India's time is here, and beware hard drive miracles

Mike,

I've been a regular visitor(came to know about "The Register" through Tom's) here and came across many articles about this outsourcing spree and you guys seem to have taken the stand against this idea.

At the same time u guys seem to have wrong information about how much do Indians get paid. In an article, about a month or two ago, u mentioned Indians do get paid around $3 - $4 where as their U.S. counterparts get paid double that. As a matter of fact, most of these companies that pick up these outsourcing projects pay around 90 cents to 120 cents unless it's a very high-end tech support like SAP Labs(which constitute less tan 2% of this business).

Even companies like Dell, IBM and HP fall in the same category of 90 cents.

Even the s/w engineers get paid probably 6 - 8% of their US Counterparts and never more(sad thing is that, we pay more than what u pay for the same products like cars and also the rents in cities like Bangalore and Mumbai are extrmely, extremely high) .

Most of my friends who did M.S in Michigan with me are getting paid about $80K per annum where as the Indians in India with the same experience get paid around $500 - $600 tops.

Regarding the article "Outsourcing pushes Indian property prices up", this hike in the property prices are never going to affect these companies, they effect only the employees who earn mere Rs. 9,000/- or less and work for more than 12 hours and w/o week-ends and horrible and ridiculous shifts.

Companies always get away with with sub standard infrastructure(PCs(lot of companies think a wheel mouse is a luxury), furniture, facilities, even headsets which are essential for this business) and nothing is going to effect them or their profits.

I feel that it's ridiculous that you or anybody in U.S and U.K getting all bugged up with this. In the 90s U.S. lost much more manufacturing jobs to China and other countries and nobody seemed to notice it.

Isn't this the part of globalization u guys taught the whole world? Now u seem to feel the side effects. What about the hundreds of small-scale industries in countries like India when they got wiped out by the MNCs and hundreds of people who lost their jobs?

I'm god damn sure that this is partly the fault of our *!#@#@ governments who didn't encourage the competition b/w the MNC's and the local companies and they are always interested in screwing these small local companies. In fact that's the difference b/w China and India.

In China, the govt. to SOME EXTENT extent, tried to support the local companies and made them compete with the MNCs (correct me if I'm wrong).

So, EARLIER YOU BEAT US WITH MORE INVESTMENTS AND NOW IS THE TIME WE BEAT U WITH HARD WORK(which, in turn means screwed up families), LESS PAY, HORRIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE, BAD WORKING CONDITIONS AND THE GREED OF YOUR OWN COMPANIES. All the best.

Rahul Chandana

Minnesota knows the right price

... how minnesotians know how much is exactly the right price for windows & co. Maybe the state of Minnesota also knows the 'right' price for all other goods! It could than open a business and make lots of money consulting car makers, newspapers, wal-marts and so forth. Or, they could just cut out the businesses altogether and errect giant, efficient, clean and cheap state-run factories. We saw how well that worked in north korea ...

Sincerely,

Wulf

Unused space on hard drives recovered

Regarding article "Unused space on hard drives recovered?" at this URL.

I am the "Linux SATA guy".

First, users are usually amused to learn that the capacity of modern hard drives is _unknown_, until it goes through the factory's qualification tests. The 120GB hard drive you purchased may have been physically identical to a 250GB hard drive, but simply it only passed qualification at 120GB.

Intel does the same thing with processors. A 3.0Ghz processor may be sold as 2.4Ghz, simply because it didn't pass qualification at 3.0Ghz but did at a lower clock speed.

Second, in the ATA standard there is a feature known as the "host protected area". This area is accessible from any OS -- but it requires special ATA commands in order to make this area available to the OS.

Third, all hard drives reserve a certain amount of free space to use for reallocation of bad sectors. These "spare sectors" are free space on your drive... completely unused until your hard drive starts finding problems on the physical media.

So this is old news :) Although the host-protected area (HPA) can be used for insidious purposes such as DRM/CPRM that is completely hidden from the users, most of the "invisible free space" exists for a purpose -- either it's spare sectors for bad sector remapping, or its capacity that didn't pass factory qualification, that you don't want to use anyway.

Feel free to edit/reproduce/publish this email.

Jeff Garzik

Not speaking for my employer, speaking as an Open Source guy

Hi Mike,

About the "recover unused space on your drive" article:

Working for a data-recovery company I know a thing or two about harddisks....

One is that if the vendors would be able to double the capacity for just about nothing, they would.

All this probably does is to create an invailid partition table which ends up having:

|...new partition.............................
|old partition.................................|

overlapping partitions. So writing either partition will corrupt the other. It probably so happens that whatever situation people tried it, it just so happened that the (quick) format of the "new" partition didn't corrupt the other partition to make it unbootable.

And the 200G -> 510Gb "upgrade" probably has ended up with three overlapping partitions....

Roger

Commenting on an article you posted today about hidden hard drive space. It was brought to my attention from a link to it from HardOCP.

What is happening is that Norton Ghost creates a virtual partition on the drive, and the data for that virtual partition resides on one of the existing partitions. So as more data is added on the virtual partition, a file on the normal drive partition expands as well.

It's kind of like a disk image which is being mounted to a drive letter. All the data for it is still on the primary partition.

Hopefully that's clear enough to explain what is happening here. The extra virtual partition basically is defined as the amount of freespace on the partition to which the that virtual partition file actually resides.

In short: No miracle space here, don't bother the hard drives manufactures. Just using a feature in ghost in a weird way, but with no real benifits other than being able to boot a disk image without reszing all the partitions on your drive.

Peace

Matt

Hello.

Here's my take on this phenomenon as an IT professional. I have HAD THIS HAPPEN BEFORE, with Microsoft FDisk. Microsoft tends to recycle [crappy] code, and it would appear that the tools called by the Disk Management MMC snapin are no exception. I didn't immediately realize what had happened some years ago (I think about 4 years ago now), but FDisk's faulty start/end sector calculation code ended up causing the program to create a ~3GB partition after an existing ~10.8GB partition on a ~11GB drive, after I had used it to delete a ~200MB Linux partition. This resulted in ~5GB of corrupted data on the primary partition due to the fact that I was probably half asleep at the time and wrote things to the other partition. I was not impressed. Regardless, this is almost certainly what's going on. I'd suggest to anyone trying this to fill the first partition with one HUGE file, take an MD5 checksum, write something to the second one, repeat MD5sum, and compare.

Just my three cents...

Paul Nienaber

Hi,

I'm writing regarding the "unused space on hard drives recovered?" article at http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597. As a frequent user of Ghost, both for work and personal machines, it is quite obvious all this method is doing is corrupting the discs' partition tables.

I'd be curious to know if the person who sent you this ever tried to FILL all partitions of the disc and then verify the data is usable. Basically, you're corrupting the hard drive's information that says its size and telling the computer it's larger-- it will definitely APPEAR that you mysteriously have tons of new space, but it WILL cause corruption and data loss.

I think at the very least you should put even more caveats on that story, before some punter comes by and wipes out all his important data by copying it to his new super-huge-hard drive.

There IS "lost space" on modern hard drives-- they do major amounts of error correction, data redundancies, etc. However, you're not talking anywhere near 50% of space lost. And even if you were-- is losing all error control worth a bit of extra space when you can pick up another 120GB drive for under $80US??

Justin Scott

Happy Holi

Hi Mike,

Hope you are doing good as the ever efficient staff of Inq. Happy Holi to all of you. I was in Delhi last week to attend "Recording Media Expo 2004". It was mainly for those in realtion to CDR and DVDR production. I got to know some amazing facts like CDR and DVDR Manufacturers think DVDR margins are already getting thin, forget about CDR altogather, which is on the decline side even though it enjoys huge sales now. One big surprise for me was the Attention HD-DVD and Blu-Ray were getting, they say it's coming fast then you can think. Apart from that there were many presentation and one I found very Intresting was by StarForce Copy Protection System's Mr Gerhard Papst (who was there even though his health wasn't good). Now the story about New XP Service Pack can make some OLD Software useless is very much true. Mr Papst hinted that not only their products may face this same problem due to some of the "Revolutionary Changes in OS Security", but many software which which were devloped with references using Windows XP's original design. But at the same time he said that their product will be ready(mostly with a patch) in due time. I also got to know that all game makers and Language Softwares are the most hit with Piracy (Now I know why UT2003 and GTA Vice City are sold for Rs 150 in some parts of Mumbai, India). But I think its really very hard to get the Perfect Anti-Hacking thing going on any Disc because if its to tight it looses compatibility with Latest Drivers we may need to play the game. Another thing HIT is the Pirated Video-CDs in Asia (with China and India leading), mainly Indian and US films, which are also huge problems for Film Studios around the world.

On different note I just hope that nVIDA gets lucky with their 16 Pipelines, so that we can enjoy High Frame Rates in DX9 based games in the months to come. Same thing for Intel IA32e, as here its very difficult to spot Athlon 64 (??-Sky High Rates-No Supply-??) based system here even though AMD and partners did announce to come out with system based on the same.

Harshal.

Spam Fax

Hi Mike,

I just thought of a great idea!!!!!

Getting rid of spam fax is easy!!!!

Just put your fax on a 0900 number, then everybody that faxes you pay's for the costs..... This will stop those spammers (or not), but when they spam you, you get paid for it!!!!

I wish this was possible wit email, that would solve the entire problem

Bas.

Cat sends email to INQ editor

"Any other stories of how pets are getting on with the Internet?" µ

One of my cats keeps deleting email by walking on the keyboard while I'm running kmail. It's impressive to see how fast messages get deleted when Kiki stands on the DELETE key.

Dave Feustel
Fort Wayne, Indiana

Plaxo Stuffing

Dear Ms. Grossman -- I read your story about Plaxo last week and I want to make a few comments to help clear up some misperceptions and factual errors.

Plaxo Contacts is a software program that users consciously and actively download in order to maintain their list of contacts they already know and care about, such as friends, family and colleagues. It automates a tedious, manual process. In only 9 months of operation, more than 1.6 million people have joined the Plaxo network, and that number grows 30-40% a month. Clearly, we offer a product that people want.

Regarding your comment "what is the point of sending out update requests to people whose email addresses may have changed," I want to note that people are generally unaware, in the case of multiple email addresses, which email addresses still work for friends, family or business contacts. The worst that can happen is that an old non-active email address bounces the message back to the sender. The best and most likely case is that the Plaxo user updates a contact. Empirically, 80 percent of our update requests arrive at their intended destinations -- only 20 percent bounce.

Plaxo provides additional benefits in this respect. Plaxo members can register their old e-mail addresses that they no longer use, and we use those to reconnect old contacts. After a Plaxo member sends an update request, Plaxo can send a user an alert saying "We have newer contact info for [a Plaxo user] , do you want to ask for it?" and if the user says yes, the Plaxo user on the other end will receive an alert saying "do you want to provide your new info?" When that member says yes, it updates the entry and changes the old email address to the new one. This makes the network "self-healing," in a way, because old connections get automatically renewed (with permissions on both sides). Currently this feature is available only for Plaxo website users, but shortly we will offer it as an Outlook and Outlook Express plug-in.

With regard to Plaxo giving internet users the ability to not receive Plaxo requests, this can be done two ways -- either by downloading and installing the Plaxo Contacts software for Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express (as you've correctly noted), or by visiting our site and choosing to "opt-out" of all Plaxo Update Requests. There is, indeed, a "blackout list," or opt-out page, which you incorrectly stated didn't exist. It can be found at http://www.plaxo.com/opt-out. Additionally, we provide an opt-out link on every single email our users send out. The bottom line is we clearly promote an opt-out page on our service.

Finally, you also mention that "most newcomers. . .don't know or think to [select which contacts to update]." The implication from your article is that you don't think most people do this. In fact, our internal stats show that the vast majority of people only send to whom they want, as opposed to their entire address book. We offer several different template messages Plaxo users can use to send an update request, or users can customize their own. Our users generally practice good 'net etiquette, if not for the simple reason that not doing so is a poor reflection upon them. Plaxo is designed to help individuals keep in touch with people they know, not send out hundreds of emails to complete strangers.

Our business depends on the word of mouth and trust of our users. We do everything possible to protect that trust. If a user is violating our terms of service, we will investigate and take appropriate action. In fact, we have created a department specific to Security & Abuse in which we've outlined protocols for handling abuses and implemented important technical changes. Any Plaxo member violating our terms of service (commercial advertisements, etc) should be immediately reported to abuse@plaxo.com .

As you are a columnist, you clearly don't need to contact the subject of your pieces to check facts or to obtain comment, but I do wish we had spoken in advance. If you are interested in running a clarification, I'm all for it.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Thank you,

Scott Epstein