Have you ever ripped up a diary before? It's like in StarCraft when you build tonnes and tonnes of zerglings in single player just to nuke them. It's vaguely satisfying, and then you think about what a huge waste of time it all was. I've done that twice now. Let me give you another example. Suppose you're playing an 8 player FFA on BGH, and for whatever reason most of the other players are not really concerned with you, so you're left to your own devices to build whatever super-army you want, but instead of doing that you start making SCVs play follow the leader around various formations of buildings and minerals and geysers hoping that one day someone is going to see all that shit and think "By the keyboard of Boxer, what the Hell is going on here?!" Only before that can happen everyone kills each other or gets frustrated and leaves, so you're just left with this stupid replay of you making SCVs play follow the leader by yourself. And most likely no one is ever gonna watch that replay anyway.
Now imagine for a moment that somehow employers were suddenly able to and cared about looking up the replays of potential employees just to make sure they were on the level, like they do with Facebook pictures. Suddenly you're worried your potential money machine is gonna find this replay of you making SCVs follow the leader by yourself and think you're mentally unstable. You'd wanna destroy that replay, right? That's how it is with ripping up a diary. Eventually you've written so much crazy weird crap that it just becomes a huge liability to keep. But at the same time, you gotta watch that replay one more time. You gotta see just how long you managed to make SCVs follow the leader without anyone knowing. It kinda takes a long time. You made a shit load of SCVs follow each other around buildings. At some point even you begin feeling weird about it. I made them do that? Why? But others you're kind of proud of, for being ingeniously clever. Ever make SCVs follow the leader in a figure eight? No, because it's impossible. But let's just say somehow you did. Still, no one would understand why that was so beautiful, they'd just see more SCVs playing follow the leader, and the really crazy person who kept making them do it. Oh sure, we've all obsed a replay once or twice and made them do that, but what kind of nut job makes a whole society based on follow the leader?
That's when you gotta say to yourself: enough is enough. You delete that shit off your hard drive and forget about it. But computers are weird. Do things ever REALLY get deleted? They get super fragmented and bizarre, but certain kinds of software can sometimes recover them, if not in their entirety, at least in some parts. Too much effort for an employer, but you hope, some day, maybe a really bored person, or an archaeologist will uncover them and find your magnificent follow the leader SCV society, maybe even uncover the figure eight, the game of follow the leader that was thought to be impossible! Actually, maybe that is possible. I am pretty sure I made them do that once. Pretty pathetic.
What prompted this, out of curiosity? Have they come for you? D:
Though I suppose the solution is to melt the whole thing down, or use the hammer method (but I am informed by reliable sources that it is actually possible, if the information is worth a dollar value in the millions, to repiece a smashed hard drive that way, so melting it all down is probably the safest solution apparently).
I can imagine some archaeologist in a thousand years, exploring your drive, finding this .rep file that you obviously hid in a special location, figuring out what it is, gathering a team of experts to write code to run the file with the hope of making a ground breaking discovery, and after years of hard work, watching in disbelief a shit load of SCV circling around a command center.
Reformatting your HDD typically just wipes the partitioning table. The raw data is actually still there until you start writing new data to the sector.
Can't really say I've done such a thing though. I got bored and started a diary a few years ago just for kicks but then I got too lazy to keep it up to date after like a week lol.
I work as a computer technician catering my local area. You get to see some weird shit people put on the computer and websites they go to. Seeing an old guy's browsing history filled with 'sexy asian whores' it's no wonder he got a virus.
On my computer, I have the most scattered hard drive. my data is literally everywhere. Duplicates, triplicates of the same file.
A ball peen hammer and ten minutes in the oven, and your magnetically stored data has been destroyed beyond the capabilities of 99% of companies to even attempt to recover. And the other 1% will charge millions, and guarantee nothing, because odds are they can't recover it either.
Or, y'know, you could just set up an industrial strength degausser, mount your computer next to it, and hit it with a pulse that will flatten the case and anything in it.
On October 23 2012 18:21 felisconcolori wrote: A ball peen hammer and ten minutes in the oven, and your magnetically stored data has been destroyed beyond the capabilities of 99% of companies to even attempt to recover. And the other 1% will charge millions, and guarantee nothing, because odds are they can't recover it either.
Or, y'know, you could just set up an industrial strength degausser, mount your computer next to it, and hit it with a pulse that will flatten the case and anything in it.
Very creative, but you could also use eraser which has the benefit of letting you keep a functional HDD after you've cleaned up whatever it is that you wanted to clean up.
but instead of doing that you start making SCVs play follow the leader around various formations of buildings and minerals and geysers hoping that one day someone is going to see all that shit and think "By the keyboard of Boxer, what the Hell is going on here?!"
I played a 2v2 random WC3 once where my opponent made a wedding theme. He had a priest presiding a chapel, footmen on patrol moving up and down. I can't remember who he used for all the roles, but it was damn funny.
You ever write a crazy blog post and tease everyone with stories of the weird replays archive to wrap-up with pictures of a cat? Did you still somehow manage to make the crazy work? Have you ever talked to a tree for 45 minutes just to see if it was shy? Did you ever start a diary's first entry with "Dear Diary, I'm going to kill you"?
I like reading your blogs and comments, Chef. Your name is one of the few on this website I can associate some semblance of personality to, and one of the fewer I can say I legitimately respect. You're a thoughtful and clever person, and I want to lightly caress your cheek. I mean shake your hand.
On October 23 2012 12:30 endy wrote: I can imagine some archaeologist in a thousand years, exploring your drive, finding this .rep file that you obviously hid in a special location, figuring out what it is, gathering a team of experts to write code to run the file with the hope of making a ground breaking discovery, and after years of hard work, watching in disbelief a shit load of SCV circling around a command center.
Considering how our archaeology works today it will most likely be called "some sort of cult thing", that's what we do whenever we can't explain things.
"The people around the time back then worshipped small virtual creatures gathering minerals and gas, supposedly symbolizing their economic struggle. Entire countries have been developed to glorify those little virtual things."
I remember when I was playing SC2 heavily, sometimes I'd hit up games against the computer just to practice my macro, right?
And I'd set the enemy AI to "very easy" and 50% handicap. Then I would go on just to practice my builds and not give a shit about the AI.
Except sometimes, I'd get bored and start fantasizing that I'm playing against NaDa or something like that. I frantically micro my units all around the damn map. I'd be like "HOLY FUCKING SHIIIT!!! THERE'S A DOUBLE DROP IN MY MAIN" and I'd run away all of my workers and bring some of my army back. Then I'd be like "WHAT DAFAQ!!! MY THIRD IS UNDER ATTACK!! THAT NADA'S MULTITASKING!!! FUCK!!" and I'd go defend it. And I'd actually snipe my own third with my own units and try to rebuild it elsewhere. The whole time I'd be running my units all over the damn map.
In the end, all my units would be dead, my base would be in shambles after all those insane drops going on all game long. (actually just my own units attacking my buildings and each other). At last, I'd muster up what I had and push Nada's base, only to find out he has like 1 marine and 6 SCV's.
And then I realize how huge of a waste of time that was. TT
On October 24 2012 12:47 Rollin wrote: A slow format writes 0s to every sector of the drive. Unrecoverable except through black magic.
The thing is that the medium, although it stores 0s and 1s logically, in the physical domain it is less digital. If a hard drive writes a logical 0, it only pulls the bit to the polarisation of logical 0. It does so quickly and imperfectly. So if you uniformly write 0s on the entire disk, with special equipment you can still read where you have ~0.1s and ~0.2s giving you an image of where you had logical 0s and 1s before. With enough iterations of random writes, you will able to make the data unrecoverable, though. Or you could be more direct about it by physically destroying the hard drive.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/OHkWH.png)
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