Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Cut to the chase (Score 1) 58

> "You claim the very act of copying infringes, which is nonsense."

That is the basis of EULAs, that copying the software from disc [even if it's the CD the software came on] into RAM is in fact a copy, and thus is subject to copyright. the LA is a license by which the copyright holder grants permission to perform this copy operation.

As much as I might LIKE your interpretation, it is clearly not the binding precedent from the last 40ish years.

Comment Re: Drives over 100,000 hours (Score 1) 51

the claim that "magnetic domains" were somehow involved was bullshit b/c it wasn't even possible. Not without reforming the platter or at least the metal oxide coating.
But low level formatting DID move the structure [sectors and tracks are structure] around. Where the real problem with your statement lies in that you mentioned the partition tables. That's not low-level formatting any more than setting up the FATs is.
The really old disks came with a list of bad sectors from the factory. and then you had to enter that into not the PROM on the HDD but rather the PROM on the controller card.
Of course, a formatted filesystem would ALSO have a list of those bad sectors. But that's not part of the low-level format.

and fwiw, I did say that calibrat CLAIMED to be able to make repairs. I didn't say it was a good stable solution. rewriting entire tracks did make a lot of sense though.

Comment Re: Drives over 100,000 hours (Score 2) 51

Although you are correct that low level formatting did not have anything to do with magnetic domains, it did not do as you describe.
Low level formatting setup the sectors [with sector IDs, checksum, etc]. It was possible, with low level formatting, to take a drive designed for MFM and low-level format it RLL [and get a capacity increase to boot]. Back in those days, all of the understanding of the disc structure & bad sectors was held in the controller, not in the HDD itself.

There was a tool, part of Norton Utilities, that could change the sector interleave by performing a low-level format, AND it could do the low-level equivalent of a ZFS scrub by reading the data on a track and rewrite it, thus refreshing the signal on the platters. Although technically the process for the two things I mentioned was the exact same thing.
It even claimed to be able to recover a bad sector or repair it, by way of multiple reads with offsets & multiple over-writes, until it came back clean.

Comment Re:SoC capabilities (Score 1) 70

It may depend on your definition of SoC. if you go back to the expansion "System on a Chip", it basically means the north bridge and south bridge are merged into the same chip as the CPU.

Consider the Intel N100. It forms the basis of many a miniPC, but it has no [discrete] north bridge or PCH.

Comment Re: PM2.5 is not just soot (Score 2) 59

science reporting is just getting worse. a few days ago my sister handed me a newsweek article speaking of "Nitrogen pollution", in atmosphere and water. But it then said that this nitrogen pollution in the water is caused by fossil fuel combustion [chances are it didn't use the word combustion].
Never mind that most nitrogen compounds contributing to water pollution come from fertilizers, ammonia etc. Never mind that the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen [N2]. Don't mention that NO, NO2, N2O & NH3 are all different things.

And getting back to PM2.5, standard *dust* such as from desert sand is a portion. Ocean air contains windblown salt.

Comment Re:Step 1 (Score 1) 206

My former employer has had a number of layoffs over the last few years.
Most recently, a "quiet" layoff [they didn't call it a layoff, but it was one. they called it a "reorg"] where they laid off a bunch of lower management and a few middle management.
Then 2 months later [in January] they had a large layoff of ~1650 persons. My understanding is that the org I was in, 90% of them are GONE [my org was not 1000 ppl strong].
I got laid off in the middle.
From a discussion with a colleague, they actually hit a limit of how many "old people" they could layoff so they reorged some managers into individual-contributor roles. Likely looking for an excuse to fire them later or make them quit [constructive dismissal].

Comment Re:As someone who uses Windows ARM every day... (Score 1) 32

Due to their hanging on to Java8 and MongoDB 3.6, the only practical way to run the Unifi controller is in a docker container.
I admit to not running it on Raspbian anymore, most recently I'm running it on Debian 11.7 on an RK3399 NanoPC-T4, and a docker image that I think is based on lscr.io/linuxserver/unifi-controller.

Note that it should work, with the above container, on RaspberryOS 64bit. I just haven't a Pi4 to try it with, and 1GB RAM isn't enough to run the controller with a Pi3.

Slashdot Top Deals

HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!

Working...