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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If we knew what city/route/service and day, we might be able to get a better idea.

    • Sometimes operators declare a ‘fare holiday’ when everyone rides free, usually as compensation for some major fuckup previously, or for some other PR stunt. Metlink in Wellington doesn’t charge on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or New Year’s Eve.

    • Operators sometimes half-strike and refuse to collect fares.

    • The specific route, service, or time of day might be free.

    • It’s an express service that you can’t pay cash on (only fare cards) and it’s easier/nicer to tell you to ride for free than to tell you to get the next bus because they don’t take cash.

    • You might be part of some group (youth, students, elderly) that doesn’t have to pay.

    • Something is broken and they can’t collect fares.

    • They don’t want to deal with the big banknote you had.




  • Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

    Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

    Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

    Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

    For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.











  • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nztomemes@lemmy.worldYarrr
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    28 days ago

    You can’t really have effective copy protection on any disc that can be played in a basic CD player; they’re just too simple.

    So Sony’s approach was to put an autorun installer for a ‘music player’ on the disk too. If installed, it attempted to lock your CD drive from being used by any other software and couldn’t be easily uninstalled. And they pirated open-source software (yes, that’s possible) to build it.

    SMH My Head.


  • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nztomemes@lemmy.worldYarrr
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    28 days ago

    Try the Sony BMG Rootkit, contained on music CDs:

    In 2005 it was revealed that the implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs distributed by Sony BMG installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and “phone home” with reports on the user’s private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software’s existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.




  • I don’t think the US/Canada usually does that style of power pole, with three phases on a crossarm and no neutral below.

    Barriers on what looks like a pretty low-traffic low-risk road too.

    I would think somewhere Scandinavia or central Europe. NZ wouldn’t put barriers like that up.

    Rock wall near bottom of picture screams old.