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Comment Re:Get Rid Of Paragon! (Score 1) 247

Author here:

Just out of curiosity, I went to check the version of my Paragon installer and guess what... it was corrupted! Oh the irony!
Windows is the OS I least use, and I have not booted it for the last month or so. Unless Paragon silently corrupted something there previously and somehow "weakened" the filesystem integrity since. Anyway, thanks for the tip. What do you use currently to read HFS+ in Windows?

Comment Re:file(1) (Score 3, Informative) 247

Author here:

At first I thought this idea wouldn't work. As some people have already written here, the 'file' command sometimes just checks for a few bytes. But since it is so easy to implement, why not give it a try? And indeed, for videos it worked quite well. Some of the corrupted MOV files were detected simply as 'data file' or even 'MPEG sequence' and were promptly deleted! Thank you for the idea.

Comment Re:Newbie question hour? (Score 5, Informative) 247

Author here:

> Last backup August.
Yes, that was silly of me.

> Thinks there is a way to detect generic file corruption
There is no way to detect generic file corruption. But there is a way to detect specific filetype corruption. For example, I already found mp3val, that is able to scan all my mp3 and check for file integrity, and even fix a few kinds of corruption (such as unmatching bytes in the header and sound chunks). Maybe with the right set of tools, I might also detect (or even fix) my corrupted pictures, movies and books as well.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's a good tool to detect corrupted files?

Volanin writes: Currently I use a triple boot system in my Macbook containing MacOS Lion, Windows 7 and finally Ubuntu Precise, on which I spend the great majority of my time. To share files between these systems, I have created a huge HFS+ home partition (MacOS native format which can also be read in Linux, and in Windows with Paragon HFS). But last week, while working on Ubuntu, my battery ran out and the computer suddenly powered off. When I powered it on again, the filesystem integrity was ok (after a scandisk by MacOS), but a lot of my files contents were silently corrupted (and my last backup was from August...). Mostly, these files are JPG pictures, MP3 musics and MPG/MOV videos with a few PDFs scattered around. I want to get rid of the corrupted files, since they waste space uselessly, but the only way I have to check for corruption is opening one by one. Is there a good set of tools to verify the integrity by filetype, so I can detect (and delete) my bad files?

Comment Where are you Canonical? (Score 1) 305

My first though when checking out the report was: "Whoa, Microsoft contributed more to the linux kernel than Canonical itself"... but later I realized that Canonical is not even listed there. Maybe I am wrong, but I have this inner concept that Canonical would contribute to these projects just like Red Hat, since they are the most "open-source-focused" companies currently... Well, I guess they indeed are completely different companies with completely different goals, and Canonical is somewhat more focused in the userspace experience (which surely is just as important).

DRM

Submission + - What book publishers should learn from Harry Potter (gigaom.com)

Volanin writes: The e-book versions of Harry Potter are being released through Pottermore, and Rowling has chosen to do a number of interesting things with them, including releasing them without DRM restrictions.

One of the encouraging things about the Pottermore launch is that the books will be available on virtually every platform simultaneously, including the Sony Reader, the Nook, the Kindle and Google’s e-book service.

Even Amazon has bowed to the power of the series and done what would previously have seemed unthinkable: it sends users who come to the titles on Amazon to Pottermore to finish the transaction.

Comment Alcohol as fuel source. (Score 5, Informative) 894

Here in Brazil we have been using alcohol as a fuel source for years. When you go to a gas station, it is guaranteed that you will find both a gasoline pump and an alcohol pump. Most cars developed here since 2003 accept both fuels, using an engine technology called FLEX. The only difference is that the alcohol we use is called "Anidro", and it is 99.3% pure, while Ethanol is 96% pure (the rest being mostly water).

Based on this, to subsidize the price of the gasoline here, the government sets an alcohol mandate of 22%. So even if you have a gasoline-only car, you are really using 3/4 gasoline and 1/4 alcohol when you fill the tank. Since the alcohol does attack all parts of the engine that are in contact with it, engines produced for the brazilian market have a special protection layer. And indeed, owners of imported cars here usually fill their tanks with a special "premium" gasoline, that is basically pure and high-octane, to avoid damage. (Guess I don't have to say that gas stations rip you off for that)

Comment Learn with history or make the same mistakes. (Score 5, Informative) 346

I dare say that this insistence on backward compatibility is going to kill this format.

If anyone still remembers, many years ago Thomson released the mp3PRO format.
It was a low bitrate MP3 with some added spectral band data that could recreate the original
music sound quality. So in theory, you could have the same quality for half the bitrate/size.

To my decaying ears, it sounded really good at the time... if played on the supported players.
But when you played these files in any unsupported player, which happened to be all of them
except for the Thomson's Player or the Thomson's Winamp Plugin, you ended up listening to
a HORRIBLE low bitrate sound quality, since the extra mp3PRO information was ignored.

And even worse: you had no way of telling if a file being downloaded was an original mp3 file
or a new mp3PRO file, since they both used the same file extension. Maybe if they had renamed
the extension to .mp3pro or something like that, the mp3PRO format might have had some chance...

Years pass... and now they are doing the same thing again.

Instead of focusing on a lossless mp3 codec for a specific kind of market/enthusiast, they are
insisting in keeping backward compatibility with players using the same method as mp3PRO did.
And once more the files are going to have the same extension as the original ones, instead
of .mp3hd or something similar.

I hope I am wrong, but this surely spells doom to me.

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