"Fortunately if someone was to try to rebuild a Saturn V they'd use completely new electronics and software anyway. Heck, it would probably have to run Linux..."
It sucks but has an easy but time consuming fix that leaves you with the drive contents intact: Boot a live Linux distro. And hook a USB HDD to the system and mount it. The USB hdd can even be formatted NTFS if the live distro has FUSE installed along with the ntfs-3g driver, most live distros already have it or will allow you to install them. Assuming your SSD is the primary or only disk in your system then:
(You need to be root or use sudo, on most live distros you simply type "su root" or "sudo -s")
/dev/sda is the first disk in the system. you may have to run ls/dev/sd* to get a list of disks and partitions. and note, sda is the entire disk block-for-block, sda1 is a partition just like sda2 , sda3 etc. If you have more than one disk and don't know which letter it is then simply type fdisk -lu/dev/sdX (X being the letter you want to check) and it will dump the drive info.
It may take about 5+ hours assuming you have a 512GB SSD and an optimal USB transfer rate of 25MBps to the backup disk (in my experience the average for USB 2.0 write speeds). Faster backup disks and smaller capacity SSD's will backup much faster.
Once complete, you now have a bit for bit block-level copy of the SSD. This ignores the boot sector, boot loaders, partitions and file systems. It does not matter what OS you had on it, how many partitions or what file system you used. if your very paranoid and want to wait hours more, the run diff against the disk and disk image file to be sure they are an exact copy (never did it and never will).
Now reboot and upgrade the firmware the way the manufacturer tells you. So now your data is wiped out, big stinkin deal. Fire up the live Linux distro and again attach your backup disk and then enter the following command:
This writes the image file back to the SSD and if all goes well (It has never failed me yet and I have done this dozens of times for various systems) you now have your upgraded firmware with its original contents fully intact.
You can even mount one or more of the partitions contained within the disk image (under Linux of course) if you do a bit of homework (search google for mounting dd images) or just go here:http://darkdust.net/writings/diskimagesminihowto That tutorial is how I started playing with dd images.
You can also movethe contents of a smaller cramped disk to larger drives. Works for windows/NTFS too! You simply dd the entire smaller drive to the new drive (works best when both drives are hooked up via sata.) Then you use gparted or some other parted disk GUI to grow the file system on the new drive. Shut down and remove the linux cd/thumb-drive and remove the old disk and move the sata cable from the old disk to the new disk. Boot your PC and if your using windows (2000, XP , Vista, 7) it will run the check disk to verify the volume (DONT SKIP IT!) and reboot. Once it reboots to windows, open up explorer and see that you now magically have all that shiny new space without formatting, reinstalling, adding new drive letters or mounting drives under folders etc. Its transparent!
A hundred bucks says a woman and her son, black dude and a juice head will break into the lab, blow it up and throw the chip into a vat of molten metal.
"It isn't enough to just leave your toothpaste visible on top of your suitcase, it has to be visible INSIDE a clear plastic bag."
Well fuck you for even thinking clear bags are enough! Obviously you support terrorism because if you were a patriot you would not only support clear bags but clear toothpaste bottles and toothpaste. Same goes for shaving cream, shampoo, luggage, clothing and electronics. Next time I fly I will put all of my belongings into clear plastic bags and wear this: http://www.zap2it.com/news/custom/photogallery/movies/zap_seethrusuit_bruno_pg,0,5475799.photo I have nothing to hide.
"everything just worked on the desktop - graphics card, drivers, audio, sleep/restore, etc every time."
I don't mean to sound like a dick but I have been running windows for years (since 3.1) along with Linux (started with Red Hat 6) and never had any of the instability you and your friend mentioned. Starting with windows 95 all the windows bashing really kicked in, it was crap. Windows 98 bought some improvement and Me was an abortion. But around the same time NT was around but it was for the big leagues. I used Windows NT 4 workstation and it was decent. I didn't run it long enough to find anything wrong with it. Then along came Windows 2000. Finally, a Windows OS worth buying. But it was still aimed at commercial/business use (I had an *ahem* "copy" of it from its launch). Then along came XP and I must say that it was a fine OS. The only instability came from shoddy drivers but it ran pretty damn solid. Vista was also a non issue for me, though it was a bit of a dog before you disable all the bullshit services. Windows 7 so far is a pleasure, I am running it as of now at work. At home I still run Vista, going to upgrade to 7 soon when I purchase upgrade hardware (cpu/mem/video).
I haven't used Linux much for gaming mainly because the games I play are not available for it. Could I use wine? Sure but why bother, the games are guaranteed to run on my existing Windows box. There is no need to struggle with tweaking or patching to run my games. I love Visual Studio and I love C# and the goodness of.Net. Windows domains are fantastic for managing networks. Windows.net, and all the other MS tech itself is not evil, just the corporate politics. Its a shame but that's the world we live in.
Linux doesn't suck on the desktop, its just limited or weak in some areas that are key to the desktop experience. And most of that isn't the fault of open source or Linux in general its just getting recognition from software vendors (be it game studios or commercial software). It has plenty of productivity software. All of the the free software I run under Linux I also run on Windows (Open Office, GIMP, Firefox etc.) and I can be just as productive on Linux as I can on Windows.
Linux does have many strong points though. One example: I recently was doing embedded C code development for an industrial controller with a Hitachi SH2 cpu. The unsupported 3rd party tool chain package was an ancient version of Cygwin with some goofy configuration. The code had to be built against old versions of binutils (2.12), GCC (3.2), newlib (1.11) and gdb (5.3). The cygwin package didn't want to run on windows 7 so I had to install it on a VM running XP. I said fuck this, booted my Xubuntu 10.04 VM and headed over to gnu.org and grabbed the same binutils, gcc and gdb verisons and then download newlib. Built them using GCC 3.4 for the hitachi SH2 using soft float and I was done. But there was one hitch, a custom windows exe that performed the final memory mapping for the binary. Problem? Nope, just installed wine and it ran. In about a days worth of work I had a fully modern up-to-date tool chain for my controller. Could I have done that on windows under cygwin? Sure but Linux was the better environment and had allot of great tools available that were only a few commands away. FPGA development is great on Linux with the Altera/Xilinx tools plus the other OSS EDA tools. Face it, if your developing embedded systems or electronics, Linux is the best (and only IMHO) OS to develop under. The flexibility of not just the software, but the OS itself make it an unstoppable dev environment. (I do wish NI ported Multisim though).
Linux has many strong points, its THE BEST hacking environment and my only wish was that.net/MONO wasnt a legal minefield and that visual studio (or an equivalent) was available for it. Then we just need the entire steam game library ported along with other games to top it off and I would permanently switch to Linux full time.
Thats what id like to know. I remember working a bounce ride at a childrens party in which an autistic child was in attendance. He got on the ride and would not come off when time was up. I tried to coax him off when his mother came to me and told me that her son had autism. She explained it as a sort of disconnection with the world, he was in his own little world and is unable to understand and socially interact normally with other people. So I just left him on the ride. He would just run around and bump into kids while laughing. As I sat down by the edge of the ride he would come around and just hug me. His mother was actually very surprised because he didn't interact like that with other people. He was all smiles and giggles, nothing bad about him. He just didn't listen because he didn't understand. Finally he tired out after 20 minutes and just curled up in the middle of the bounce ride while all the other children were jumping around. His mother had to go in and get him out. That is how I understand autism, a disconnection with the surrounding world.
Maybe to some that could be misinterpreted as acting out but in reality I understood that he wasn't aware of what he was doing. He was in his own world and did not understand what he was doing. If you have some spoiled undisciplined brat then no they aren't autistic, just brats because they weren't raised properly.
Concerning the article, My bet is since the two parents met at work or other professional gatherings, they both are working. Also both parents probably relocated to their place of work meaning there are no grandparents/family around. The kids are looked after by nannies and day care services. The parents probably don't interact with their kids as much as they should be. Thats not how you raise children.
Both of my parents hold masters degrees. After my mother had me, she stopped working. My father ran his own business and made enough money to support us and my mother became a homemaker (Her decision) and never complained about it. Both sets of grandparents were in the same neighborhood, my mothers parents were a 3 minute walk and my fathers parents a 10 minute drive. If my parents were going out, my grandmother would walk over and watch me and my brother or we were dropped off at her house. We never had a nanny. Once in a while my aunt would watch us as well, all family members were were familiar with. And my father always made time for the family, he had a trusted manager and would frequently take vacations with us (little trips to Vermont, we live in NYC). That simple upbringing was important because it reinforced social ties with both parents and immediate family members. These kids probably feel abandoned, distant or unloved by their parents.
"Quoting the first paper: 'For over 40 years the notion of the file, as devised by pioneers in the field of computing, has proved robust and has remained unchallenged. Yet this concept is not a given, but serves as a boundary object between users and engineers. In the current landscape, this boundary is showing signs of slippage, and we propose the boundary object be reconstituted. New abstractions of file are needed, which reflect what users seek to do with their digital data, and which allow engineers to solve the networking, storage and data management problems that ensue when files move from the PC on to the networked world of today."
They pretty much peppered the report with bullshit and buzz words to make "meta data" and "internet based storage" sound all new and shiny for the brain dead market droids and managers.
This reminds me of that MIT operating system hoax that was going to take current file system ideas and throw them out the window. Face it, how else do you organize bits of information? The concept of a file is simple: an organized arrangement of bits that contains data which can be moved, re-sized or deleted. How do you change that? The only thing that can change is the method in which they are stored on physical media (file system) or cataloged and indexed.
I just want one thing: a file system that is part database for fast file searches. I don't want to manually build indexes or any other bullshit just look at the file table and give me my fucking file. Even if you had 100,000 files with file names of 256 characters, its only 2.5 MB, how long does that take to parse? Maybe I don't understand file systems but even a 10 MB file table should only take a few seconds to scan. When I do a search of a directory or entire disk with tens of thousands of files it sometimes takes a minute or two. The disk is thrashing away as if the program is looking all over for the file names. Shouldn't they all be in one place pointing to where they are on disk? Maybe I don't understand file systems in general, someone care to explain?
And one thing that just popped into my mind is a better method to tag and store files. When I download a file or save a document/image/whatever I shouldn't have to dig through a huge directory hierarchy. I should be able to type the name of a directory and something along the lines of Google's auto complete or intellisense will begin to auto complete my search, regardless of what volume its stored on. As I type vacation.. it should list all directories beginning with that string or tag. Maybe I am ignorant of similar functionality for Windows and Linux. The tags and file/directory names should be system wide and accessible to all programs and commands that interact with files, not just a built in shell.
I like how one little country that normally doesn't play a big role in the world, is flooded and suddenly its a big deal. How many of the disk makers have factories located there?
I had a client ask me to set one up for them. You don't partition it like a standard raid array, you format it to some predetermined size that may be larger then the physical disk space in the machine (through their drobo dashboard). If you have three 1 TB disks you will have around 2TB of actual storage but you can format it for 16TB under Win 7. This is achieved via their "beyond raid" technology which fools the OS into thinking there is more disk space than there actually is. This lets the user make one large volume now and then add disks in the future, even disks of different sizes can be mixed and matched. If you start to go beyond the physical capacity, the array degrades and goes offline until you add another disk and wait hours or days for the disks to reorganize. My client was consolidating her photography library to the drobo when it just crapped out. Turns out she ran over the physical limit.
Then if your lucky, your computer be it Apple or Windows will take upward of 30 to 45 minutes to boot and shutdown if the fucking thing is plugged in and powered on during either of those two procedures. Drobo recommends you move your data to another set of disks and re-format your drobo. As if people have a few spare TB of disk capacity just sitting around, that's the reason they bought your shit box to begin with, assholes. Its a known issue.
I have personally used hardware raid 5, software block level raid 5 and ZFS. If you ask me id rather have the file system do the RAID work at the file system level, not the block level where the file system is ignorant of what lies beneath. ZFS is the way to go until BTRFS is fully stable and feature competitive with ZFS. Then you do incremental backups offsite, either to a family or friends house or to a commercial off site backup provider.
And what is your 16 TB consist of? If its movies and the like then don't bother spending money backing it up. If its self make video and other personal large files then that makes sense. I know of people who spent oodles of cash to backup silly crap like downloaded movies that can easily be replaced or rented from Netflix.
With the way things are going in the storage world, SSD's will eclipse mechanical disks at the desktop level and mechanical disks will be relegated to backup duty where they far outstrip SSD's in capacity. It reminds me of when tape drives were the king of capacity, often tapes were several orders of magnitude larger than current hard disks and tapes were cheap. They were slow but my god did they have capacity. Now it looks like SSD's will assume the role of desktop storage and to some degree server storage while mechanical disks will be used for large backup systems and file servers. Mechanical hard drives of today will be tomorrows tape drives and then obsolete when SSD's begin to overtake then in capacity. By then we might have something even higher in capacity like holographic or some other sci-fi sounding storage.
Bingo. After working in an industry where the customers audit you as well as standards organizations, I can admit that paying for support and buying commercial software with support is a life saver. During one audit, I was called into an office and grilled by a customers auditor about our data retention, backup and disaster recovery procedures and policies. And these companies are are very serious about quality control, one simple mistake will have two people on a plane to your shop the next day (an engineer and quality control person). Hell even ISO wants to know the same stuff.
If you can sit back and say we have, X, Y and Z with support then they will feel comfortable with your answer and not poke and prod further. Its all about accountability and if you can prove that someone is backing you with support for hardware and software then you are golden. If you tell them you cobbled together a system using shoe string and bubble gum they are going to be concerned and might take drastic steps to make you prove that your disaster recovery plans and backup systems really do work.
Think of it like this, ARM is small and lean on power. You could pack dozens of cores onto a die giving it the power to compete with the Xeon. Blade servers can be shrunk down and more can fit into a single U of rack space since ARM does not dissipate tens of watts. We might see something along the lines of servers that are nothing more than a mini cluster in a box that appear as one whole system. A prepackaged beowulf cluster if you will.
There was an interesting video I saw a while back of a researcher who packed 196 of those ARM gumstix modules into a case not much bigger than a tower PC with no forced cooling. I cant find the video but here is a link to information about the cluster:
My brother has taken part of the global game jam for the past three years, this isn't anything new. The point of a 48 hour stint is not to make a marketable game, but how to best utilize your resources to make something small, pretty and clever with people you might have never met before. Maybe the game you make could be turned into something marketable.
The idea is to get together with other people with a common interest and passion for making games. You go into a game jam not knowing who your going to be paired up with. My brother met allot of good people both in the industry and looking to get into it. That is the true spirit of the game jam.
I would love to take my commute and shove it. That and be able to go out, get hammered and then have a computer safely drive me home. And I do believe I will see self driving cars within my lifetime, its a no-brainer with all the technology we have at our disposal.
Then again I do enjoy driving from time to time. I went down to Street, MD the other week and then drove up through Lancaster, PA to Litiz for a truck show. I had a great time driving through the country, such beautiful scenery. I even had fun navigating the narrow, winding country roads at night. It was a challenge.
Hell I own a 1961 Mack B61 tractor that has a two stick 9 speed duplex transmission and a 205HP Mack Thermodyne turbo diesel. I have a blast driving around old manual trucks. You just cant beat that feeling and the incredible simplicity of the machine, no electronics, not even to operate the engine. Electric is only needed to start it and you shut it down by pulling an engine stop cable. Heck, if the battery goes dead you can just pull start the truck. The generator only runs the lights and heater motor, and maybe a radio, if you had one. Even the wipers are air operated from the air brake system.
190,000 miles isn't allot. Just proving a new engine design can run reliably takes around a million combined miles of testing. I am glad they worked out traffic navigation but how many of those miles were in severe weather conditions? Snow, sleet, high winds, heavy rain, fog etc. Weather is never mentioned and the cars primary means of 3d mapping is done with a laser.
And here is the better question. If an automated car gets into an accident and someone is severely injured or killed, who is to blame? The occupant in the driver seat, vehicle owner, robot driver manufacturer or car manufacturer? Who gets sued? Seriously, as long as ambulance chasing lawyers are out there, car makers and their lawyers will have to figure out how not to get sued into oblivion and divert blame or responsibility for such cases. No matter how good the engineering is, the liability is a huge issue. Its easy now as you just blame the driver, a human being.
And as the number of automated cars increases, how do they cope with human piloted vehicles? Do they have the ability to see a blinker, slow down and let someone merge into their lane? If an automated car isn't "courteous" to other human drivers things could get hostile on the roads. If the robot cars are perceived as slow and lack courtesy, people will be hostile to robot cars creating a dangerous driving situation. With all the talk of robot cars packing themselves tightly together, how do these packs of cars react to human drivers. How do human drivers merge onto a highway with a conga line of robot cars driving along nut to butt. Around packed cities you also have allot of variables, people just walking into the street either knowingly or they are oblivious. A human driver can see a person walking toward the street and slow down in anticipating that the person will not stop. What about driving down a street and you see children playing? I always slow down when I see kids. I once almost hit a kid who ran into the street chasing her dog. I literally stopped two feet from her. That scared the shit out of me and since then I am cautious when I see children playing near a road. Can a computer sense that?
And lastly lets not get into stuxnet type worms causing massive pileups which result in injuries and deaths by attacking robot cars. I keep hearing about wireless cars connecting together forming their own networks to communicate. To me all I hear is an attack vector. Imagine a worm that commands all of the robot "cars on demand" to swarm a city or part of town. Imagine a million compromised cars blindly headed to the capitol building in Washington as protest of a war, policy or elected official. Clogging streets, running out of fuel on the roads blocking them etc. All sorts of mayhem. Its actually sounds funny now that I think of it.
Computers can drive flawlessly but the amount of v
I have had my house broken into (and a second failed attempt) and had two close friends develop an addiction, one was hooked on crack/cocaine the other heroin. And I agree with the grandparent poster, they are not serious crimes. Someone directly harming someone through physical violence is serious. You PlayStation getting nicked at first is unsettling but you can replace it and get on with your life as if nothing happened. A dead person cant be replaced and neither can you replace your health.
And a right winger would more likely say that the addicts themselves are responsible for their addictions in the first place, not the dealers. And I agree. Dealers don't go around threatening people to do drugs. Yes they might engage in other criminal activity, mostly violence toward other dealers in turf disputes. But that is a separate crime. The best weapon against addiction is education and making sure that people get help for problems they are looking to escape by using drugs. That cant apply to everyone but then again you know that we do not live in a perfect society.
So finger print scanners are increasing attendance? I call bullshit. When I was in high school 13+ years ago they had this thing called attendance. Each teacher would check to see if we were in class. So once that data was compiled at the end of the day by the attendance office, it was known if you skipped a class, skipped out after half a day or the entire day. And the next day you could expect the home room teacher to send you directly to the deans office as they would be notified in the morning.
The funny thing was during my first year we had a school ID card with a bar code. It was pretty high tech for 1994 and the scanner had a slot you stuck your card into, kind of like an ATM machine. It had an LCD screen and three lights on top. If you cut class or skipped out for a day or committed any other offence to the school, the scanner would lock your card, sound an alarm and the read light would flash. School staff who monitored the clock in process would then escort those red flagged students to the deans office.
During my second year the scanners were gone. No one told us what happened but my shop teacher in senior year did. He said during the summer of 94 there were contractors working on the school and sometime during the summer the machines were stolen. They couldn't prove who did it and they couldn't convince the board of Ed to fund replacements. So after that we went back to old fashioned paper and pencil attendance which worked just as well.
And in all seriousness the school cant force kids to go. I knew plenty of kids who didn't give a shit about school and would take entire weeks or months off. They failed and either kept going and skipping class or just dropped out. If the kids don't give a shit, no fancy bio-metric scanner will make them go to class. Their parents didn't care either and probably saw the school as a free baby sitting service. The stupidity of schools never ceases to amaze me.
Is it just me or does it feel like we were using FF 3.x just yesterday? For a while it was mostly point releases now were on 8.x already? I must be living under a rock or something. That or I just forgot about FF after switching to chrome.
I do the same thing at work. We have a wet saw for cutting welding samples and it cleanly slices through all kinds of metals without much of a problem. I put the drive on the table and run the blade into the platters about half way. It slices through the drive like a hot knife through butter. That disk will never be read again.
Another way is to run them over with a forklift as they weigh twice as heavy as their lifting capacity. So a 6000 pound capacity forklift weighs in at around 12000 pounds meaning each tire has a crushing force of about 3000 pounds. Just don't do that on asphalt as your going to leave an imprint of the drive in it or possibly mush the drive into the pavement. I know not everyone has a fork lift but its one way to do it. I got that tip from a UPS driver who informed me that is how he destroys his old disks at work. I tried it and it seems to work very well. You just need a very heavy fork lift.
Burning a drive doesn't guarantee it will destroy it unless you bring its temperature well over 1000F. And I believe the case of the drive is made from zinc which melts at 787F making it a liquid metal mess. Also, its circuit board will burn causing quite a stink so its one of the least clean methods of destroying a drive.
And lastly the good ol' hammer works great. Just wear eye protection and your all set for some destructive fun. Just make sure you smash the platters and not just the circuit board. Use a cold chisel or punch to better focus the blow to the platters. Its simple, fast and just about everyone has a hammer lying around. Just do it on a hard surface like pavement or concrete. A kitchen table or counter top will deaden the blow and your almost guaranteed to damage them in the process.
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"Fortunately if someone was to try to rebuild a Saturn V they'd use completely new electronics and software anyway. Heck, it would probably have to run Linux..."
Fixed that for you.
It sucks but has an easy but time consuming fix that leaves you with the drive contents intact:
Boot a live Linux distro. And hook a USB HDD to the system and mount it. The USB hdd can even be formatted NTFS if the live distro has FUSE installed along with the ntfs-3g driver, most live distros already have it or will allow you to install them. Assuming your SSD is the primary or only disk in your system then:
(You need to be root or use sudo, on most live distros you simply type "su root" or "sudo -s")
/dev/sda is the first disk in the system. you may have to run ls /dev/sd* to get a list of disks and partitions. and note, sda is the entire disk block-for-block, sda1 is a partition just like sda2 , sda3 etc. If you have more than one disk and don't know which letter it is then simply type fdisk -lu /dev/sdX (X being the letter you want to check) and it will dump the drive info.
It may take about 5+ hours assuming you have a 512GB SSD and an optimal USB transfer rate of 25MBps to the backup disk (in my experience the average for USB 2.0 write speeds). Faster backup disks and smaller capacity SSD's will backup much faster.
Once complete, you now have a bit for bit block-level copy of the SSD. This ignores the boot sector, boot loaders, partitions and file systems. It does not matter what OS you had on it, how many partitions or what file system you used. if your very paranoid and want to wait hours more, the run diff against the disk and disk image file to be sure they are an exact copy (never did it and never will).
Now reboot and upgrade the firmware the way the manufacturer tells you. So now your data is wiped out, big stinkin deal. Fire up the live Linux distro and again attach your backup disk and then enter the following command:
This writes the image file back to the SSD and if all goes well (It has never failed me yet and I have done this dozens of times for various systems) you now have your upgraded firmware with its original contents fully intact.
You can even mount one or more of the partitions contained within the disk image (under Linux of course) if you do a bit of homework (search google for mounting dd images) or just go here:http://darkdust.net/writings/diskimagesminihowto That tutorial is how I started playing with dd images.
You can also movethe contents of a smaller cramped disk to larger drives. Works for windows/NTFS too! You simply dd the entire smaller drive to the new drive (works best when both drives are hooked up via sata.) Then you use gparted or some other parted disk GUI to grow the file system on the new drive. Shut down and remove the linux cd/thumb-drive and remove the old disk and move the sata cable from the old disk to the new disk. Boot your PC and if your using windows (2000, XP , Vista, 7) it will run the check disk to verify the volume (DONT SKIP IT!) and reboot. Once it reboots to windows, open up explorer and see that you now magically have all that shiny new space without formatting, reinstalling, adding new drive letters or mounting drives under folders etc. Its transparent!
Example command:
sda is the small disk and sdb is the new large disk. I have done that trick multiple times as well with a 100% success rate. My friends were amazed.
Probably gathering for a pizza party!
csh, tcsh and zsh?
Because 20 years ago they weren't bat shit crazy.
A hundred bucks says a woman and her son, black dude and a juice head will break into the lab, blow it up and throw the chip into a vat of molten metal.
All that work for nothing.
"It isn't enough to just leave your toothpaste visible on top of your suitcase, it has to be visible INSIDE a clear plastic bag."
Well fuck you for even thinking clear bags are enough! Obviously you support terrorism because if you were a patriot you would not only support clear bags but clear toothpaste bottles and toothpaste. Same goes for shaving cream, shampoo, luggage, clothing and electronics. Next time I fly I will put all of my belongings into clear plastic bags and wear this: http://www.zap2it.com/news/custom/photogallery/movies/zap_seethrusuit_bruno_pg,0,5475799.photo I have nothing to hide.
"everything just worked on the desktop - graphics card, drivers, audio, sleep/restore, etc every time."
I don't mean to sound like a dick but I have been running windows for years (since 3.1) along with Linux (started with Red Hat 6) and never had any of the instability you and your friend mentioned. Starting with windows 95 all the windows bashing really kicked in, it was crap. Windows 98 bought some improvement and Me was an abortion. But around the same time NT was around but it was for the big leagues. I used Windows NT 4 workstation and it was decent. I didn't run it long enough to find anything wrong with it. Then along came Windows 2000. Finally, a Windows OS worth buying. But it was still aimed at commercial/business use (I had an *ahem* "copy" of it from its launch). Then along came XP and I must say that it was a fine OS. The only instability came from shoddy drivers but it ran pretty damn solid. Vista was also a non issue for me, though it was a bit of a dog before you disable all the bullshit services. Windows 7 so far is a pleasure, I am running it as of now at work. At home I still run Vista, going to upgrade to 7 soon when I purchase upgrade hardware (cpu/mem/video).
I haven't used Linux much for gaming mainly because the games I play are not available for it. Could I use wine? Sure but why bother, the games are guaranteed to run on my existing Windows box. There is no need to struggle with tweaking or patching to run my games. I love Visual Studio and I love C# and the goodness of .Net. Windows domains are fantastic for managing networks. Windows .net, and all the other MS tech itself is not evil, just the corporate politics. Its a shame but that's the world we live in.
Linux doesn't suck on the desktop, its just limited or weak in some areas that are key to the desktop experience. And most of that isn't the fault of open source or Linux in general its just getting recognition from software vendors (be it game studios or commercial software). It has plenty of productivity software. All of the the free software I run under Linux I also run on Windows (Open Office, GIMP, Firefox etc.) and I can be just as productive on Linux as I can on Windows.
Linux does have many strong points though. One example: I recently was doing embedded C code development for an industrial controller with a Hitachi SH2 cpu. The unsupported 3rd party tool chain package was an ancient version of Cygwin with some goofy configuration. The code had to be built against old versions of binutils (2.12), GCC (3.2), newlib (1.11) and gdb (5.3). The cygwin package didn't want to run on windows 7 so I had to install it on a VM running XP. I said fuck this, booted my Xubuntu 10.04 VM and headed over to gnu.org and grabbed the same binutils, gcc and gdb verisons and then download newlib. Built them using GCC 3.4 for the hitachi SH2 using soft float and I was done. But there was one hitch, a custom windows exe that performed the final memory mapping for the binary. Problem? Nope, just installed wine and it ran. In about a days worth of work I had a fully modern up-to-date tool chain for my controller. Could I have done that on windows under cygwin? Sure but Linux was the better environment and had allot of great tools available that were only a few commands away. FPGA development is great on Linux with the Altera/Xilinx tools plus the other OSS EDA tools. Face it, if your developing embedded systems or electronics, Linux is the best (and only IMHO) OS to develop under. The flexibility of not just the software, but the OS itself make it an unstoppable dev environment. (I do wish NI ported Multisim though).
Linux has many strong points, its THE BEST hacking environment and my only wish was that .net/MONO wasnt a legal minefield and that visual studio (or an equivalent) was available for it. Then we just need the entire steam game library ported along with other games to top it off and I would permanently switch to Linux full time.
And one more obse
Coal-to-fuel plants kept Germany's war machine running just fine. And the USA has lots of coal.
Thats what id like to know. I remember working a bounce ride at a childrens party in which an autistic child was in attendance. He got on the ride and would not come off when time was up. I tried to coax him off when his mother came to me and told me that her son had autism. She explained it as a sort of disconnection with the world, he was in his own little world and is unable to understand and socially interact normally with other people. So I just left him on the ride. He would just run around and bump into kids while laughing. As I sat down by the edge of the ride he would come around and just hug me. His mother was actually very surprised because he didn't interact like that with other people. He was all smiles and giggles, nothing bad about him. He just didn't listen because he didn't understand. Finally he tired out after 20 minutes and just curled up in the middle of the bounce ride while all the other children were jumping around. His mother had to go in and get him out. That is how I understand autism, a disconnection with the surrounding world.
Maybe to some that could be misinterpreted as acting out but in reality I understood that he wasn't aware of what he was doing. He was in his own world and did not understand what he was doing. If you have some spoiled undisciplined brat then no they aren't autistic, just brats because they weren't raised properly.
Concerning the article, My bet is since the two parents met at work or other professional gatherings, they both are working. Also both parents probably relocated to their place of work meaning there are no grandparents/family around. The kids are looked after by nannies and day care services. The parents probably don't interact with their kids as much as they should be. Thats not how you raise children.
Both of my parents hold masters degrees. After my mother had me, she stopped working. My father ran his own business and made enough money to support us and my mother became a homemaker (Her decision) and never complained about it. Both sets of grandparents were in the same neighborhood, my mothers parents were a 3 minute walk and my fathers parents a 10 minute drive. If my parents were going out, my grandmother would walk over and watch me and my brother or we were dropped off at her house. We never had a nanny. Once in a while my aunt would watch us as well, all family members were were familiar with. And my father always made time for the family, he had a trusted manager and would frequently take vacations with us (little trips to Vermont, we live in NYC). That simple upbringing was important because it reinforced social ties with both parents and immediate family members. These kids probably feel abandoned, distant or unloved by their parents.
He did, you just didn't hear it.
Why?
"Quoting the first paper: 'For over 40 years the notion of the file, as devised by pioneers in the field of computing, has proved robust and has remained unchallenged. Yet this concept is not a given, but serves as a boundary object between users and engineers. In the current landscape, this boundary is showing signs of slippage, and we propose the boundary object be reconstituted. New abstractions of file are needed, which reflect what users seek to do with their digital data, and which allow engineers to solve the networking, storage and data management problems that ensue when files move from the PC on to the networked world of today."
They pretty much peppered the report with bullshit and buzz words to make "meta data" and "internet based storage" sound all new and shiny for the brain dead market droids and managers.
This reminds me of that MIT operating system hoax that was going to take current file system ideas and throw them out the window. Face it, how else do you organize bits of information? The concept of a file is simple: an organized arrangement of bits that contains data which can be moved, re-sized or deleted. How do you change that? The only thing that can change is the method in which they are stored on physical media (file system) or cataloged and indexed.
I just want one thing: a file system that is part database for fast file searches. I don't want to manually build indexes or any other bullshit just look at the file table and give me my fucking file. Even if you had 100,000 files with file names of 256 characters, its only 2.5 MB, how long does that take to parse? Maybe I don't understand file systems but even a 10 MB file table should only take a few seconds to scan. When I do a search of a directory or entire disk with tens of thousands of files it sometimes takes a minute or two. The disk is thrashing away as if the program is looking all over for the file names. Shouldn't they all be in one place pointing to where they are on disk? Maybe I don't understand file systems in general, someone care to explain?
And one thing that just popped into my mind is a better method to tag and store files. When I download a file or save a document/image/whatever I shouldn't have to dig through a huge directory hierarchy. I should be able to type the name of a directory and something along the lines of Google's auto complete or intellisense will begin to auto complete my search, regardless of what volume its stored on. As I type vacation.. it should list all directories beginning with that string or tag. Maybe I am ignorant of similar functionality for Windows and Linux. The tags and file/directory names should be system wide and accessible to all programs and commands that interact with files, not just a built in shell.
I like how one little country that normally doesn't play a big role in the world, is flooded and suddenly its a big deal. How many of the disk makers have factories located there?
And here I was all set to buy two 2 TB disks.
STAY AWAY FROM DROBO!
I had a client ask me to set one up for them. You don't partition it like a standard raid array, you format it to some predetermined size that may be larger then the physical disk space in the machine (through their drobo dashboard). If you have three 1 TB disks you will have around 2TB of actual storage but you can format it for 16TB under Win 7. This is achieved via their "beyond raid" technology which fools the OS into thinking there is more disk space than there actually is. This lets the user make one large volume now and then add disks in the future, even disks of different sizes can be mixed and matched. If you start to go beyond the physical capacity, the array degrades and goes offline until you add another disk and wait hours or days for the disks to reorganize. My client was consolidating her photography library to the drobo when it just crapped out. Turns out she ran over the physical limit.
Then if your lucky, your computer be it Apple or Windows will take upward of 30 to 45 minutes to boot and shutdown if the fucking thing is plugged in and powered on during either of those two procedures. Drobo recommends you move your data to another set of disks and re-format your drobo. As if people have a few spare TB of disk capacity just sitting around, that's the reason they bought your shit box to begin with, assholes. Its a known issue.
I have personally used hardware raid 5, software block level raid 5 and ZFS. If you ask me id rather have the file system do the RAID work at the file system level, not the block level where the file system is ignorant of what lies beneath. ZFS is the way to go until BTRFS is fully stable and feature competitive with ZFS. Then you do incremental backups offsite, either to a family or friends house or to a commercial off site backup provider.
And what is your 16 TB consist of? If its movies and the like then don't bother spending money backing it up. If its self make video and other personal large files then that makes sense. I know of people who spent oodles of cash to backup silly crap like downloaded movies that can easily be replaced or rented from Netflix.
With the way things are going in the storage world, SSD's will eclipse mechanical disks at the desktop level and mechanical disks will be relegated to backup duty where they far outstrip SSD's in capacity. It reminds me of when tape drives were the king of capacity, often tapes were several orders of magnitude larger than current hard disks and tapes were cheap. They were slow but my god did they have capacity. Now it looks like SSD's will assume the role of desktop storage and to some degree server storage while mechanical disks will be used for large backup systems and file servers. Mechanical hard drives of today will be tomorrows tape drives and then obsolete when SSD's begin to overtake then in capacity. By then we might have something even higher in capacity like holographic or some other sci-fi sounding storage.
Bingo. After working in an industry where the customers audit you as well as standards organizations, I can admit that paying for support and buying commercial software with support is a life saver. During one audit, I was called into an office and grilled by a customers auditor about our data retention, backup and disaster recovery procedures and policies. And these companies are are very serious about quality control, one simple mistake will have two people on a plane to your shop the next day (an engineer and quality control person). Hell even ISO wants to know the same stuff.
If you can sit back and say we have, X, Y and Z with support then they will feel comfortable with your answer and not poke and prod further. Its all about accountability and if you can prove that someone is backing you with support for hardware and software then you are golden. If you tell them you cobbled together a system using shoe string and bubble gum they are going to be concerned and might take drastic steps to make you prove that your disaster recovery plans and backup systems really do work.
Whoops, it is forced air cooled and built by Sandia National Labs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyn9krjIRc
Still it does demonstrate that you can really tightly pack ARM systems into a box to raise computing power.
Think of it like this, ARM is small and lean on power. You could pack dozens of cores onto a die giving it the power to compete with the Xeon. Blade servers can be shrunk down and more can fit into a single U of rack space since ARM does not dissipate tens of watts. We might see something along the lines of servers that are nothing more than a mini cluster in a box that appear as one whole system. A prepackaged beowulf cluster if you will.
There was an interesting video I saw a while back of a researcher who packed 196 of those ARM gumstix modules into a case not much bigger than a tower PC with no forced cooling. I cant find the video but here is a link to information about the cluster:
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Sandia-StrongBox-and-Gumstix-Stagecoach/
My brother has taken part of the global game jam for the past three years, this isn't anything new. The point of a 48 hour stint is not to make a marketable game, but how to best utilize your resources to make something small, pretty and clever with people you might have never met before. Maybe the game you make could be turned into something marketable.
The idea is to get together with other people with a common interest and passion for making games. You go into a game jam not knowing who your going to be paired up with. My brother met allot of good people both in the industry and looking to get into it. That is the true spirit of the game jam.
I would love to take my commute and shove it. That and be able to go out, get hammered and then have a computer safely drive me home. And I do believe I will see self driving cars within my lifetime, its a no-brainer with all the technology we have at our disposal.
Then again I do enjoy driving from time to time. I went down to Street, MD the other week and then drove up through Lancaster, PA to Litiz for a truck show. I had a great time driving through the country, such beautiful scenery. I even had fun navigating the narrow, winding country roads at night. It was a challenge.
Hell I own a 1961 Mack B61 tractor that has a two stick 9 speed duplex transmission and a 205HP Mack Thermodyne turbo diesel. I have a blast driving around old manual trucks. You just cant beat that feeling and the incredible simplicity of the machine, no electronics, not even to operate the engine. Electric is only needed to start it and you shut it down by pulling an engine stop cable. Heck, if the battery goes dead you can just pull start the truck. The generator only runs the lights and heater motor, and maybe a radio, if you had one. Even the wipers are air operated from the air brake system.
190,000 miles isn't allot. Just proving a new engine design can run reliably takes around a million combined miles of testing. I am glad they worked out traffic navigation but how many of those miles were in severe weather conditions? Snow, sleet, high winds, heavy rain, fog etc. Weather is never mentioned and the cars primary means of 3d mapping is done with a laser.
And here is the better question. If an automated car gets into an accident and someone is severely injured or killed, who is to blame? The occupant in the driver seat, vehicle owner, robot driver manufacturer or car manufacturer? Who gets sued? Seriously, as long as ambulance chasing lawyers are out there, car makers and their lawyers will have to figure out how not to get sued into oblivion and divert blame or responsibility for such cases. No matter how good the engineering is, the liability is a huge issue. Its easy now as you just blame the driver, a human being.
And as the number of automated cars increases, how do they cope with human piloted vehicles? Do they have the ability to see a blinker, slow down and let someone merge into their lane? If an automated car isn't "courteous" to other human drivers things could get hostile on the roads. If the robot cars are perceived as slow and lack courtesy, people will be hostile to robot cars creating a dangerous driving situation. With all the talk of robot cars packing themselves tightly together, how do these packs of cars react to human drivers. How do human drivers merge onto a highway with a conga line of robot cars driving along nut to butt. Around packed cities you also have allot of variables, people just walking into the street either knowingly or they are oblivious. A human driver can see a person walking toward the street and slow down in anticipating that the person will not stop. What about driving down a street and you see children playing? I always slow down when I see kids. I once almost hit a kid who ran into the street chasing her dog. I literally stopped two feet from her. That scared the shit out of me and since then I am cautious when I see children playing near a road. Can a computer sense that?
And lastly lets not get into stuxnet type worms causing massive pileups which result in injuries and deaths by attacking robot cars. I keep hearing about wireless cars connecting together forming their own networks to communicate. To me all I hear is an attack vector. Imagine a worm that commands all of the robot "cars on demand" to swarm a city or part of town. Imagine a million compromised cars blindly headed to the capitol building in Washington as protest of a war, policy or elected official. Clogging streets, running out of fuel on the roads blocking them etc. All sorts of mayhem. Its actually sounds funny now that I think of it.
Computers can drive flawlessly but the amount of v
I have had my house broken into (and a second failed attempt) and had two close friends develop an addiction, one was hooked on crack/cocaine the other heroin. And I agree with the grandparent poster, they are not serious crimes. Someone directly harming someone through physical violence is serious. You PlayStation getting nicked at first is unsettling but you can replace it and get on with your life as if nothing happened. A dead person cant be replaced and neither can you replace your health.
And a right winger would more likely say that the addicts themselves are responsible for their addictions in the first place, not the dealers. And I agree. Dealers don't go around threatening people to do drugs. Yes they might engage in other criminal activity, mostly violence toward other dealers in turf disputes. But that is a separate crime. The best weapon against addiction is education and making sure that people get help for problems they are looking to escape by using drugs. That cant apply to everyone but then again you know that we do not live in a perfect society.
Thanks for that laugh, I almost pissed my pants. I have to admit that I never cared for that episode but it sticks in your head.
So finger print scanners are increasing attendance? I call bullshit. When I was in high school 13+ years ago they had this thing called attendance. Each teacher would check to see if we were in class. So once that data was compiled at the end of the day by the attendance office, it was known if you skipped a class, skipped out after half a day or the entire day. And the next day you could expect the home room teacher to send you directly to the deans office as they would be notified in the morning.
The funny thing was during my first year we had a school ID card with a bar code. It was pretty high tech for 1994 and the scanner had a slot you stuck your card into, kind of like an ATM machine. It had an LCD screen and three lights on top. If you cut class or skipped out for a day or committed any other offence to the school, the scanner would lock your card, sound an alarm and the read light would flash. School staff who monitored the clock in process would then escort those red flagged students to the deans office.
During my second year the scanners were gone. No one told us what happened but my shop teacher in senior year did. He said during the summer of 94 there were contractors working on the school and sometime during the summer the machines were stolen. They couldn't prove who did it and they couldn't convince the board of Ed to fund replacements. So after that we went back to old fashioned paper and pencil attendance which worked just as well.
And in all seriousness the school cant force kids to go. I knew plenty of kids who didn't give a shit about school and would take entire weeks or months off. They failed and either kept going and skipping class or just dropped out. If the kids don't give a shit, no fancy bio-metric scanner will make them go to class. Their parents didn't care either and probably saw the school as a free baby sitting service. The stupidity of schools never ceases to amaze me.
Is it just me or does it feel like we were using FF 3.x just yesterday? For a while it was mostly point releases now were on 8.x already? I must be living under a rock or something. That or I just forgot about FF after switching to chrome.
I do the same thing at work. We have a wet saw for cutting welding samples and it cleanly slices through all kinds of metals without much of a problem. I put the drive on the table and run the blade into the platters about half way. It slices through the drive like a hot knife through butter. That disk will never be read again.
Another way is to run them over with a forklift as they weigh twice as heavy as their lifting capacity. So a 6000 pound capacity forklift weighs in at around 12000 pounds meaning each tire has a crushing force of about 3000 pounds. Just don't do that on asphalt as your going to leave an imprint of the drive in it or possibly mush the drive into the pavement. I know not everyone has a fork lift but its one way to do it. I got that tip from a UPS driver who informed me that is how he destroys his old disks at work. I tried it and it seems to work very well. You just need a very heavy fork lift.
Burning a drive doesn't guarantee it will destroy it unless you bring its temperature well over 1000F. And I believe the case of the drive is made from zinc which melts at 787F making it a liquid metal mess. Also, its circuit board will burn causing quite a stink so its one of the least clean methods of destroying a drive.
And lastly the good ol' hammer works great. Just wear eye protection and your all set for some destructive fun. Just make sure you smash the platters and not just the circuit board. Use a cold chisel or punch to better focus the blow to the platters. Its simple, fast and just about everyone has a hammer lying around. Just do it on a hard surface like pavement or concrete. A kitchen table or counter top will deaden the blow and your almost guaranteed to damage them in the process.