Dave.

There’s geological, and then there’s ecological. Mars has geology but has no ecosystem discovered thus far.

So the question, “should we replace one ecosystem with another on Mars for our own benefit?” doesn’t really make much sense. There isn’t anything to replace, as far as we can tell right now.

Perhaps consider instead that creating an ecosystem where there wasn’t one before is of an overall net benefit to life in the universe, of which all current evidence points to being present on only one planet.

Especially after all the spam on Facebook like:

“RANDOM_FRIEND wants to get in touch with you on Threads™!”

“RANDOM_FRIEND just posted something on Threads™! Check it out!”

Etc etc

And then the interleaving of Threads™ teaser posts amongst Facebook posts with half a sentence and then “…” and any interaction with it prompts you to join threads so you can read the rest of that sentence that hooked you in…

Or the “easy and fun™” way that every Instagram account has a Threads™ account just waiting to be activated by you.

I wonder how much of a user base they would have without all the jamming it down user’s throats.

They should be able to put memtest on the boot partition and then break to an EFI shell on boot and Ioad it manually.

There will be a bit of swearing and googling required but it’s doable in a way that doesn’t mess with the current boot arrangement.

Did they give you a very funny reason for this requirement, or is it just some windows exclusive garbage that doesn’t work in wine?

Why do people always ask this kind of crap?

If you have a corporate laptop, it will likely have a suite of software centrally managed by your company’s IT department.

It will contain software that is also centrally licenced so that your boss doesn’t have to figure out how to pay for thousands of dollars of software, they can just tell IT to bill a licence for software X to your cost centre at $13.75 a month.

It will have a domain login that is your corporate identity which will usually require multi factor authentication.

It will have some corporate VPN solution which operates mostly transparently and requires zero setup on your part.

It will contain company sensitive data which will usually be encrypted by bitlocker, whose keys are stored with your domain account.

It will have the usual Teams/Outlook/SharePoint stuff with a centralised calendar and contacts for your company, and likely security classifications for all the communications you do through it, allowing you to join groups, accept invites to restricted groups, and limit access, all linked to your domain account.

It will have mapped drives to your corporate file storage , again, all linked to your domain account.

It will probably have OneDrive, synced to a corporate server, again, linked to your domain account.

It will have a printing solution that is linked to your domain account so that your printers follow you wherever you go and you can easily find and print to the secure print queue on some random printer you happen to walk past in one of your offices, so you can enter your PIN or swipe your access card and have that IMPORTANT_SECRET_RESEARCH.DOC file print while you’re standing in front of the printer.

And finally, your work laptop does not belong to you. Wiping it and installing Linux plus Wine and keeping company sensitive data on an unmanaged device will attract the ire of HR.

Your IT department won’t give a crap. But they also won’t help if anything doesn’t work, such as trying to join a domain to access allllll those domain-linked features with an unauthorised device.

They will simply re-image your laptop to bring it back to a known state that they can deal with, because they are dealing with thousands of devices. They need everything to be homogeneous simply because they don’t have the manpower to manage anything else or to audit a million different configurations for security issues or data leaks.

So no, suggesting Linux + Wine to run some “windows exclusive garbage” isn’t an answer here.

There is a certain amount of wank factor in mechanical keyboards. But if you are a high volume typist or heavy keyboard user, a keyboard that suits your typing style (with regards to springiness and feedback) absolutely helps.

If you primarily just use the WASD keys a few hours a week with a bit of half assed sorta touch typing in between then they’re not really needed.

Eh…Windows 3.1, 95, 98SE, XP, and 7 were all pretty great.

From a user interface perspective, they were okay, perhaps because by the time people got to XP they’d had a decade of a consistent interface and were just used to its quirks.

From a security context they were not ok. Not ok at all.

Digg was Reddit, before Reddit came along. And then they tried to monetise it all and pushed out a site layout update that “enhanced” that monetisation aspect (sound familiar?)

Basically they fucked it up right there.

I left Digg in 2010 and never went back, and now the domain and it’s remnants are owned by some advertising company.

I would like to hear your opinion on crumbed, deep fried, pineapple rings. 🤔

For example : https://www.redrooster.com.au/menu/sides-kids-meals/pineapple-fritter/

Also, things not designed for food use or human consumption don’t have to follow strict rules regarding their composition, and they’re not monitored.

Nobody is checking PVA glue for heavy metals or melamine or pesticides or any other number of things that will give your insides a bad day.

Nobody is issuing a recall if your bottle of glue ends up with ground up glass in it.

Because it’s not food, and it doesn’t matter, until you put half a cup of it in your pizza because Google told you it was a good idea.

Mmm I’d take Common Sense Skeptic’s spaceX videos with about a ton of salt. They’ve got a real big bug up their ass about spaceX for some reason.

I don’t know about you, but I just swiped my way through the first sentence off this reply with Google’s keyboard and all I had to do was select swiped instead of the suggested settled.

They do remember common words that you use, so if you have accidentally “approved” a few misspellings they’ll be suggested/given to you more often so a drastic solution to that is to clear your personalised data from the keyboard.

LIVE BLACKBIRDS???

Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,

Oh wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

The king was in his counting house counting out his money,

The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey

The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,

When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!

Moral of the story, don’t be a minor character in an 18th century nursery rhyme.

I can’t speak for the popularity of TurboVPN, or the probable ease in which companies can manipulate download numbers, but note the “+” on the end of each number.

NordVPN could have 99,999,995 downloads, TurboVPN can have 100,000,002 downloads, but one would be 50M+ and the other would be 100M+.

Yes, I shifted to my own domain after my default ISP of 20 years decided that email was just too hard, you know? They didn’t outright say it, they just started batch processing emails so that I’d get all my daily emails at around 2 am the next day. Super handy for time limited password reset emails!

A few hours reading a guide and setting up a $5/mo linode email server with SPF and dmarc, a few more hours transferring 20 years of IMAP mail from my old account to a folder, and a month or so of changing a few site contact emails over each day when they emailed something to my old account, and now I’ve got an email server on my own domain that is 10 times faster at sending/receiving mail than my old ISP ever was.

And now I can have amazon@mydomain.com and career@mydomain.com and random other disposable addresses so that when they are inevitably sold off for the $$$ I can just dump them and maintain a spam free inbox.

You’re thinking of a firewall. NAT is just the thing that makes a connection appear to come from…

That connection only “appears to come from” if I explicitly put a rule in my NAT table directing it to my computer behind the router doing the NAT-ing.

Otherwise all connections through NAT are started from internal->external network requests and the state table in NAT keeps track of which internal IP is talking to which external IP and directs traffic as necessary.

So OP is correct, it does apply a measure of security. Port scanning someone behind NAT isn’t possible, you just end up port scanning their crappy NAT router provided by their ISP unless they have specifically opened up some ports and directed them to their internal IP address.

Compare this to IPV6 where you get a slice of the public address space to place your devices in and they are all directly addressable. In that case your crappy ISP router also is a “proper” firewall. Strangely enough it usually is a “stateful” firewall with default deny-all rules that tracks network connections and looks and performs almost exactly like the NAT version, just without address translation.

Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.

When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.

Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.

Added edit:

Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.

The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.

M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?

I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.

The partition table is just a set of pointers to various places on the physical disk where partitions should be, inside those partitions are filesystems with all your data. It’s like the table of contents in a book. You can mess around with the table of contents and make the page numbers for chapters different, but all the words in the book are still there.

Now you’re lucky that filesystem drivers are fairly smart these days. They sanity check things all the time. When you write the partition table to disk all the active filesystem drivers get notified of the changes, so they can keep track of things. When the driver noticed that the size of your filesystem exceeded the size of your partition, it basically was like “Hold it right there, I’m not touching any of this!”. At that point the filesystem would have been forcibly unmounted and disconnected, which is why none of your commands worked after running cfdisk, they were on that filesystem.

Note that your approach was almost the right way to do it. To make your filesystem bigger you can expand the partition using cfdisk ( as long as there is physical room on the disk!) and then run a program called resize2fs , and it will expand the filesystem to suit.

Similarly, you can shrink the filesystem in the same kind of way, except you run resize2fs first and command it to shrink the filesystem to a particular size. It will do that (assuming there’s enough free space in your filesystem to do so) then you shrink the corresponding partition with cfdisk to match.

Of course, as you’ve learned, resizing partitions is moderately risky so backups are a good idea. Having said that I routinely expand filesystems in VMs like this without backups - I make the VMs disk larger in its settings, then run cfdisk and expand the partition, then run resize2fs.

The filesystem driver knows the size of the filesystem is larger than the physical size of the partition it is on. Because of that it refuses to do anything with it until that discrepancy is sorted.

Boot to a USB/ISO, run cfdisk, extend the partition size back to original or larger, then run fsck on the partition again.

It sounds like your sync process can create files, but not rename them afterwards.

That long filename you’ve got now is likely the temporary name you get while the file is being transferred, once it’s fully there it usually gets renamed to what you want it to be.

Go up one level and check the permissions for the directory the files are in. The permissions should be read-write, otherwise it’d not be able to create files in there at all, but check if the “sticky bit” is set. That stops processes from renaming files once they are made.

Unfortunately I’m travelling at the moment, but hopefully your file manager will have a way of showing if the “sticky bit” is set for that directory.

Heavy debian testing / unstable user for over a decade here. I have never had to worry about doing 1/2/3 and I let my package manager do whatever it wants whenever it wants.