jabberwcky

You are literally commenting on the thread for a blog post describing the mess that occurs when a drive is incorrectly erased. JFC

> This is not remotely accurate

At least Ext4 repeats the complete superblock at the beginning of every block group, so yes, it is not only remotely accurate, but entirely accurate. In the case of GPT, Linux requires explicit command line options to enable alternative GPT use, but do you know this is true for all systems in existence and all versions of Linux?

> Rebooting and re-detecting everything between partitioning and mkfs is not part of any ordinary OS installation procedure

Yes, I've personally bumped into this on desktop and unattended server installs - numerous times.

But you're externalizing the onus to prove cases where some hacky approach won't ever break when there is a vastly simpler way to avoid this entire class of problem. This is exactly the reverse of sound logic -- I'm offering you concrete real world examples of why you should avoid the hack and you're simply ignoring them

At this point I'm considering this not only to be offering up worst-practice advice, but actively trolling. Possibly the worst case of "a little knowledge is dangerous" I've seen recently. Regards

GPT along with most filesystems store a bunch of stuff at random places around the disk, for many filesystems it's even configurable.

The most usual problem with your approach is recreating a set of partition tables exactly matching the old tables, while failing to wipe out a filesystem signature buried halfway into the disk. One reboot later, and magic header bytes start to be recognized as valid filesystems by whatever OS installer or BIOS utility you happen to be using. Even worse if you're been taking some hacky shotgun approach to blowing holes in the drive by zeroing out random sectors that belong to one of those recognized filesystems.

So once again,

> The only portable, reliable, robust way to accomplish this is wiping the drive

> But right now we're just trying to make a device appear functionally empty so that we can re-install an OS without remnants of any previous installation getting in the way

The only portable, reliable, robust way to accomplish this is wiping the drive. If the original author had issued a secure erase, they would not have encountered any subsequent difficulties, all of which were due to partially erasing the device.

It is still bad advice, zero filling an SSD is not nearly the same as erasing it due to the presence of large (up to 10% or more of the drive) overprovisioning areas present in all devices, ignoring the permanent wear zero-filling the drive also causes, and the fact the controller believes real data remains stored, placing restrictions on its ability to perform internal maintenance

This option is horrendously inefficient on most modern drives. For many SSDs, issuing a secure erase request is an almost instantaneous process as it only requires the drive to generate a replacement encryption key, and need not even entail bulk writing or erasing physical flash pages

The worst experience I had with this involved 4 customer service representatives simply hanging up (after a 30+ minute wait) after exhausting their script. I simply recorded the final call, stopping paying the bill, and sent the documentation I had to the credit reference agency when the contract went into default

At some point they sent a debt collection agency, that was much less stressful than it sounds. They called me up, "you owe $telco money", "No I don't", "oh?", "Yes, I have complete documentation of cancelling it, but their CS reps kept hanging up. Sorry, you've been had.", "Oh, this again. Sorry to have bothered you.", never heard from the debt collection agency again.

Substantively, this is a battle between a US media powerhouse and a sovereign nation over control of its local media. This isn't "ideological flamewar", it is an inescapable reality underpinning the case.

I like the idea of flipping DIMMs to get capacity and processing improvements, and also the thought that mass-produced memory with this tech could potentially significantly reduce the cost of AI hardware through commoditization

Thanks

(obligatory scihub reference)

Dubious energy savings claims, but sounds like potentially awesome tech. Looking forward to their slides/paper next week

We can conveniently nitpick whether or not we treat Apple products as an integrated hardware-software product, the reality is thousands of these units have shipped and from those screenshots, many have already racked up 2-4 years wear in a matter of weeks, for a component that cannot be replaced without replacing the entire motherboard.

The product configuration as shipped inflicts permanent damage on itself, it's very difficult to see this as anything but a manufacturing defect.

Love this! Please make landing screen a teeny bit prettier and you could definitely start recommending this to regular 'retail' folk. I'd consider putting the about text below the main 'create room' panel for example

It looks like a nerd app, just needs a tiny bit of swish to make it a mom and pop app too