Jihad needs scientists

In article <esc6m4$atc$3@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:

In article <esbpio$8qk_004@s977.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <es9djf$q95$3@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
[....]
You are in error. Last access is an important datum.

Please explain exactly how you thing the last access is important.

[This is the piece I inadventently deleted]

What
do you do with this information?

I, the BACKUP programmer, will save all files during an incremental
that has an access date after the date-time argument of the /SINCE
switch.

This makes it no longer an "incremental". You are in fact doing a partial
save on the system.

That is what an incremental is.

The mere fact that you do something that is not an
incremental and call that an incremental, doesn't make you right about any
of the things you've posted on the subject.

You are telling the developers that they are wrong?!!

A far better way to do a
backup is still to make an image of the drive.

No, it is not. It is a faster way, not a better way. You lose
information when you do a bit-to-bit. And I've just realized
that your reference of "bit-to-bit" isn't really a bit-to-bit.
I assumed you were correct in this one but I was wrong.

In this context, the only use of that
information will be a mistake.

Are you interested enough to read some code which implements
this stuff correctly?

Yes, do you know of any?

Yes. I developed and maintained it. I was not the original
developer. We called it BACKUP.EXE and the source files
are BACKUP.MAC and BACKRS.MAC. The OS was called TOPS-10.

There, you have all the magic incantations required to find
the code.

/BAH

 

In article <esc81s$atc$5@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:

In article <esboom$8qk_001@s977.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <es9f0f$q95$6@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <es98ds$8qk_001@s1006.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
[....]
The other stuff I've spoken to elsewhere.

The case that I brought up was database; with databases, the data
is always a moving target that can never be snap-shot with accuracy.

This is not always true. In a multidisk mirroring system, you can do a
commit and unmount one drive. It will be an image of what was there at
the time the commit happened. Disks are fast enough that this option can
be used for most applications. The delay caused by the OS's commit
operation is not very long.

I know this is one strategy. One kind of implementation was called
striping. For a reservation system, this may not be the best
technique because data entry and maintenance is over a wide
geographical area; the speed of light is very slow.

You said "never".

That's right; that kind of data base can never be snapshot with
accuracy; this is because the same field can change often at
the same wall clock time.

You now admit that the method I stated does exist.

I never said it didn't exist. I said it couldn't be backed up
with the snapshot stratgey. I don't know how to reword this
again so you can understand that there are different strategies
which are defined by the nature of the data and its use.

The
speed of light issue is only a slight delay on the commit process.

It is a huge delay.

<snip>

You can have multiple streams of
data going to a file even on a Windows machine. All that is needed is to
have one task that does the actual write operations. This is usually
combined with "event based" recording where the transactions are recorded
with time stamps so that the correct order is insured.

That's not very effiecient if your app is writing a lot. There
will be a bottleneck at the timekeeper's point in the execution.

What do you mean by "timekeeper". I have to ask because there is no such
problem in any part I can think of as the "timekeeper".

In any computer system, there has to be a timekeeper which will
dictate the time so all things can be synchronized. When this
syncrosity is spread geographically, some flavor of timekeeper
has to be the boss so that coincidental events don't overwrite
each other.

Contention also needs handling because two events could have
the same time stamp.

Contention is only an issue if you have multiprocessing and events that
can't be commuted.

I have been talking about a reservation system. You and somebody
half-way around the world can make a reservation for the same flight.
How do you think such a system prevents you from sitting in that
other person's lap?...or, for that matter, out on the wing?

/BAH

 

In article <48cku2dg872ekdnpgtu6u9phbndvhu92oo@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng <MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote:

On Sat, 03 Mar 07 13:03:35 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:

In article <f3d56$45e8681e$49ecf0e$20166@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
"nonsense@unsettled.com" <nonsense@unsettled.com> wrote:
MassiveProng wrote:
On Fri, 02 Mar 07 12:25:31 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:


In article <9abb5$45e6dbbb$4fe70c3$30531@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
"nonsense@unsettled.com" <nonsense@unsettled.com> wrote:

jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:

In article <epccu25dvaomn9ak8i5fmq0lks6prbbtuh@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng <MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote:

Aren't you out of vital bodily fluids yet?

This is what happens when you free the serfs.

Even serfs have been toilet trained and know the best
use of those other fluids.


Your senility is showing again, witch. Don't you have a grave site
or an urn of ashes to talk to? Do you really feel so compelled to try
to talk to us? If you're such a bit god, invent something!

Well here's one that was/is incapable of learning toilet
skills.

It is clear that he needs adult supervision of the
maternal kind.

More immature petty baby bullshit. You have succeeded in letting
the Unlearned Tard drag you down to its level. Congratulations.

Your congratualtions are premature. I have yet to achieve his level
of thinking ability. It's a fine goal.

/BAH

 

In article <20dku29jsq6ahmd2ucqjrm0279atd4ll2r@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng <MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote:

On Sat, 03 Mar 07 13:22:49 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:

There are plenty of data bases in today's online world that can never
be taken off-line.


You're an idiot.

You stopped thinking. Consider finance. Transportation,
especially things like trains, planes, and some ships.
Consider war objects. Consider NORAD. Consider power
generating stations. Consider the networks and telecomm.

/BAH

 

[nonsense@unsettled.com]

jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:

In article <48cku2dg872ekdnpgtu6u9phbndvhu92oo@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng <MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote:

On Sat, 03 Mar 07 13:03:35 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:


In article <f3d56$45e8681e$49ecf0e$20166@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
"nonsense@unsettled.com" <nonsense@unsettled.com> wrote:

MassiveProng wrote:

On Fri, 02 Mar 07 12:25:31 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:



In article <9abb5$45e6dbbb$4fe70c3$30531@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
"nonsense@unsettled.com" <nonsense@unsettled.com> wrote:


jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:


In article <epccu25dvaomn9ak8i5fmq0lks6prbbtuh@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng <MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote:

Aren't you out of vital bodily fluids yet?

This is what happens when you free the serfs.

Even serfs have been toilet trained and know the best
use of those other fluids.


Your senility is showing again, witch. Don't you have a grave site
or an urn of ashes to talk to? Do you really feel so compelled to try
to talk to us? If you're such a bit god, invent something!

Well here's one that was/is incapable of learning toilet
skills.

It is clear that he needs adult supervision of the
maternal kind.

More immature petty baby bullshit. You have succeeded in letting
the Unlearned Tard drag you down to its level. Congratulations.


Your congratualtions are premature. I have yet to achieve his level
of thinking ability. It's a fine goal.

Thank you. However IMO we're merely displaced on the
same plateau.

 

[Phil Carmody]

jmfbahciv@aol.com writes:

Has controller functionality moved into all disk drives? That
sorta sucks. ....Do these disk drives have multi ports?

Ever since IDE was invented, and before that too.
You're several decades behind the rest of the world.

When a sector
starts failing (retry threshold exceeded) the drive moves the data on
that sector to a spare/reserved sector (hopefully) close by, then
points to the new sector and marks the old as bad. The replacement
sector is mapped to be in the same logical position as the one it
replaced, even though it is not physically adjacent. When a sector-
for-sector copy is done to another drive (for instance) sectors are
copied from the source in logical (not physical)

Logical!!! Then it is NOT a bit-to-bit copy. Goddammit. I
goofed and believed them on this one.

order to the target
(where they often end up in physical order).

When you say physical order, is this a numerical monotonically
increasing order of the sectors? Or is it ordered by the directory tree?

The mere fact that you have mentioned the word "directory tree" in
this context implies that you HAVEN'T GOT A FUCKING CLUE what you
are talking about.

You are so far out of your depth it's risible.

Phil
--
"Home taping is killing big business profits. We left this side blank
so you can help." -- Dead Kennedys, written upon the B-side of tapes of
/In God We Trust, Inc./.

 

[Phil Carmody]

jmfbahciv@aol.com writes:

In article <esc6m4$atc$3@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <esbpio$8qk_004@s977.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <es9djf$q95$3@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
[....]
You are in error. Last access is an important datum.

Please explain exactly how you thing the last access is important.

[This is the piece I inadventently deleted]

What
do you do with this information?

I, the BACKUP programmer, will save all files during an incremental
that has an access date after the date-time argument of the /SINCE
switch.

This makes it no longer an "incremental". You are in fact doing a partial
save on the system.

That is what an incremental is.

The mere fact that you do something that is not an
incremental and call that an incremental, doesn't make you right about any
of the things you've posted on the subject.

You are telling the developers that they are wrong?!!

He's telling you you're wrong. I don't believe you could develop
anything more complex than gout.

A far better way to do a
backup is still to make an image of the drive.

No, it is not. It is a faster way, not a better way. You lose
information when you do a bit-to-bit.

What information? Be explicit. And use terms that the rest of the
planet uses.

This will be fun...

Phil
--
"Home taping is killing big business profits. We left this side blank
so you can help." -- Dead Kennedys, written upon the B-side of tapes of
/In God We Trust, Inc./.

 

[krw]

In article <6aeku2ppeeouq9caalhd6g4e4hqft1hvkr@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org says...

On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 19:23:33 -0500, krw <krw@att.bizzzz> Gave us:

Sorry, but that's the drive's call. SMART tells you it _was_ time to
buy a new drive. You don't have access to the information, for a
number of reasons. A bit-by-bit copy won't see this information
either.

One does NOT need SMART turned on in order to get bad sectors mapped
out on a drive.

Clueless, MassivelyWrong.

--
Keith

 

[krw]

In article <9ldku21o58531j21nnipbg2qorbqtc71li@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org says...

On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 13:38:29 -0500, krw <krw@att.bizzzz> Gave us:

If you accept that there are disk controllers controlling
controllers.


IDE controllers are ALL ON THE DRIVE.

Clueless.

The part on the MOBO is called an I/O interface, NOT a drive
controller.

You couldn't be more clueless, Dumbulb.

--
Keith

 

[Tony Lance]

Big Bertha Thing redoubt
Cosmic Ray Series
Possible Real World System Constructs
http://web.onetel.com/~tonylance/redoubt.html
Access page to 600K ZIP file
Astrophysics net ring access site
Newsgroup Reviews including sci.physics.particle

Postings potentially suitable for;-
1. SRF Classical Astronomy
2. SRF Classical Mathematics
3. SRF Classical Physics
4. SRF Classical Chemistry

After 15 months, an armistice term has just been fullfilled.(2nd Battle)
Student research project conferences, by invitation only, now available.

Battles without cost are not battles.
I have just had the following shot out from under me:-
1. www.bertha.ndirect.co.uk (disabled)
2. Paid UK ISP Net Direct. (15 months)
3. Professional newsgroup SP Dejanews.com (3 months)

To the victor the spoils. See my new newsgroup review
section, complete with copyright.


Big Bertha Thing memoriam

Tony died raising his best friends family,
His wife needed two helpers, his poor heart and him.
Carer, postman, welder and domino player.
RAF aircraft fitter at Battle of Britain and El Alamain.
Outboxed a voortrecker at middleweight.
Raised trade union branch president and
National officer of voluntary .org
Taught me to keep the faith,
Mend my bicycle and trigonometry.
His story is ended, but not yet finished.

Tony Lance
judemarie@bigberthathing.co.uk


From: Tony Lance <judemarie@bigberthathing.co.uk>
Newsgroups: swnet.sci.astro,sci.chem
Subject: Big Bertha Thing warlord
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2007 17:17:10 +0000


Big Bertha Thing warlord

The last time I heard that an apology given under duress was valid,
was in the Monty Python' comedy sketch on the Spanish Inquisition.
Everytime anyone said Spanish Inquisition,
then 3 red cardinals turned up to organise it.

What do I have in comon with a Texas cattle baron?
He thinks that he is a bigger liar than I am. I think I am.

What does a drill sargeant have in comon with a chinese warlord?
He says that the sun will not rise tomorrow. His men believe it.

What is the difference between a Texas cattle baron and a
chinese warlord? The one knows he is lying. The other has never had the problem.


Big Bertha Thing adversity

Milton (1644) from The Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.

First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked about,
her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round,
defiance and battle oft rumoured to be marching up
even to her walls and suburb trenches;
that then the people, or the greater part, more than at other times,
wholly taken up with the study of the highest and most important matters
to be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing,
discourcing, even to a rarity and admiration,
things not before discourced or written of,
argues first a singular good will,
contentedness and confidence in your prudent forsight,
and safe government, Lords and Commons;
and from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well-grounded contempt
of their enemies, as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us,
as his was, who when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, being in the city,
bought that piece of ground at no cheap rate
whereon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment.
Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and victory.
For as in a body, when the blod is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous,
not only to vital, but to rational faculties,
and those in the acutes and the pertest operations of wit and subtilty,
it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is;
so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up,
as it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety,
but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of contyroversy,
and new invention, it betokens us not degenerated,
nor drooping to a fatal decay,
by casting off the old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs,
and wax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue,
destined to become great and honourable in these latter ages.
Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man
after sleep, and shaking her inincible locks;
methinks I see her as an eagle nursing her mighty youth,
and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam;
purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance;
while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds,
with those also that love the twilight, flutter about amazed at what she means,
and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.


Big Bertha Thing liberty

Milton (1644) from The Liberty of Unlicensed Printing
What should ye do then,
should ye suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge and new light sprung up
and yet springing daily in this city?
Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers over it,
to bring a famine upon our minds again,
when we shall know nothing but what is measured to us by their bushell?
Believe it, Lords and Commons! they who counsel you to such a suppression,
do as good as bid ye suppress yourselves; and I will soon show how.
If it be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free writing and free speaking,
there cannot be assigned a truer than your own mild, and free, and humane government:
it is the liberty, Lords and Commons,
which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us;
liberty, which is the nurse of all great wits;
this is that which hath rarified and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven;
this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged,
and lifted up our apprehensions degrees above themselves.
Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing,
less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves,
that made us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty.
We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal, slavish, as ye found us;
but you then must first become that which ye cannot be,
oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us.
That our hearts are now more capacious,
our thoughts more erected to the search and expectations of greatest and exactest things,
is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress that,
unless ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless law,
that fathers may despatch at will their own children.
And who shall then stick closest to ye, and excite others?
not he who takes up arms for coat and conduct, and his four nobles of Dangelt.
Although I dispraise not the defence of just immunities,
yet love my peace better, if that were all. Give me the liberty to know,
to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience, above all liberties.


Big Bertha Thing indomitable

(1938) about biography of Lord Grey of Falloden

Lord Grey of Falloden sprang from a Northumberland family of country squires,
who for generations had played a part in public affairs.
His own pleasures lay in the country, but his sense of duty drove him into politics.
He was happiest fishing for trout, and watching wild birds,
but once he was a member of parliament his abilities and character
won for him a prominence that gave him little time for such pursuits.
From 1905 to 1916 Lord Grey was Foreign Secretary.
It is strange that the man whose heart was never entirely in politics
should have risen to such a high office, should have held it so long,
and in such crucial years.

It is possible to consider Lord Grey's life as a failure.
His sense of duty prevented him from living the life he loved.
His efforts to preserve the peace of Europe suffered the defeat of August 1914,
that darkened the rest of his life.
He sacrificed his eyesight in his wartime service in the government.
When at last release came, and he returned to his birds and books,
he could no longer see them. Domestic griefs beset him.
Yet as our extract from his biography shows,
from this tragic material his serene and strong nature
won a greatness that is an inspiration and splendid example.(Two extracts follow)

He was equally cut off from books, of which as life advanced he had grown scarcely less
fond.

I classify the different parts of my body as being
of different ages, as thus:
Sense of smell aged 99 years
Eyes 95
Stomach 85
Sense of Hearing 56 (My age)
Brain 56
Heart and lungs 45
It makes an unequal team to get along with.

 

[krw]

In article <eseef4$8qk_001@s993.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com says...

In article <MPG.20536be861bedd6a98a048@news.individual.net>,
krw <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:
In article <esbpq1$8qk_005@s977.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com says...
In article <MPG.2052091685c10ec298a03a@news.individual.net>,
krw <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:
In article <es928h$8ss_001@s1006.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com says...
In article <es829g$2hl$2@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <87fy8paqu8.fsf@nonospaz.fatphil.org>,
Phil Carmody <thefatphil_demunged@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) writes:
ls -lu

I assume you had a point.

I think his point is that access time is part of the metadata
that accompanies the file.

It is not stored into the data part of the file. The file's sectors
are
not rewritten so there is no change to that part. I believe that it is
the time you close the file and not the time you opened it that
actually
ends up stored BTW. None of this matters to the backup method I
suggested.



So we have 3 cases:
- If it doesn't change the last-accessed time, then the "last-
accessed time" is in fact a falsity;
- If it changes the last-accessed time and stores the new access,
then the restored file will not be what it was a backup of;
- If it changes the last-accessed time but doesn't store the new
time, then the file in the backup is not identical to the
filesystem that it is a backup of.
All three of these are unsatisfactory. Therefore I contend that
this field is indeed not a useful field when it comes to considering
the behaviour of backups.

No, this is all silly. The backup I have been refering to is not cover
in
the cases in your list. What I suggested was a complete image of the
drive.

That has the problem of also preserving the bad spots of the disk.

Modern disks don't show their "bad spots" to the system.

I'm assuming that this housekeeping moved into the smart
controllers.

The disk drive itself.

Has controller functionality moved into all disk drives? That
sorta sucks. ....Do these disk drives have multi ports?

The original ATA (as in; [IBM PC] AT Attached) drives had the
controller integrated into the drive. The "controller" was no more
than buffers off the "AT" (ISA) bus. As things progressed, more of
the "controller" function moved back to the controller (DMA, etc.).
Drives still have a lot of smarts. No, they're not mult-ported.

They're
replaced from a cache of hidden sectors as they fail. This doesn't
mean it isn't possible to lose data when one fails though.

So what does a bit-to-bit copy of the physical mean? Bit-to-bit
implies all bits, including the ones covered by the error handler...
doesn't it?

Any bad sectors are mapped out so they don't get copied. They no
longer exist. In fact one should never see a bad sector on a disk.
If you do, throw it away. The spare sectors have been used up and
data sectors (the ones you paid for) are being used for replacements.
This indicates a severely damaged drive.

So if you don't ever "see" bad sectors, how does the human know
that a disk replacement is required? Do we have to wait until
it's a complete mess? What happened to mess prevention?

SMART will tell the user the disk is on it's way out. You have to
look, but the information is there.

Drives today use LBA (Logical Block Addressing).

Yes,yes. Is this hardware or software? Note, for the purposes
of this discussion, firmware is soft. Oh, and exclude optical--
I don't understand that stuff.

Firm^Wsoftware on the disk drive's controller.

When a sector
starts failing (retry threshold exceeded) the drive moves the data on
that sector to a spare/reserved sector (hopefully) close by, then
points to the new sector and marks the old as bad. The replacement
sector is mapped to be in the same logical position as the one it
replaced, even though it is not physically adjacent. When a sector-
for-sector copy is done to another drive (for instance) sectors are
copied from the source in logical (not physical)

Logical!!! Then it is NOT a bit-to-bit copy. Goddammit. I
goofed and believed them on this one.

Ok.

order to the target
(where they often end up in physical order).

When you say physical order, is this a numerical monotonically
increasing order of the sectors? Or is it ordered by the directory tree?

If it's a "bit-for-bit" copy it is in sector order. If it's a file-
by-file copy it's ordered by the directory tree.

Note that I realize different code does different things. Give me
the rule of thumb ;-)

Oh...were they using the term incorrectly again?

Words change meaning, levels of indirection are thrown in, confusion
reigns, Dimbulb is wrong (and swears a blue streak to prove it).
Nothing ever changes.

[glum emoticon here] Yea, no progres has been observed.

I've made this point in the other group, but sometimes things are
invented in more than one place at close to the same time. Each
invents new words and a mess occurs. For example: AMD and Intel have
totally different and contradictory vocabulary WRT caches. I always
get confused when reading either's cache docs.

--
Keith

 

[krw]

In article <e50b9$45e8a816$49ed0b4$27577@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
nonsense@unsettled.com says...

MassiveProng wrote:
On Fri, 2 Mar 2007 13:26:33 -0500, krw <krw@att.bizzzz> Gave us:


That's the whole point, dimmie! It doesn't *have* to be a legal
document. That's the whole pint, dimmie!



Yes it *does*, you fucking retard. That is the ONLY point.

I met a fellow who was able to put his entire resume on
the back side of a business card.

Having met you, virtually, I now know two.

Except MassivelyWrong writes his with a crayon.

--
Keith

 

[krw]

In article <esbq1q$8qk_008@s977.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com says...

In article <MPG.20520a9f9e61c03b98a03c@news.individual.net>,
krw <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:
In article <es92g1$8ss_002@s1006.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com says...
In article <MPG.2050cf07addd0e6298a031@news.individual.net>,
krw <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:
In article <0sccu2tencv0vqes1nru8uec7if9e8f4cm@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org says...
On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:02:48 -0500, krw <krw@att.bizzzz> Gave us:

In article <97v6u2hhdaf437oki5ujqt4q3gkjghn3dv@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org says...
On Mon, 26 Feb 07 12:36:17 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:


The wrinkle to the new process is that the checks have stopped
traveling.


Bullshit. My landlord gets a check, and his bank submits it to my
bank who has it ON FILE RIGHT NOW, I get an image of the check in my
mailed monthly statement, and can look up a full size image of all my
checks online.

Dumber-than-a-dim-bulb, you're wrong.

No. You are. I can even request the return of the check.

Not if it's been cleared via "check 21". The check paper check is
turned into bits and the hard copy destroyed.

This is the bug in the process, IMO. The process depends on the human,
who is scanning the physical paper, to destroy it.

It doesn't matter if the physical check is destroyed or not. The
routing and account numbers are all that matters. The paper check is
only a carrier for those.


What prevents multiple scans?

Oh, that's the real beauty of the system. NOTHING. It happens all
the time. Better have online banking so you can catch it before you
start bouncing checks.

BTW, I had to agree to allow my employer to reach into my account to
pull money out before I could get direct deposit. At least there is
some protection there, but this will become the general case.

--
Keith

 

[Ken Smith]

In article <eseflq$8qk_001@s993.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
<jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:

In article <esc6m4$atc$3@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <esbpio$8qk_004@s977.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <es9djf$q95$3@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
[....]
You are in error. Last access is an important datum.

Please explain exactly how you thing the last access is important.

[This is the piece I inadventently deleted]

What
do you do with this information?

I, the BACKUP programmer, will save all files during an incremental
that has an access date after the date-time argument of the /SINCE
switch.

This makes it no longer an "incremental". You are in fact doing a partial
save on the system.

That is what an incremental is.

No, it isn't. An "incremental backup" is a record of the files that have
changed or in some cases merely the changes. The very word "increment"
refers to a change this should be your clue as to the correct meaning.

The mere fact that you do something that is not an
incremental and call that an incremental, doesn't make you right about any
of the things you've posted on the subject.

You are telling the developers that they are wrong?!!

No, I am telling you that you are wrong. There are many people out there
who are developers. Some make mistakes. You are making one.

A far better way to do a
backup is still to make an image of the drive.

No, it is not. It is a faster way, not a better way. You lose
information when you do a bit-to-bit.

No, you don't lose information. You save all of the information that cn
be saved. Some is lost in the drive its self but there is absolutely
nothing that can be done about this.

And I've just realized
that your reference of "bit-to-bit" isn't really a bit-to-bit.
I assumed you were correct in this one but I was wrong.

You read the other part of the thread where this was covered. Big deal!
The images is still the absolute best you can do. Anything less is less
information than that.

[....]

In this context, the only use of that
information will be a mistake.

Are you interested enough to read some code which implements
this stuff correctly?

Yes, do you know of any?


Yes. I developed and maintained it. I was not the original
developer. We called it BACKUP.EXE and the source files
are BACKUP.MAC and BACKRS.MAC. The OS was called TOPS-10.

Well if it contains your mistakes, I don't see much point in reading it.
I have seen lots of "backup" programs that did not in fact work.



--
--
kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

 

[Ken Smith]

In article <87zm6t5c5o.fsf@nonospaz.fatphil.org>,
Phil Carmody <thefatphil_demunged@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
[....]

You are telling the developers that they are wrong?!!

He's telling you you're wrong. I don't believe you could develop
anything more complex than gout.

Lots of very complex but wrong software has been developed.


--
--
kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

 

[Ken Smith]

In article <eseef4$8qk_001@s993.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
<jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
[.....]

Has controller functionality moved into all disk drives?

Some fraction of the controller has been on the disk drive for a long
time. As we went ST506->EDI->fast ATA->SATA, more and more of the
workings moved into the drive.

That
sorta sucks. ....Do these disk drives have multi ports?

As I suspect you mean multi-port, they never had and never will. There is
only one set of hardware to be controlled. Making it multiported would
slow things down and add a bunch of electronics for no gain anywhere.

[....]

So if you don't ever "see" bad sectors, how does the human know
that a disk replacement is required? Do we have to wait until
it's a complete mess? What happened to mess prevention?

I will just leave that unanswered but here for you to read over.

Drives today use LBA (Logical Block Addressing).

Yes,yes. Is this hardware or software? Note, for the purposes
of this discussion, firmware is soft. Oh, and exclude optical--
I don't understand that stuff.

It is a mix of the two. There is hardware and firmware. Without the
hardware, you couldn't have the firmwhere.

order to the target
(where they often end up in physical order).

When you say physical order, is this a numerical monotonically
increasing order of the sectors? Or is it ordered by the directory tree?

The sectors end up in physical order. The drive knows nothing of the
logical structure written onto it therefor obviously, that can't be what
sets the order.

Note that I realize different code does different things. Give me
the rule of thumb ;-)

Nothing can base results on information it doesn't have.

--
--
kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

 

[Ken Smith]

In article <eseg77$8qk_001@s993.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
<jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:

In article <esc81s$atc$5@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <esboom$8qk_001@s977.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <es9f0f$q95$6@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <es98ds$8qk_001@s1006.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
[....]
The other stuff I've spoken to elsewhere.

The case that I brought up was database; with databases, the data
is always a moving target that can never be snap-shot with accuracy.

This is not always true. In a multidisk mirroring system, you can do a
commit and unmount one drive. It will be an image of what was there at
the time the commit happened. Disks are fast enough that this option can
be used for most applications. The delay caused by the OS's commit
operation is not very long.

I know this is one strategy. One kind of implementation was called
striping. For a reservation system, this may not be the best
technique because data entry and maintenance is over a wide
geographical area; the speed of light is very slow.

You said "never".

That's right; that kind of data base can never be snapshot with
accuracy; this is because the same field can change often at
the same wall clock time.

So now you go back to "never". Which is it?

You now admit that the method I stated does exist.

I never said it didn't exist. I said it couldn't be backed up
with the snapshot stratgey.

You were wrong when you said this. The method of doing a commit, and then
an image makes a backup of the files as they existed at an exact instant
in time. There is no way around it, you were wrong.


[....]

The
speed of light issue is only a slight delay on the commit process.

It is a huge delay.

On your plannet, the speed of light must be very low. The disk is a
mechanical thing. Light can go a very long way in 100uS. The head on a
disk doesn't get very far in that much time.

[....]

What do you mean by "timekeeper". I have to ask because there is no such
problem in any part I can think of as the "timekeeper".

In any computer system, there has to be a timekeeper which will
dictate the time so all things can be synchronized. When this
syncrosity is spread geographically, some flavor of timekeeper
has to be the boss so that coincidental events don't overwrite
each other.

There is not bottle neck in that if you don't do something completely
daft. BTW: coincidental events won't overwrite each other unless you do
something also daft. Today, time stamping can be done with very high
accuracy for very little cost. The GPS system sends a very accurate clock
around the world for you. You don't have to use time packets and figure
travel times any more.


[....]

Contention also needs handling because two events could have
the same time stamp.

Contention is only an issue if you have multiprocessing and events that
can't be commuted.

I have been talking about a reservation system. You and somebody
half-way around the world can make a reservation for the same flight.
How do you think such a system prevents you from sitting in that
other person's lap?...or, for that matter, out on the wing?

That is pretty obvious. Based on what you have said, I doubt you actually
wrote the code that dealt with this. You have made too many mistakes on
the issue to be the one who actually wrote it. Just being in the same
room where it was written doesn't count.


--
--
kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

 

[Ken Smith]

In article <esef6o$8qk_001@s993.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
<jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:

In article <esc9ar$atc$7@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <esbqel$8qk_010@s977.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <es9g7v$q95$8@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
[.....]
This is part of the "complex issues" skipped to keep the list short.

Do you think that a swapper moves pages from the RAM to the
swap file?

If you think otherwise, you don't know what you are talking about. This
is what "swapping" in a VM system implies.

It didn't in any VM system JMF implemented.

Then JMF was not implementing VM as the term is commonly used in the
industry. He obvious implemented something that he called VM.

People who do the first implementations in the industry get to do the
naming. We got to do that a lot. I know IBM did an implementation.
I don't remember if the other six sisters did.

The generally accepted meaning in the industry is the one that matters.
VM has a generally accepted meaning. You seem to have your own private
meaning. Welll good for you but it doesn't help you to communicate when
you you vuncanize a gorm for a pogo.

I'm unaware of
any other OS that used the term in that wasy.

In which way?

The way you've been using it. From your descriptions you
think the RAM is a replacement of our core memory.

RAM is the currently used term.

I can
see where some implmentations would do this because RAM
capacities grew so large so fast. Swapping transfers
a context to the disk, not memory.

This is not what you said early. I see you have learned something new.
This is good.

Doing memory to memory
copies without using a disk was called shuffling.

Perhaps it was called that by you and a few others. The process of
"compacting" was crushing the gaps out of the memory map. Since the moves
involved don't look anything like shuffling, I don't see why anyone would
use such a misleading term, for the operations involved.



--
--
kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

 

[MassiveProng]

On Sun, 04 Mar 07 12:12:25 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:

I don't call webbing modern computing.

No, but it IS the absolute best resource for a dope like you to
learn about it. You are the main reason why I feel that anyone taking
computer sciences as a major should have to take electronics first.
You are clueless as to how things actually work at the hardware level.

That is why they call this the "information age". For you to live
your pathetic life, cutting yourself out of an entire segment of the
worldwide information base is yet another proof that you do not have a
single clue.

Start with NEETS

http://tpub.com/neets/

After you learn a little about electronics, take a new, modern course
in computer sciences.

Short of that, I give you zero credence as you are stuck several
decades in the past.

 

[MassiveProng]

On Sun, 04 Mar 07 12:24:46 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:

That is not a bit by bit compare.

For the most part, yes it is as there cannot be one bit out of place
and yield the same checksum, AND the exact bits that would have to be
off in order to yield the same checksum put the likelihood at about 10
to the 17th power to one odds against.

So, you were also unaware that checksums are the de facto standard
in the industry? How telling.

Entire CD and DVD and soon HD DVD images are verified in this
manner. Has been done for decades without a miss.

What happened to you? Why have you "missed" the rest of the world?