The "not really" is that modern OSs treat floppies as once big expanse of sectors, upon which a filesystem of some sort is put (FAT/EXT2/whatever) or not (cpio/tar/etc). There's no partition table as such; the dimensions are just taken as given for the drive and media.
For the kinda/sorta, I recall a utility for the Apple ][ that placed
both DOS and ProDOS filesystems on the same side of a 120KB floppy.
This was possible, not because of partition tables, but because DOS
stored its filesystem markers on tracks 0-2 and ProDOS around track 13.
So it was possible to make a disk that looked half-size to either OS.
This was seldom useful, but still kind of cool.
Venturing back towards the topic, ZIP floppies do have partition tables,
probably because they act like SCSI disks. Memory fobs probably have
their choice to allow partitioning (emulating, say,/dev/sda) or to
have it fixed (emulating only/dev/sda1 or the like.) Looks like some
do it each way.
That density is at STP. I wonder what the pressure is inside the lungs[...]
For back-of-the-envelope purposes, it's the same as STP.
The actual temperature is a little higher than standard, so by the
ideal gas law the density (and weight) goes down a bit; no help there.
As for the pressure, it's the same on average in the lungs and the environment, and breathing really doesn't generate much pressure in either direction. (To demonstrate the latter, try to blow up a bicycle tire with your mouth and see if you can get enough pressure in to even measure
with a tire gauge. Bet you can't.)
This won't do anything about the postal spam, but give your email as a sneakemail address. Then whenever that address gets harvested for spam, you can cancel it, set up a new one, and update your whois record.
It will still get harvested... but you'll probably only have to cycle it a couple of times a year. The three or four spams a year that'll get through is probably negligible.
C-Band dishes still work just dandy, and contrary to what you may have heard, there is still plenty of programming available.
Wild feeds are unencrypted programming, often with fewer or no commercials, and sometimes air in advance of their regular timeslots.
Regular listings are mostly encrypted and by subscription, but there's no shortage of programming here either.
And I won't go into 4DTV since I don't know much about it.
The encryption providers moan every
year about having to raise the rates due to the declining number of subscribers, but this is self-fulfilling on their part since they
aren't promoting the technology. It works great and it should continue
to do so for quite some time.
(Did you notice I said "every year"? This isn't like cable, where
you pay for it every month. One payment a year does the trick.)
The wildfeeds are where I get my advance Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy information, as posted here. It surprises people, but this information is in the clear for anybody to receive...
I wish somebody knew how to build a Freevo for the BUD, though.
No one has mentioned glimpse, probably because they moved to a
non-free license a while back, but the 3.0 version is still gratis. And it allows you to configure filters to search files of whatever type you like.
Here's a
snapshot of the source for Glimpse 3.0, packaged up from my system
as I don't have the original tarfile anymore.
Doesn't matter. Magnetic braking is caused when conductive material is moved through a magnetic field. The induced current causes a resistive force in the moving metal, slowing it down. This works very well even in
completely nonferromagnetic material such as aluminum.
Magnetic braking is in fact used in vending machines to slow coins
by just a certain amount, to test against slugs. Wrong alloys will
be slowed too much or not enough; either way, they can be rejected.
why does it take a relative of this Newsweek columnist being hassled for said columnist to write a column about this?
Said columnist is not really a columnist. The "My Turn" column in
Newsweek is written each week by someone from the general
public. It's a high-profile soapbox for people who aren't
reporters.
i cant think of too many things designed these days that would survive 60+ years of being exposed to the elements... and then would still work close to specifications...
True, but do remember that a bomb basically has one thing to do
and only has to do it once. It's not as though it has lots of
moving parts constantly wearing and requiring service...
Want something more impressive? 50,000-year-old paleolithic stone hammers
that still work like the day they were new. Now that's quality construction.
Reminds me of the old Beagle Bros. warning label showing things not to do to a floppy disk. Such as, do not set on fire, do not feed to crocodiles, etc...
Why don't you try googling for Mar 19104 if you think there are no unresolved Y2K problems?
Some things were prevented from breaking -- most of the major issues. Some things broke but were quickly corrected. And some things, as that search will show you, broke and are still broken.
I was hoping to read how to get popcorn from the kernel.
Popcorn comes from kernels. Just place 'em on your Athlon.
Re:You want to burn in the Sun?
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 4, Funny
No problem. Just get buried here on earth. Eventually, your wish will be granted.
Exactly. Once the sun goes red-giant, its radius will be far larger
than the orbital distance of this little planet. So everyone's bones will eventually wind up toast.
Worried about global warming? Now that's global warming.
One other neat thing about cell phones: you don't even have to have a cellular plan to get emergency service. So, go ahead and throw away your POTS, get a cable modem and Vonage or whatever.
This may come as a surprise, but there are plenty of places in the US
where they simply don't work at all. Even here in
the high-tech state of Connecticut, if you venture into Litchfield
County, there's nary any coverage. Replacing land lines is not an option
for everyone.
I wanted a civilized wakeup protocol, and cobbled together the
hardware and software to make it so. These were my design goals:
On startup, start CD playing.
Wait X minutes (4?) before entering alarm mode.
Turn on light.
Begin playing alarm.
Monitor keyboard, snooze button, and soundfile progress.
On kbd Esc, terminate alarm and exit program.
On snooze, terminate soundfile and sleep X minutes (9?), then
begin playing soundfile again. Decrease interval
with each sucessive snooze.
On soundfile expiration, start playing it again.
The key thing was that the snooze button (a doorbell switch)
and the light were right by the bed, but the keyboard escape
key was in another room. Four wires run off of a serial port sufficed.
Another nice feature was that I programmed it to not go off
on weekends and holidays. It's very nice to have an alarm clock that
doesn't wake you when you don't actually need to get up.
Your girlfriend's dad's colleague may have been right. Consider:
Aircraft are statistically much safer than cars.
Aircraft travel much faster than cars.
Air crashes, though rare, almost always kill everyone onboard.
Aircraft have redundant drivers, and multiple checks against
either pilot being intoxicated before boarding, let alone both.
Automobile drivers don't have to pass through any checkpoints
before getting behind the wheel, so are much more likely to be impaired.
A car crash at 90MPH might be survivable and might involve decelerations up to 9Gs. A plane crash at 600MPH would not be, would
involve decelerations much greater than 9Gs, and very few people can
survive that sort of deceleration anyway.
Weight is much more important in aircraft economics than automotive.
An airplane with 9G chairs would probably have to charge something like Space Shuttle rates of $2000/lb to fly, if it could even get off the ground.
The analysis is probably not so callous as you suppose. Stronger seats
on airplanes probably would not increase survivability.
I've sometimes thought that it might be better to require uniform redistricting requirements across all states. For example, for a state due 10 districts, picture a vertical line sweeping horizontally across the state. (East to west or vice versa, wouldn't matter.)
At exactly the point that that line has swept over 1/10th of the voters in that state, the area behind the line becomes the 1st Congressional district. Repeat until the whole state is demarkated.
This might create some problems with collecting and tallying votes, but being arbitrary and fair, it's not succeptible to such manipulation as we see now.
The biggest problem is implementation; this idea would have to be imposed by the Supreme Court (not a big fan of that thought) or by Constitutional amendment to avoid state's rights issues. Our representatives probably would never vote for this. But they should.
Ah, MFM... I remember MFM... my 3rd and 4th computers had those.
To segue this back to topic, system #4 was a 286. After I'd had it
a few years, I added a 287 (math coprocessor for the youngsters) that
I bought used on Usenet.
That 287 turned out to be one chip with a deathwish;
for some reason, it ran at about 300 degrees F. (Yes, it
would boil drops of water.) The system would shut down after
about 10 minutes.
But after I added a makeshift aluminum heatsink, it was fine.
And that systems still works. I'll never know why that
chip ran that hot, or how it survived.
Did you read the summary? Static executables will be available in/recover (that's a new one on me.)
But I don't understand this myself./sbin means "static/bin" and it's that way for recovery purposes. Why make it
dynamic and add a new directory to be the new statically linked recovery directory? This seems on the surface to just push the original
problem back a step. Is the next new thing to be/srecover?
You make some good points, but there's more to it than that.
Computer sounds often make very good diagnostics that the ear
used to ignoring "everyday" sounds can pick up on and detect
problems before they're uncorrectable. The *absense* of a fan
sound can trigger a "replace fan" impulse; the sudden and dangerously loud
whine of a hard disk can say "you may have a few hours or you
may have a few months, but back me up and replace me ASAP."
Unusual modem sounds have woken me up and clued me in to
system crashes, both mine and other people's.
If you hear your computers all the time, you can detect these
things. But if your computers are silenced, you may be
oblivious. I consider the background sounds helpful,
not annoying.
I have an unlimited(?) number of valid email addresses. The 'opt-out'
provision would require me to generate as many of them as I could and
then deliver them to the spammers -- and then, if the spammers could
think of ones I missed, then it would be OK for them to spam me at
those addresses. Need I point out that this is a flawed proposal?
I've thought of generating a bunch of legal addresses and putting
them on a CD-ROM, to show to my congresswoman with the message 'Here are
60 million of my legal e-mail addresses. This disk is full.
How many more should I make?'
I'm glad that this bill is unlikely to pass, though it makes up something
like 70% of my mail. We need opt-in legislation, and we need it with teeth.
Large and increasing fines, individual grounds to sue, and possibly even
the death penalty after some number of convictions; maybe 10?
The [trojan or back-door] logic could be so well hidden that
not even a careful review of the machine's source code would find it. This isn't as far-fetched as it might sound: Unauthorized features called "Easter eggs" are routinely hidden in commercial software, even software shipped by Microsoft.
(Emphasis mine). Bullshit! Careful review of source code finds as much as it wants to.
I guess you've never read Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, in which he describes how he hid a trojan password
in the Unix login program which could not be found by
inspection of any source code. Both the login program and the C
compiler were compromised in a masterfully clever way. The
resulting backdoor was present for years.
The author of this article suffers from an either/or, electronic or
paper ballot, mindset. As I've said before, I like the mechanical lever machines best of all.
Short of buying off every inspector at a polling place, there's
practically no way to corrupt the results.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really and kinda/sorta.
The "not really" is that modern OSs treat floppies as once big expanse of sectors, upon which a filesystem of some sort is put (FAT/EXT2/whatever) or not (cpio/tar/etc). There's no partition table as such; the dimensions are just taken as given for the drive and media.
For the kinda/sorta, I recall a utility for the Apple ][ that placed both DOS and ProDOS filesystems on the same side of a 120KB floppy. This was possible, not because of partition tables, but because DOS stored its filesystem markers on tracks 0-2 and ProDOS around track 13. So it was possible to make a disk that looked half-size to either OS. This was seldom useful, but still kind of cool.
Venturing back towards the topic, ZIP floppies do have partition tables, probably because they act like SCSI disks. Memory fobs probably have their choice to allow partitioning (emulating, say, /dev/sda) or to
have it fixed (emulating only /dev/sda1 or the like.) Looks like some
do it each way.
Huh? Of course rice explodes.
For back-of-the-envelope purposes, it's the same as STP.
The actual temperature is a little higher than standard, so by the ideal gas law the density (and weight) goes down a bit; no help there. As for the pressure, it's the same on average in the lungs and the environment, and breathing really doesn't generate much pressure in either direction. (To demonstrate the latter, try to blow up a bicycle tire with your mouth and see if you can get enough pressure in to even measure with a tire gauge. Bet you can't.)
It will still get harvested... but you'll probably only have to cycle it a couple of times a year. The three or four spams a year that'll get through is probably negligible.
This is a good strategy for /. email, too.
The encryption providers moan every year about having to raise the rates due to the declining number of subscribers, but this is self-fulfilling on their part since they aren't promoting the technology. It works great and it should continue to do so for quite some time.
(Did you notice I said "every year"? This isn't like cable, where you pay for it every month. One payment a year does the trick.)
The wildfeeds are where I get my advance Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy information, as posted here. It surprises people, but this information is in the clear for anybody to receive...
I wish somebody knew how to build a Freevo for the BUD, though.
Here's a snapshot of the source for Glimpse 3.0, packaged up from my system as I don't have the original tarfile anymore.
Doesn't matter. Magnetic braking is caused when conductive material is moved through a magnetic field. The induced current causes a resistive force in the moving metal, slowing it down. This works very well even in completely nonferromagnetic material such as aluminum.
Magnetic braking is in fact used in vending machines to slow coins by just a certain amount, to test against slugs. Wrong alloys will be slowed too much or not enough; either way, they can be rejected.
See question and answer #14 here for more details.
Said columnist is not really a columnist. The "My Turn" column in Newsweek is written each week by someone from the general public. It's a high-profile soapbox for people who aren't reporters.
True, but do remember that a bomb basically has one thing to do and only has to do it once. It's not as though it has lots of moving parts constantly wearing and requiring service...
Want something more impressive? 50,000-year-old paleolithic stone hammers that still work like the day they were new. Now that's quality construction.
Reminds me of the old Beagle Bros. warning label showing things not to do to a floppy disk. Such as, do not set on fire, do not feed to crocodiles, etc...
Some things were prevented from breaking -- most of the major issues. Some things broke but were quickly corrected. And some things, as that search will show you, broke and are still broken.
Popcorn comes from kernels. Just place 'em on your Athlon.
Exactly. Once the sun goes red-giant, its radius will be far larger than the orbital distance of this little planet. So everyone's bones will eventually wind up toast.
Worried about global warming? Now that's global warming.
This may come as a surprise, but there are plenty of places in the US where they simply don't work at all. Even here in the high-tech state of Connecticut, if you venture into Litchfield County, there's nary any coverage. Replacing land lines is not an option for everyone.
Almost. It won't work with C-band satellite.
Pisses me off, frankly.
Not with a UID that low, dude. That only tells your prospective employer, "I spend way too much time cruising the Internet instead of working."
The key thing was that the snooze button (a doorbell switch) and the light were right by the bed, but the keyboard escape key was in another room. Four wires run off of a serial port sufficed.
Another nice feature was that I programmed it to not go off on weekends and holidays. It's very nice to have an alarm clock that doesn't wake you when you don't actually need to get up.
- Aircraft are statistically much safer than cars.
- Aircraft travel much faster than cars.
- Air crashes, though rare, almost always kill everyone onboard.
- Aircraft have redundant drivers, and multiple checks against
either pilot being intoxicated before boarding, let alone both.
- Automobile drivers don't have to pass through any checkpoints
before getting behind the wheel, so are much more likely to be impaired.
- A car crash at 90MPH might be survivable and might involve decelerations up to 9Gs. A plane crash at 600MPH would not be, would
involve decelerations much greater than 9Gs, and very few people can
survive that sort of deceleration anyway.
- Weight is much more important in aircraft economics than automotive.
An airplane with 9G chairs would probably have to charge something like Space Shuttle rates of $2000/lb to fly, if it could even get off the ground.
The analysis is probably not so callous as you suppose. Stronger seats on airplanes probably would not increase survivability.At exactly the point that that line has swept over 1/10th of the voters in that state, the area behind the line becomes the 1st Congressional district. Repeat until the whole state is demarkated.
This might create some problems with collecting and tallying votes, but being arbitrary and fair, it's not succeptible to such manipulation as we see now.
The biggest problem is implementation; this idea would have to be imposed by the Supreme Court (not a big fan of that thought) or by Constitutional amendment to avoid state's rights issues. Our representatives probably would never vote for this. But they should.
To segue this back to topic, system #4 was a 286. After I'd had it a few years, I added a 287 (math coprocessor for the youngsters) that I bought used on Usenet.
That 287 turned out to be one chip with a deathwish; for some reason, it ran at about 300 degrees F. (Yes, it would boil drops of water.) The system would shut down after about 10 minutes.
But after I added a makeshift aluminum heatsink, it was fine. And that systems still works. I'll never know why that chip ran that hot, or how it survived.
But the price was a bargain. :-)
But I don't understand this myself. /sbin means "static /bin" and it's that way for recovery purposes. Why make it
dynamic and add a new directory to be the new statically linked recovery directory? This seems on the surface to just push the original
problem back a step. Is the next new thing to be /srecover?
If you hear your computers all the time, you can detect these things. But if your computers are silenced, you may be oblivious. I consider the background sounds helpful, not annoying.
I've thought of generating a bunch of legal addresses and putting them on a CD-ROM, to show to my congresswoman with the message 'Here are 60 million of my legal e-mail addresses. This disk is full. How many more should I make?'
I'm glad that this bill is unlikely to pass, though it makes up something like 70% of my mail. We need opt-in legislation, and we need it with teeth. Large and increasing fines, individual grounds to sue, and possibly even the death penalty after some number of convictions; maybe 10?
I guess you've never read Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, in which he describes how he hid a trojan password in the Unix login program which could not be found by inspection of any source code. Both the login program and the C compiler were compromised in a masterfully clever way. The resulting backdoor was present for years.
The author of this article suffers from an either/or, electronic or paper ballot, mindset. As I've said before, I like the mechanical lever machines best of all. Short of buying off every inspector at a polling place, there's practically no way to corrupt the results.
Of course, on the ISS, they're simply called "telephones."