Techie Talk

So after some testing magic jack was giving me some choppy voice, but I attirubte that to vmware more than the gizmo or software itself.
But then.... I came home one day and noticed the vm rebooted, and not cleanly. So it didn't start up again. I had to poke it to restart.
I was on a call for work (best test I can think of) and the vm crashed again.
Ok, so much for that.
So I just installed the latest virtualbox, installed xp and installed magicjack.
Hopefully vbox will fare better.

wow that was horrible. The sound cuts out 50% of the time, like you get .2 seconds of audio then .2 seconds of dead.
I hope there's some way to get this working....

heh, site blocked for "hacking" have to check it when I get home.

My friend mistakenly added the wrong disk to a RAID array and wiped some data he needs. Any idea on the best way to recover this. It's a PC and likely NTFS formatted.

Restore the data from his most recent backup, of course.

If only he had one :-P

if you actually wrote over data the only way to get it back if at all is to get one of those $1000 per byte data recovery places to try.
His data isn't THAT important.
If he only wrote over the directory tree, then he should start learning about how filesystems work and try and piece it together himself.
Do they still make sector editors anymore?

do hex editors read from block devices directly, as if I wanted to edit the MBR myself.
or are you saying mount the device as a file and do it that way...

why not? everything is a file. block devices are random access.

Exactly. I once used a hex editor to reconstruct, partition by partition, a Sun disklabel that had been maliciously wiped out by an unauthorized user.
All it takes is a bootable CD with a hex editor loaded, and a knowledge of the device you're trying to reconstruct.

This is of course assuming that the device is not physically malfunctioning.

Hey! He stole my line "[it's] like using the space shuttle to drive to the grocery store." I made that up like ten years ago!

I think the novelty there is they were willing to build a custom chip.
ANYBODY could have done that since all x86 motherboards still have to have all the same crap on them.
You can chop one of those babies into 1370 pieces and have a kick ass no-pc-left-behind $100 machine.

Actually, the idea of building cheap-and-sleazy servers using the Atom CPU is being floated by a number of different manufacturers. Intel doesn't really want it to happen because it cannibalizes their high-end server chip sales.

That's just what a lot of people need, though. I've got a Dell PowerEdge 2650 sucking down power in my basement 24 hours a day. Do I need all that power all the time? Of course not. I would welcome a box that sips power, especially during the 99% of the day when it's idle.

My understanding was that Intel was requiring contracts from Atom OEM's that had some pretty specific stipulations about what sort of laptops could be built with them.

That's correct -- there are limits on the physical dimensions of the display, for example. They seem pretty intent on making sure the Atom is only used in mobile devices. I'm guessing they'll make exceptions for vendors like Sea Micro if they feel that the vendor would otherwise go with ARM for their application ... either that or Sea Micro is just buying the chips without the same kind of discounts that Dell and HP are getting.

Now that I think about it, there's really no reason why a home server needs to be x86-based. Most families just need them to be file servers and Internet gateways, which will run just fine on ARM. Even in a highly automated home like mine which adds things like X-10 and Asterisk, there's nothing that won't run on ARM with a mere recompile.

Hmm. ARM or Atom CPU, plus disks that spin down when not in use ... I'd really like that.