I don't know what it is with college students these days. They were pretty illiterate when I went to school, but, today, they're displaying their ignorance online.

The Bank Implode-O-Meter is an interesting way to learn captialism: by watching it fail. This sector blog/news/community is crazy.

The "gold standard" in this category is "Darik's Boot and Nuke" or DBAN (pronounced D Ban).

DBAN is a tiny version of Linux, usually run from a diskette, that contains a program that will erase any hard disk on your computer. It has several different methods, many which are used by the military to securely erase data.

The reason for such a tool is that, even if you erase the data, and write new data, the old data can still be extracted by skilled technicians. DBAN repeatedly writes to the disk, with different patterns of data, to make it more difficult to find the old data on the disk.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

I've only done this once, but, it was easier than expected. You don't need to pay a service hundreds of dollars to do this.

It costs $325 for the one trademark, but the costs can rise if your mark is used in different contexts. If you use the online forms and are well-prepared, you can save some money and get it done for $275.

Do You Need to Register the Trademark?

It's up in the air. Lawyers and websites say you should, but, legally, you're protected once you start using a name in conjunction with a specific product or service. Always document the first use, by noting it in your diary or something.

One morning, I started wondering how RAID 5 parity works to rebuild a disk array. It seemed "magical" to me, that you can get redundancy and still use most of your disk capacity. So I searched for it... and turned up not very much info, and one other person's unanswered question. A few articles explained it, but in a little more detail about performance, and less detail about the actual parity function. So that's why this page exists. The good articles were at:

Sunworld
MS TechNet
Tom's Hardware