nullorempty's comments

On: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

[nullorempty]

Congrats. You solved the puzzle.

On: UMD Scientists Create 'Smart Underwear' to Measure Human Flatulence

[nullorempty]

Clearly. Seems like the top concern for today's the powers that be.

On: UMD Scientists Create 'Smart Underwear' to Measure Human Flatulence

[nullorempty]

Methane you say.

May be they should just stop the wars for now. Stop spilling oil into the seas. Stop dropping bombs. Stop all the crazy shit they are doing.

As far as meat is concerned - our bodies need meat and fat to stay healthy.

[6510 → nullorempty]

> Stop all the crazy shit they are doing.

But then we would have to accept methane is an excellent fuel and that we have an abundance of it. No one on the fortune 500 likes that idea.

On: UMD Scientists Create 'Smart Underwear' to Measure Human Flatulence

[nullorempty]

And I just invented a fart-tube to route gasses away from sensors - already assuming farts will be taxed.

On: UMD Scientists Create 'Smart Underwear' to Measure Human Flatulence

[nullorempty]

Life is stranger than fiction.

On: Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold

[nullorempty]

The reason he was released is because they were getting close to never finding out where the gold is. Now, they have a chance of him leading them to it.

On: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

[nullorempty]

It reaches far out, not just the West. China remains relatively immune. S. Korea and Japan immune to some degree. Russia, unfortunately, is not immune at all.

[pocksuppet → nullorempty]

The things that our politicians want to make illegal for children were already illegal for everyone in China.

That probably has something to do with why China's economically outperforming us so much.

[numpad0 → pocksuppet]

Everything appear to be illegal in China, but also everything illegal appear to come from there. Their chemotherapy dose table is calculated for diluted compounds. Coupling their law text to regular universal enforcement is just a suicide.

On: Flash media longevity testing – 6 years later

[nullorempty]

What's the simplest way to rewrite the data without actually copying the data? Like in place rewrite - you write what you read.

[fhdkweig → nullorempty]

I've seen "dd if=/dev/removable of=/dev/removable" suggested. I don't know if it actually works or if the OS optimizes it to a no-op.

[valleyer → fhdkweig]

Certainly the OS can't optimize it to a no-op, since `dd` makes separate read and write syscalls.

I suppose your `dd` implementation itself could do so, but I don't know why it would.

[piyh → fhdkweig]

the risk of catastrophic data loss from misuse of `dd` makes my hackles rise just looking at this.

I will never forget when I mixed up `if` and `of` during a routine backup.

`cat /dev/sda > /mnt/myDisk2` is so much safer, explicit, and in unix norms. It's also faster because you don't have to tune block size parameters.

Plus you can also do `pv /dev/sda > /mnt/myDisk2` to get transfer speed details.

Friends don't let friends use `dd` where `cat` can do the same job.

[jmb99 → piyh]

I stopped getting scared of `if` and `of` about a decade ago when I started explicitly saying (in my head) "input file" and "output file" rather than "if" and "of." You still can mess up the order, but imo no more easily than you can swap `cat in > out` for `cat out > in`.

> Friends don't let friends use `dd` where `cat` can do the same job.

Technically yes... but I like being able to explicitly set block sizes and force sync writes.

[ogurechny → jmb99]

I think you both are arguing about how to fight a bear with your bare hands. To win in that, you simply need to not fight with a bear.

Let's say someone made an expansion board with a cool feature: there are 5 documented I/O addresses, but accessing any other address fries the stored firmware. What would you do? No, not leaving a lot of comments in code in CAPS LOCK. No, not printing the correct hexadecimal values in red to put the message on the wall. You make a driver that only allows access to the correct addresses, and configure the rest of the system to make sure that it can only work through that driver.

Let's say there's a loading bay at the chemical plant with multiple flanges. If strong acid from the tanker is pumped into the main acid tank, everything is fine. If it is pumped into any other tank, the whole plant may explode and burn. What should be done? No, not promising that drivers will be fired, then shot by the firing squad if they make a mistake. Each connection is independently locked, and the driver only gets a single matching key.

You have wonderful programmable devices that allow you to solve non-standard problems with non-standard tools. What should be done is making a wrapper for dd that just does not allow you to do anything you don't want to happen. Even the most basic script with checks and confirmation is enough.

[hpb42 → nullorempty]

Wouldn't a ZFS Scrub get the job done?

[toast0 → hpb42]

zpool scrub is what I would do, but it only rewrites data that needs it. The OP wanted to rewrite everything.

On: Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)

[nullorempty]

There is a reason they put that into curriculum.

On: Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)

[nullorempty]

I much prefer "Imagine" by Beatles.

Imagine they call a war but no one shows up.

Young people are especially vulnerable to brainwashing. Do everything you can to explain to them that they will dying to protect the powerful elite.