Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
It is beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured.
and
Attorney General Ashcroft said we got assurances. Assurances? From a country that we also say now “oh, we can’t talk to them because we can’t take their word for anything”.
Man, it’s great to listen to a Senator who remembers that there are three equal branches of government, not just one and two rubber stamps.
For years now, whenever I’ve had drive or controller problems, I’ve hauled out IBM’s DFT (Drive Fitness Test), even if the drive isn’t a DeathstarDeskstar. Now IBM’s drive division belongs to Hitachi, but DFT lives on. I used it last week to make sure my new colo box could handle the sorts of loads I wanted to put on it. But now that I have my old colo box back, I want to test it to see if the problems I was having might be fixed with a new drive cable before I sell it on eBay.
But this box doesn’t have a floppy. No problem, I thought, the Hitachi site has a bootable CD version. So I downloaded it and burned it and booted with it. But the first thing it does it scan the IDE controllers, and when it’s scanning “Secondary Slave”, it suddenly starts spewing errors about being unable to read A:\COMMAND.COM. Evidently DFT needs to read its own disk just at the moment that the drive was disconnected for scanning. So when they made the CD ISO, they didn’t actually test it, or didn’t think about how it works, and instead of using the “Linux Live CD” model where they make a ramdisk and load themselves into it, they just made a DOS boot partition on the CD and expect it to be there all the time.
I guess it’s off to my junk shelf to see if I have a floppy drive and cable.