1237e148c1c8
tech



Hello Pascal - 

CA>> If I remember correctly being _able_ to eject a CD at
CA>> inappropriate times without un-mounting it was one of the
CA>> complaints about supermount mentioned in a message base I
CA>> was reading?

PS> Must be ancient history. 

Could be. Oddly enough even institutional webpages don't always
have dates of authorship on them. Used to be 'standard business
practice' to put a date at the upper left corner of all
professional correspondence just for this purpose, to inform
the reader that the information _may_ have been superseded by
newer information. 

PS> There are a few drives that are unable to lock their doors
PS> and very old kernels didn't offer the possibility. It's
PS> also not much of a problem for a CD since they're read-only
PS> and not much is going to happen to your data if it gets
PS> ejected without umounting. 

I was thinking of zipdrives and CD burners but yes, read-only
media it wouldn't necessarilly matter all that much. 

CA>> When I meet young people who claim to program in multiple
CA>> languages sequentially that use very similar syntax I can
CA>> only assume that they are very tolerant of their own
CA>> mistakes and never expect to write working code the first
CA>> (or second) time that they try to. 

PS> I don't have much of a choice. I currently have a student's
PS> job at university teaching lower semesters to program in
PS> Haskell, and the stuff I do for my diploma thesis involves
PS> programming in Standard ML. ;) 

Two languages or even possibly three that are much the same
would've been doable when I was younger and more flexible. :-) 

I'm getting older and more stubborn with each passing day. 

CA>> If webpages weren't so over-done with graphics, animation,
CA>> and clientside scripting we could all be a bit safer. :-) 

PS> Since that is not going to change :(, the browser writers
PS> will have to provide more security, such as only running
PS> plugins in a secured environment, WITHOUT access to any
PS> files on the system and without the ability to call other
PS> programs. 

Browser authors seem to fan the flames rather than put out the
fires. The anal attitudes of the W3C annoy me at times but if
they had been more in control from the start we'd probably be
better off overall than we are now with no one in control. :-\ 

CA>> I think this happened to my son-in-law at EDS more than
CA>> once. The cleanup and transfer of database files stopped
CA>> dead in the middle of the night and put all other jobs
CA>> behind by many hours because there was no one to reply "y"
CA>> to a prompt. LOL 

PS> Very annoying if the problem didn't show up in testing but
PS> only in real use. 

EDS forces many employees to work from their homes and be on
call 24/7. I got the impresssion someone was encouraged to make
last minute changes late that evening and didn't test it before
allowing it to be queued into the job cycle that night. 

CA>> It seems your MO drive and disks are the only working long
CA>> term storage media for non-business users I can find at
CA>> this time. 

PS> Seems to be the case, at least if you want something that
PS> is known to be reliable. MOs have existed for over 20 years
PS> and so experience with them exists and proves that you
PS> really can trust those things for 10+ years. 

I am going to do more research into MO drives and may have to
bite the bullet and get one and some disks to store my more
valuable data on. :-) 

CA>> Or very paranoid for awhile as I have done. :-) 

PS> Doesn't mean they're not really after you. ;) 

Now you're scaring me. LOL 

>
>        ,                          ,
>      o/      Charles.Angelich      \o       ,
>       __o/
>     / >          USA, MI           < \   __\__
 

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