haven't already seen elsewhere. Heck, a couple of times lately NPR has scooped slashdot on technology news. If you read the register and another couple of tech sites, it's almost guaranteed that you will not see anything new on slashdot.
Yeah. Calculate how much energy that would take. It's actually pretty hard to hit the sun from here.
Bringing it down in the shuttle is actually far and away the easiest way to get rid of it. Getting it up there was expensive. Once the shuttle is there, and the bay's empty anyway, bringing anything back is not that big a deal. Some extra mass in the deorbit calculations.
Why would we spend the time and money to build and attach and pilot a remote deorbit pack when we have the shuttle coming back anyway?
The Enterprise had 400-odd people on it. I guarantee they had some pretty extensive waste recycling systems. But they had matter transmutation, so they didn't actually have to deal with disposal, they could just feed mass in, and get food/water/gold/clothing/whatever they needed back out again. If you think about it, people in a society with that technology would soon come to view looking at actual trash as very disgusting.
Fat32 is DOS's file system. Window's file system is NTFS, which does support many (but not all) permissions features. I don't know if something like softlinks could be done. NTFS does support hard links I think.
Wow, she does everything at the command line? What's she using as her "typewriter" program, emacs? Cool mom. I have this image of a couple of soccer moms in a "vi vs emacs" throwdown!
So it's OK now that the mainboard and hard drive have been replaced with generics? or it was OK before?
Back in the hayday of PB, a whole lot of independent computer repair places I walked into had hand-lettered signs:
"$25 additional bench fee for Packard Bell computers"
They were that much of a pain in the ass to work on. Plus they cheaped out in ridiculous places, like having mainboards that could take 2 simms but saving 20 cents by not soldering in the 2nd socket. Great fun when it came time to expand.
What will you do when the graphics break on your wintel laptop?
Sorry, I see that you were specifically referring to laptops.
First off, do you seriously keep non-backed-up files on a portable, easily dropped, easily stolen device?
Anyway: I'd take out the one screw that holds the hard drive in, plug in a $5 ATAPI adaptor, drop it into an external case, and plug it on to any machine lying around and go back to work. Should take about 10 minutes and cost $40 total. Only $5 if I want to install it internally in a desktop.
I dunno. I've been using PCs since 1984 and have not had this happen yet. Does this happen often with Macs?
I suppose if my graphics card died, I'd go to the basement and grab another one and be back up and running in 5 minutes.
If my monitor died, I'd go buy another. I need another anyway, right?
I'm much more likely to have an old crusty backup video card lying around than I am to have another machine to plug into.
I've heard of 3 different friends who have had Mac laptops die and lose all their data from their hard drives in the last couple of months. I haven't heard of anyone who lost their display recently, on any kind of machine. Doesn't seem that useful of a feature to me.
New machines also do all that from BIOS, with the added feature that they give you a menu. I was trying to install an OS on an old G3 box I got out of the closet at work, and it took a bit of googling to figure out that I needed to hold down a key to boot from CD. On a PC, at boot time it says "press Fxx for boot menu" - you press that, it shows what things are there to boot from, you pick one. Nothing to remember, one key to press.
I'm seriously thinking about switching to Mac, but since the Mac came out, I've been amused by people saying things like "See, no difficult menus and words to read, you just press System+Open-Apple+backspace+q to switch modes! So much easer and intuitive!" People can convince themselves of anything, especially if they're trying to be counter-culture or are defending their choices.
As far as features working on intel-based machines, anyone who's had even a little programming experience should know that the processor doesn't matter; you can do whatever you want on whatever CPU you have, the only difference will be suitability to certain tasks (as in, how fast can it do the things that make what you want to do fast and efficient, like matrix transforms, vector math, fast I/O, memory blitting, etc). Any modern CPU can do anything any other modern CPU can do, just at different speeds for different tasks.
It did if it was connected. It slowed the machine down. It was fun explaining that when selling machines to people. Since we were building the machines custom, I'd usually explain it and ask if they wanted us to even connect it. Usually users would say "no". I often saw machines coming in for service that had the button pushed in. "Why is the Turbo button pressed in?" "to make it run faster, I've always had it in that setting." "Uh, you know, pressed in means "run slower"? *click* See, now it's twice as fast." "Oh."
Sounds like when I try to shop for speakers. Everything in the reasonable price range seems to have hyper-thundered bass. I want FLAT response. I don't want my speakers to color my music, I want them to reproduce what I send to them and be invisible. I suppose if the music you're listening to is crap, maybe making things shake is an alternative way to make it entertaining.
Currently we're better at making batteries last a long time than we are at making either I.C. engines or fuel cells last a long time.
According to my friends in the industry, one of the big problems with fuel cells is that they get easily poisoned and ruined by pollutants in the air that they suck in to consume the O2. Batteries actually last longer, and it is possible to properly recycle them, particularly if they're part of a large bank of batteries in a car. Junkyards have really become pretty darn efficient at recycling; it makes good business sense for them to be as efficient as possible.
It was on a history channel show, Modern Marvels, "Space Shuttle Columbia". I'm not sure of the exact number but it was in that range. I've got a recording around here somewhere but do not have the time to watch the episode to find the quote, and history channel is not a terribly reliable source anyway. Maybe someone else has a good source.
True, back in the 60's in the Apollo days, they tested the bejezus out of everything; that's because they were pushing stuff to almost beyond what technology of the time would do, and they had to have the best of the best to have a chance in hell of pulling off the mission.
They just don't have the budget for that now. I think they just ignored a lot of stuff and got lucky most of the time. They are going to be super-careful this time; they can NOT afford a failure on this launch.
Remember when the air force told NASA to expect something like 1 in 20 missions to blow up, because that was their record with SRBs? NASA has been doing WAY better than that.
These days they're scrubbing when they notice something outside of nominal. I'm happy they are. The Challenger was lost when they were operating outside of nominal and figured they could get away with it. After that event, investigations showed that they were ignoring a WHOLE LOT of stuff. I keep hoping they'll stop ignoring their own rules; we'll see.
For me, it's not a question of having the money to buy a new TV. It's a matter of being forced to buy something that I have no real use for. I'm 100% happy with the TV I have. I don't really give much of a damn if the picture gets any better than it is; it's totally fine as is.
I watch the TV very little as it is. The kids use it a fair amount, and my wife uses it to watch sports. If it were up to me I'd trash the thing and get the space back in the living room. I do watch TV and movies, but mostly on the computer screen, and hardly any of the main networks (I watch simpsons, but pretty much no other broadcast networks).
Some day they're going to have drive-by-wire with embedded sensors in the roads. Soon afterwards, when the statistics show conclusively that NOT having DBW is insanely dangerous, they'll have a mandate that by a certain date, everyone on the road needs DBW autopilot, either built into new cars or retrofitted into old cars.
People are going to whine and moan about having to buy a $100 set top box, but wait until they need to choose between paying $15000 to retrofit a new car or $50000 for a new car (probably what a cheap econobox will cost in 25 years when this all happens). MUCH screaming will ensue.
I haven't put a floppy into a machine I've built for the last 4 years. I've never missed it. Since I don't even have any floppies in my house except for some old crappy games and screensavers in a box in the basement, I can't imagine what I'd need one for.
Beg to differ. I have a Canon i960, I've had it for 2 years, have never bought a Canon cart, I just refill, have refilled all the colors about 20+ times, and have never had so much as a misfiring nozzle. not once.
I print about 5 pages of plain paper graphics a day, plus about 20 pages of glossy photos a month.
By contrast, I previously owned 2 HPs and an Epson, and had tons of printing problems with both of them. I won't buy anything else but Canon now.
No, you can't. On the 3-out plan, at first you can turn about twice a week, for a total of 24, but they start to throttle you pretty fast. If you keep this up, pretty soon you'll only be getting about 1 turn a week, for a total of 12/month. They start to take an extra day or even two to ship.
Slashdot Mirror
http://diskzapper.com/
Ten pass high security erase (not DoD compliant, but very good), linux based, on either floppy or CD boot. I've been using it for a couple of years and keep copies around to give to friends at work for when they're selling PCs.
Make sure your friends realize that it wipes EVERYTHING, even partition and boot records, and the "restore" area that many manufacturers put on the drives these days.
Well, according to my stats and review page, most people think I do. Sorry if I diverge occasionally. That's a beautiful bit of prose that you've constructed, by the way, Mister A.C.
Not to mention:
metal as it's source for power.
it's is a contraction of "it is", therefore:
[uses] metal as [it is] source for power.
Of course, that leads to:
The editor's didn't have their coffee this morning.
The editor's WHAT didn't have coffee?
That probably should be source OF power, as long as we're picking nits.
Knowing the english language isn't really a requirement for the job of Slashdot editor. That's been apparent for quite a long time now.
Actually, I don't think the "editors" are editors at all. They sift through the submissions pile, and accept stories, seemingly at random. They don't really seem to actually even read slashdot themselves; just look at the number of duplicate articles. They certainly don't spell- or grammar-check the articles.
But I'm about done with slashdot anyway. It's getting to be rare that I see an article that I haven't already seen elsewhere. Heck, a couple of times lately NPR has scooped slashdot on technology news. If you read the register and another couple of tech sites, it's almost guaranteed that you will not see anything new on slashdot.
They should auction it on eBay. Seriously. I mean, they could probably get hundreds of bucks for an old used toothpaste tube that had been on the ISS.
"hurl this stuff into the sun"
Yeah. Calculate how much energy that would take. It's actually pretty hard to hit the sun from here.
Bringing it down in the shuttle is actually far and away the easiest way to get rid of it. Getting it up there was expensive. Once the shuttle is there, and the bay's empty anyway, bringing anything back is not that big a deal. Some extra mass in the deorbit calculations.
Why would we spend the time and money to build and attach and pilot a remote deorbit pack when we have the shuttle coming back anyway?
The Enterprise had 400-odd people on it. I guarantee they had some pretty extensive waste recycling systems. But they had matter transmutation, so they didn't actually have to deal with disposal, they could just feed mass in, and get food/water/gold/clothing/whatever they needed back out again. If you think about it, people in a society with that technology would soon come to view looking at actual trash as very disgusting.
Like I said. Win9x is just DOS with some crap glued on it. Real Windows starts with NT. FAT32 is FAT's dying gasp before succumbing to reality.
Fat32 is DOS's file system. Window's file system is NTFS, which does support many (but not all) permissions features. I don't know if something like softlinks could be done. NTFS does support hard links I think.
GUIs are not for her
Wow, she does everything at the command line? What's she using as her "typewriter" program, emacs? Cool mom. I have this image of a couple of soccer moms in a "vi vs emacs" throwdown!
So it's OK now that the mainboard and hard drive have been replaced with generics? or it was OK before?
Back in the hayday of PB, a whole lot of independent computer repair places I walked into had hand-lettered signs:
"$25 additional bench fee for Packard Bell computers"
They were that much of a pain in the ass to work on. Plus they cheaped out in ridiculous places, like having mainboards that could take 2 simms but saving 20 cents by not soldering in the 2nd socket. Great fun when it came time to expand.
What will you do when the graphics break on your wintel laptop?
Sorry, I see that you were specifically referring to laptops.
First off, do you seriously keep non-backed-up files on a portable, easily dropped, easily stolen device?
Anyway:
I'd take out the one screw that holds the hard drive in, plug in a $5 ATAPI adaptor, drop it into an external case, and plug it on to any machine lying around and go back to work. Should take about 10 minutes and cost $40 total. Only $5 if I want to install it internally in a desktop.
I dunno. I've been using PCs since 1984 and have not had this happen yet. Does this happen often with Macs?
I suppose if my graphics card died, I'd go to the basement and grab another one and be back up and running in 5 minutes.
If my monitor died, I'd go buy another. I need another anyway, right?
I'm much more likely to have an old crusty backup video card lying around than I am to have another machine to plug into.
I've heard of 3 different friends who have had Mac laptops die and lose all their data from their hard drives in the last couple of months. I haven't heard of anyone who lost their display recently, on any kind of machine. Doesn't seem that useful of a feature to me.
New machines also do all that from BIOS, with the added feature that they give you a menu. I was trying to install an OS on an old G3 box I got out of the closet at work, and it took a bit of googling to figure out that I needed to hold down a key to boot from CD. On a PC, at boot time it says "press Fxx for boot menu" - you press that, it shows what things are there to boot from, you pick one. Nothing to remember, one key to press.
I'm seriously thinking about switching to Mac, but since the Mac came out, I've been amused by people saying things like "See, no difficult menus and words to read, you just press System+Open-Apple+backspace+q to switch modes! So much easer and intuitive!" People can convince themselves of anything, especially if they're trying to be counter-culture or are defending their choices.
As far as features working on intel-based machines, anyone who's had even a little programming experience should know that the processor doesn't matter; you can do whatever you want on whatever CPU you have, the only difference will be suitability to certain tasks (as in, how fast can it do the things that make what you want to do fast and efficient, like matrix transforms, vector math, fast I/O, memory blitting, etc). Any modern CPU can do anything any other modern CPU can do, just at different speeds for different tasks.
It did if it was connected. It slowed the machine down. It was fun explaining that when selling machines to people. Since we were building the machines custom, I'd usually explain it and ask if they wanted us to even connect it. Usually users would say "no". I often saw machines coming in for service that had the button pushed in. "Why is the Turbo button pressed in?" "to make it run faster, I've always had it in that setting." "Uh, you know, pressed in means "run slower"? *click* See, now it's twice as fast." "Oh."
He probably doesn't want to say "CLit" in public.
They'd especially choose Ford if you also revealed the fact that Ferrari owners need to be able to adopt a live-in mechanic.
Sounds like when I try to shop for speakers. Everything in the reasonable price range seems to have hyper-thundered bass. I want FLAT response. I don't want my speakers to color my music, I want them to reproduce what I send to them and be invisible.
I suppose if the music you're listening to is crap, maybe making things shake is an alternative way to make it entertaining.
Currently we're better at making batteries last a long time than we are at making either I.C. engines or fuel cells last a long time.
According to my friends in the industry, one of the big problems with fuel cells is that they get easily poisoned and ruined by pollutants in the air that they suck in to consume the O2. Batteries actually last longer, and it is possible to properly recycle them, particularly if they're part of a large bank of batteries in a car. Junkyards have really become pretty darn efficient at recycling; it makes good business sense for them to be as efficient as possible.
It was on a history channel show, Modern Marvels, "Space Shuttle Columbia". I'm not sure of the exact number but it was in that range. I've got a recording around here somewhere but do not have the time to watch the episode to find the quote, and history channel is not a terribly reliable source anyway. Maybe someone else has a good source.
True, back in the 60's in the Apollo days, they tested the bejezus out of everything; that's because they were pushing stuff to almost beyond what technology of the time would do, and they had to have the best of the best to have a chance in hell of pulling off the mission.
They just don't have the budget for that now. I think they just ignored a lot of stuff and got lucky most of the time. They are going to be super-careful this time; they can NOT afford a failure on this launch.
Remember when the air force told NASA to expect something like 1 in 20 missions to blow up, because that was their record with SRBs? NASA has been doing WAY better than that.
These days they're scrubbing when they notice something outside of nominal. I'm happy they are. The Challenger was lost when they were operating outside of nominal and figured they could get away with it. After that event, investigations showed that they were ignoring a WHOLE LOT of stuff. I keep hoping they'll stop ignoring their own rules; we'll see.
Why are Americans so resistant to change?
For me, it's not a question of having the money to buy a new TV. It's a matter of being forced to buy something that I have no real use for. I'm 100% happy with the TV I have. I don't really give much of a damn if the picture gets any better than it is; it's totally fine as is.
I watch the TV very little as it is. The kids use it a fair amount, and my wife uses it to watch sports. If it were up to me I'd trash the thing and get the space back in the living room. I do watch TV and movies, but mostly on the computer screen, and hardly any of the main networks (I watch simpsons, but pretty much no other broadcast networks).
Some day they're going to have drive-by-wire with embedded sensors in the roads. Soon afterwards, when the statistics show conclusively that NOT having DBW is insanely dangerous, they'll have a mandate that by a certain date, everyone on the road needs DBW autopilot, either built into new cars or retrofitted into old cars.
People are going to whine and moan about having to buy a $100 set top box, but wait until they need to choose between paying $15000 to retrofit a new car or $50000 for a new car (probably what a cheap econobox will cost in 25 years when this all happens). MUCH screaming will ensue.
I haven't put a floppy into a machine I've built for the last 4 years. I've never missed it. Since I don't even have any floppies in my house except for some old crappy games and screensavers in a box in the basement, I can't imagine what I'd need one for.
Beg to differ. I have a Canon i960, I've had it for 2 years, have never bought a Canon cart, I just refill, have refilled all the colors about 20+ times, and have never had so much as a misfiring nozzle. not once.
I print about 5 pages of plain paper graphics a day, plus about 20 pages of glossy photos a month.
By contrast, I previously owned 2 HPs and an Epson, and had tons of printing problems with both of them.
I won't buy anything else but Canon now.
After the article earlier about the GTA hack, /.ers will all be much more interested in hot coffee than before.
No, you can't. On the 3-out plan, at first you can turn about twice a week, for a total of 24, but they start to throttle you pretty fast. If you keep this up, pretty soon you'll only be getting about 1 turn a week, for a total of 12/month. They start to take an extra day or even two to ship.
www.dvdshrink.org
remove extras, who watches them anyway?