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For reference:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Average-US-Broadband-Connection-Now-67-Mbps-120700

CALEA applies to Internet communication.

Pen/Trace - asking for email headers and IP headers but not content.
Full detail - asking for actual dump of bidirectional communication from a specific IP address or address-range.

See ISPs can be requested to forward all traffic...
or a company that helps ISPs comply...
or this has been a law since 2007...

To find these things check out this link.

Fact: I appreciate your copying my style. However, when doing so, please ensure that after the word "Fact:" comes a fact.

Ehud

sounds like there cable card pricing

where each area has it's own costs / fees and you can't tell based on the website.

Some areas make you have the HD fee (or have as part of the base package)

Some areas make you pay a outlet fee on the cable card.

and so on.

Read http://www.dslreports.com/ for more

In canada, unless you need low latency, the internet is about the most expensive method you could possibly use to transfer data. source

Incorrect. The answer six years ago was http://www.dslreports.com/ now it is http://www.broadbandreports.com/

Ok this is unfortunately a fantasy and not something you should do in this bullshit legalistic world we live in today. Hypothetical, don't do it, do not try at home etc.
,br> But having said that. Never underestimate the power of beating the living crap out of a few company executives and making sure they know why, and informing them that it will continue until they honor their promises. It would happen a time or two and then they'd get the message and after that no one would be beaten and no one would be cheated.

In the old days they dealt with assholes by running them out on a rail or by tarring and feathering them. Assholes, liars, and cheats were harder to find back then.

Incorrect.
The answer six years ago was http://www.dslreports.com/
now it is http://www.broadbandreports.com/

If anyone wants an example of why RAID should always have a backup solution and not just and/or solution. Please check http://dslreports.com/ , as they just recovered from a powerloss at nac.net which took their entire array system with it, and fudged 2 years worth of data, which had to be sent off for recovery. That was on April16th, the site is just starting to come back up in the last two days.

Some info here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kll86bDn_MgWoo6Ja7oHo_yvI0SCqggEvNWwPWIcrHY/edit?pli=1

Surely we have learned by now to be very, very skeptical of any claim by a wireless carrier?

At least is seems that some are not parroting what they are told.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/NY-Times-Actually-Bothers-to-Question-Spectrum-Crisis-119397

You have to be kidding. Letting luddite politicians control industries they don't understand is bad for a whole lot of reasons.

Like chemical manufacturing, medicine and pharmaceuticals to name a few? Should these be unregulated perhaps? Politicians are politicians and they're not going to understand just about any industry and yet legislation is requires for the benefit of the country as a whole.

You, obviously, do not understand DSL.

You obviously do not understand DSL as there is no technological reason that DSL can't be deployed just about anywhere that humans live. It is strictly a cost issue as you do mention below.

When a company makes a product or service available for some people and not others, there's usually a good reason.

And that reason is of course profit or lack of profit for the company involved.

With DSL, it all has to do with the costs of adding new infrastructure.

Yes and like any other infrastructure that benefits the country and society it should be deployed even when it one instance of it is not profitable as the entire deployment remains profitable. The money they make off the 99% of people where deploying infrastructure is low cost (I'm admittedly pulling this number out of nowhere) will still more than make up for whatever it costs to deploy DSL (or any other form of Internet access if they prefer, i.e. leased line as the real issue is equal access to the Internet and all the benefits that come with it) in the areas that are high cost.

Unlike basic phone lines, DSL performance is extremely sensitive to the distance from the CO.

If the phone company is going to charge me $1000/yr for DSL, and place a new CO just for me, then they better be able to get several hundred others in my neighborhood to also get service from the same CO. There's no way that my $1000/yr will pay for it.

If a mandate went in that all companies had to provide DSL to all possible customers, I guarantee there are some people who would be told that their service would costs thousands per month, because of their location. Now, you may think that this is easy to solve, by just price-fixing the cost also. If feel this way, then you should consider voting for Jimmy Carter this year.

Not price fixing but price standardizing where people pay the same amount for the same service from the same provider regardless of where they happen to live. If people living in the rich neighborhood of a major city only have to pay X dollars for service then the poor people who can't afford to live there should arguably also only have to pay X dollars for the same service. The company involved spreads the cost of deployment of a given area and calculates the revenue from a given area - the only thing changing would be the size of the area involved in the calculation.

You have to be kidding. Letting luddite politicians control industries they don't understand is bad for a whole lot of reasons. You, obviously, do not understand DSL.

When a company makes a product or service available for some people and not others, there's usually a good reason. With DSL, it all has to do with the costs of adding new infrastructure.

Unlike basic phone lines, DSL performance is extremely sensitive to the distance from the CO.

If the phone company is going to charge me $1000/yr for DSL, and place a new CO just for me, then they better be able to get several hundred others in my neighborhood to also get service from the same CO. There's no way that my $1000/yr will pay for it.

If a mandate went in that all companies had to provide DSL to all possible customers, I guarantee there are some people who would be told that their service would costs thousands per month, because of their location. Now, you may think that this is easy to solve, by just price-fixing the cost also. If feel this way, then you should consider voting for Jimmy Carter this year.

why blame Microsoft? Have they been knowing for astroturfing here before?

Just a little...

http://lists.essential.org/1998/am-info/msg01529.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/27/microsoft_ie8_chain_letter/
http://www.1pstart.com/mercury-news-writer-accuses-microsoft-of-bribery/
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/87901
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57345892-94/microsoft-nokia-linked-to-comments-on-negative-lumia-review/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
http://linkprimer.com/internet-marketing/microsoft-encourages-reputation-management
http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t568832-microsoft-well-take-the-astroturf-supreme-please.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/business/smallbusiness/30reputation.html?_r=1
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1698666/microsoft-tests-social-media-monitoring-product
http://www.informationweek.com/news/220200062
etc
etc
etc
etc

Someone enlighten me, why Wayland?

There are many reasons to adopt Wayland.
The reason I have been following Wayland so closely is to ditch X.
X is the Linux Desktop's largest security hole.

::further reading::

These days all you really need is a powerful laptop & a smart HDTV connected to it and an unlimited or very high cap cable/dsl service then you get access to TONNES of Online Content World Wide The people have spoken. Convergence is IN!
And Depending on where you live you can agument with OTA antenna to your HDTV.

[...]and for the extra $3 it's not worth going to court.

IANAL, but if there are so many customers being ripped off that way, why not start a class action lawsuit?

The US Supreme Court has recently decided that AT&T is legally allowed to put "You can't form a class action suit against us" in their license agreement. Now all the ISPs are rushing to add that clause to the mix. Even Netflix is joining in on the scramble.

I had this *exact* same issue with Cox Communications. Same argument/discussion, etc.

Here was my post about it over at DSL Reports.

*note: Please excuse my ignorance. I knew/know enough to be dangerous so I am certain I made many mistakes in describing things. Despite the inaccuracies, the overall point still stands.

From

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/694

DSL/Cable 10-20ms

https://secure.dslreports.com/shownews/LightSquared-Lawyers-Up-For-FCC-Assault-118429
"LightSquared is apparently trying to convince the Defense Department to swap spectrum they're unlikely to give up for LightSquared spectrum nobody wants. Again, LightSquared lacks the cash to wage any sustained battle on this front, and Falcone faces two pending inquiries by the SEC for unrelated financial infractions. He's also now being sued by a group of investors in Harbinger Capital Partners who claim the effort "squandered billions of dollars."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/corbin-hiar/fcc-lightsquared-_b_1280076.html
"The company has vowed to challenge the suspension, but how long it can stay financially solvent is in question. For example, one of its biggest contracts -- a $13 billion, 15-year deal with Sprint, the third largest U.S. wireless carrier -- required that LightSquared resolve the FCC concerns about GPS before March. The value of Harbinger, which is heavily invested in LightSquared, fell by half last year."

After Obama gets elected it could be a different story, and Soros is involved as well (whatever that means) but I think he's cooked as people are backing out of the deal and Harbinger is going to sue his arse.
I've watched people like Falcone and groups like Harbinger work before, I found the process disturbing to say the least as it is all about money with no real thought or regard to what they are actually doing--other than the money.

Choice #2: Use a utility like HDDErase which uses low level ATA commands to tell the controller to wipe the drive. This will wipe every sector, even ones that are bad, relocated, or protected ones. After that, follow up with DBAN for good measure.

You need to become more familiar with the underlying storage protocols before stating things like this. Let's get to the facts, preferably technical ones, because this is Slashdot. What you've said is mostly nonsense (not entirely though), so let me go over it with you:

1) There is no such thing as a "low-level ATA command". ATA commands are as "low-level" as it gets with communication between disks and controllers -- controller status bits are a different thing, and are not managed/viewed via ATA, they are done via PCI BAR or memory-mapped I/O. The "command" you are talking about with regards to HDDErase is part of standard ATA8-ACS specification (probably earlier), known as SECURITY ERASE UNIT (command 0xF4). This is verified here.

2) HDDErase issues SECURITY ERASE UNIT, which is a firmware-level erase that the drive does itself. On mechanical HDDs this is completely equivalent to issuing dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=64k -- except with SECURITY ERASE UNIT, you have no visibility into the progress of the erase, the software simply has to make "educated guesses". If you erase via an OS (meaning the underlying storage driver issues zeros to each LBA), you can get an idea of the progress and speed given that you know how many LBAs there are, and which ones you've written to. DBAN does the latter (though with its own program, not using dd -- but its C code does the equivalent).

With SSDs, SECURITY ERASE UNIT actually does some extra magic, since the FTL that maps LBAs to NAND flash regions also gets reset (meaning you lose all wear levelling history). This doesn't happen with a standard "OS-level" erase.

And I'll just throw this out there because some smart-ass will certainly bring it up: there is absolutely no "low-level format" equivalent on ATA/SATA disks unless the vendor chose to implement a non-ATA-standard ATA command that does it. I repeat: THERE IS NO LOW-LEVEL FORMAT COMMAND. SCSI, on the other hand, even today still has a low-level format command. This command on SCSI merges the grown defect list into the physical defect list. ATA/SATA does not work this way -- keep reading.

3) Both methods I described above "wipe every sector". However, your claim that "it wipes even ones which are bad" is completely incorrect. The same goes for your "[even ones which are] reallocated (sic)". Bad (uncorrectable) sectors are PERMANENTLY bad. LBAs which are remapped (to point to sectors other than their actual LBA 1:1 equivalent) can point to any sector, of course. Sectors which are marked unusable DO NOT get touched by the drive with SECURITY ERASE UNIT or an OS-level format. I can expand more on this later, but it's probably best to read something someone familiar with storage wrote a few weeks ago for a user.

4) Please explain what a "protected" sector is. I believe you're referring to the HPA region of a disk. SECURITY ERASE UNIT does not do this, and no OS-level erase/zero can touch it. The HPA stores information like SMART attributes, the ATA GP log, hard disk model, serial number, capacity (LBA count), and many internal/vendor-specific things. It is possible to "reset" the HPA using utilities like mHDD, but if you read the (awful) docs for it, it will tell you flat out that this doesn't work on the mass majority of disks because it uses a vendor-specific ATA command that not all vendors implement, or if they do implement it, have security limitations applied to it (usually something magical like issue ATA command 0x45 with a specific CDB payload, watching for a result code of some value, then issuing a

I'm glad you went with an SSD that induces data loss after 5200 power-on hours. See their (Crucial's) site for a firmware update.

AT&T is having a hard time competing because they need more spectrum.

So AT&T claims. What about the reports to the contrary?

According to Comcast's filings (pdf) with the FCC, they've deployed new hardware and software close to the company's Regional Network Routers (RNRs). This hardware will flip a user from the standard "Priority Best-Effort" traffic (PBE) to lower quality of service (QoS) "Best-Effort" traffic (BE) for fifteen minutes if they're a major reason congestion exists.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r26702537-HD-Comcast-could-have-set-my-house-on-fire.

They send out a box that later on one cable guy says they were supposed to stop giving these out quite awhile ago, and that they are known to do this, which is why they stopped using them...so just the guy at the Tech center was not so up to date, I suppose.

1. why do they still give out 5-6 year old boxes? (that can't get the new guide that comcast is working or use MPEG 4 channels)

2. why are people still being forced to rent boxes that old at prices that keep going up. Let's say $7-$16 /m has payed off that box and then some.

also look at this gem

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22872520-lightning-killed-Comcast-modem-and-my-pc-attached-to-it

Install cable systems is very hands on and lack of skills can you or others killed. Some of what cable guys do is like electricians and I want some who knows what they are doing not some one with just certs or Degrees. THIS IS LEARN ON THE JOB JOB! that should need a min of a degree to get in.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/106756

Just look at the story's where a cable guy grounds to a GAS LINE and other stuff.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/79994 Botched Comcast Install Blows Up House
Investigators believe grounding rod punctured gas line

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25415431-Comcast-fried-my-new-Sony-52q-lcd-tv

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80151

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80368 both technicians stated that the company-installed "system" of cables on the roof were "a real mess" and were unsafely stretched over and near an electrical box and associated cables."

Install cable systems is very hands on and lack of skills can you or others killed. Some of what cable guys do is like electricians and I want some who knows what they are doing not some one with just certs or Degrees. THIS IS LEARN ON THE JOB JOB! that should need a min of a degree to get in.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/106756

Just look at the story's where a cable guy grounds to a GAS LINE and other stuff.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/79994 Botched Comcast Install Blows Up House
Investigators believe grounding rod punctured gas line

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25415431-Comcast-fried-my-new-Sony-52q-lcd-tv

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80151

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80368 both technicians stated that the company-installed "system" of cables on the roof were "a real mess" and were unsafely stretched over and near an electrical box and associated cables."

Install cable systems is very hands on and lack of skills can you or others killed. Some of what cable guys do is like electricians and I want some who knows what they are doing not some one with just certs or Degrees. THIS IS LEARN ON THE JOB JOB! that should need a min of a degree to get in.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/106756

Just look at the story's where a cable guy grounds to a GAS LINE and other stuff.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/79994 Botched Comcast Install Blows Up House
Investigators believe grounding rod punctured gas line

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25415431-Comcast-fried-my-new-Sony-52q-lcd-tv

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80151

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80368 both technicians stated that the company-installed "system" of cables on the roof were "a real mess" and were unsafely stretched over and near an electrical box and associated cables."

Install cable systems is very hands on and lack of skills can you or others killed. Some of what cable guys do is like electricians and I want some who knows what they are doing not some one with just certs or Degrees. THIS IS LEARN ON THE JOB JOB! that should need a min of a degree to get in.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/106756

Just look at the story's where a cable guy grounds to a GAS LINE and other stuff.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/79994 Botched Comcast Install Blows Up House
Investigators believe grounding rod punctured gas line

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25415431-Comcast-fried-my-new-Sony-52q-lcd-tv

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80151

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80368 both technicians stated that the company-installed "system" of cables on the roof were "a real mess" and were unsafely stretched over and near an electrical box and associated cables."

Install cable systems is very hands on and lack of skills can you or others killed. Some of what cable guys do is like electricians and I want some who knows what they are doing not some one with just certs or Degrees. THIS IS LEARN ON THE JOB JOB! that should need a min of a degree to get in.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/106756

Just look at the story's where a cable guy grounds to a GAS LINE and other stuff.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/79994 Botched Comcast Install Blows Up House
Investigators believe grounding rod punctured gas line

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25415431-Comcast-fried-my-new-Sony-52q-lcd-tv

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80151

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80368 both technicians stated that the company-installed "system" of cables on the roof were "a real mess" and were unsafely stretched over and near an electrical box and associated cables."

Qwest got bought by CenturyLink. Whomever made that call is no longer in charge. CenturyLink has no difficulty cooperating with the NSA.

This is a bad idea, and it's being deceptively promoted. The OpenDNS site says "DNSCrypt is a piece of lightweight software that everyone should use to boost online privacy and security." This is willfully misleading.

This isn't a way to make the existing distributed DNS infrastructure more secure. It just establishes an encrypted connection between your machine and one central DNS server farm belonging to OpenDNS. One that makes its money by redirecting nonexistent domains to ad sites.

There have been slimy DNS providers before. Comcast is notorious for this. The Wikipedia article on OpenDNS summarizes the privacy issues, conflicts, and problems with OpenDNS. At one point, OpenDNS tried redirecting address bar searches to their own search page., which is apparently permitted by their terms of service.

OpenDNS isn't that bad. They're only a little evil. But they're also unnecessary.

Open Secrets classifies the corporation as a fence sitter when it comes to politics, although during the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was clearly the telco's favorite.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Top-Campaign-Contributor-Since-1990-110351

Once up, the article woouldn't load, but gave:

Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 0000000000 [true number changed]
Varnish cache server

I had never seen the Varnishcache server before. So, I use Google, and one of the first hits is a link to a Slashdot article, also detailing FBI work: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,26358766 [dslreports.com]. Here is their discussion:

reply to antdude
Re: HideMyAss.com Doesn't Hide Logs From the FBI
said by antdude:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/25/0415213/hidemyasscom-doesnt-hide-logs-from-the-fbi [slashdot.org]
Link doesn't work for me....
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 853827040
Varnish cache server --
GuruGuy

Ok, once is ok. Twice. Hmmm. Three would be a hit.

How do you submit a story that doesn't trigger anything human but only an automatic reconnaissance, or vice versa. It would be fun to see if this follows a pattern.

Here you go:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Repeatedly-Helped-FBI-Break-Communications-Law-106553
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/03/fbi_confirms_co
http://www.itworld.com/security/216565/google-admits-it-would-give-your-data-feds-93-times-out-100
http://www.pcworld.com/article/190438/microsoft_stool_pigeon_for_the_cops_and_fbi.html

George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, and the U.S. Senate have all made it plainly clear that the government no longer wants to or thinks they have to abide by the constitution. Some folks are trying to disagree but.... Anyway, like any government bureaucracy, after it has been around a while it tends to create its own group mind, and usually that group mind tends to forget or disregard annoying things like constitutional rights or just plainly doing the right thing. After all, these annoyances just get in the way of doing things, which is already hard enough to do in a bureaucratic institution. And the problems just get exacerbated by the rectilinearlly rigid thinking robot-like people that seem to excel in a bureaucracy; and no-doubt is the type of person who is causing this bullshit maneuver that NASA is making right now. (And corporations are just narcissistic/egocentric bureaucracies... extrapolate from there.)

See these (their usages might match slashdotters more):
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

These rates are probably for "normal users" (as in normal users who buy SSDs ;) ):
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

Note the common failure modes are not very graceful, they're usually brutal and/or weird:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help

http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

In contrast with most (not all of course) of the HDD failures I've seen you still can get a lot of data out.

SSD failure is predictable.

That's bullshit. You call the following predictable?
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help

http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

I might buy a Samsung SSD. The rest (except for Intel) don't have such a great track record even when compared to hard drive failure rates (and Intel's failures haven't been very confidence inspiring).

http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

For some people the failure is predictable in that they can almost bet the drives will fail within a year! http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

But I don't regard that sort of predictability of failure as acceptable, unless the manufacturer is paying me to use their products and gives me plenty of spares.

As mentioned before, the launch isn't exactly new, and it was a provision of the NBC/Comcast merger. Nevertheless, it has gotten more attention than usual in the past day or two. Here's an alternative viewpoint, heavily biased against Comcast but still worth reading (at least in my opinion): http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Highlights-10-Broadband-in-DC-116216

Re the 20,000 employees laid off... It's actually a bit of speculation.

Pretending That T-Mobile Job Losses Will Actually be Job Gains

They (AT&T) already have more spectrum than Verizon which has more customers and fewer issues with their network. If AT&T is using their existing frequencies so poorly, should the government simply allow them to have more? Also the documents AT&T's attorneys submitted showed that the build-out to 97% coverage would have cost $3.8B less than 10% of the T-Mobile acquisition. So cost savings are not really part of the acquisition motivation.

Motorola is a communications company, not just a phone maker Look at the distributed whitespace broadband that Google has been looking at deploying; now they own the infrastructure to make it happen. I see phones fitting in as a smaller piece of a giant puzzle. They has been planning this for years and owning Motorola means they won't have to wait on others to make the hardware anymore.

Be careful not to misinterpret the readings if you have Comcast. Chances are that you may have the PowerBoost feature they provide.

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/14520

This system would be easy for any ISP to game. QOS routing is already in place in all ISP networks. All any one of them would need is an example whitebox (eg. one of their employees or their friends), and they could ensure all packets destined for the target host are treated with the highest priority. All we can tell from that graph is CableVision doesn't do that...

Remeber too that ISPs route packets differently depending on the destination provider among other things. Anyone remember the debacle about Comcast refusing to peer Level 3? They thought the traffic was lopsided, and as a result, all Netflix customers on their network were routed over a congested transit link which they refused to embiggen.

If you're unlucky backups won't save you from this:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue

yesterday I spent over an hour fomatting, re-installing windows and everything else I needed.

Also updated windows fully, customized everything to my liking... in short, a good 2-3h of work.

This morning, I open up the laptop and surprise... EVERYTHING's back to the pre-format. I have no idea how this is even remotely possible.

OCZ is calling this the time warp issue, and is related to the sandforce controller...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/552728-fresh-os-install-ocz-ssd-r3.html

any firmware before 1.29 can result in you experiencing what OCZ refers to as "Time Warp" (you lose all info stored on drive since last boot - happens at random). 1.29 decreases likelihood of this happening, but does not eliminate the possibility.

The big problem with this failure mode is the drive still appears to work. So if you are unlucky to not notice that the pricelist/tender document you are about to send or commit to is no longer showing the corrected figures/information, things could get way more painful than if your drive just didn't work (in which case work would just be delayed while you restore from backups, or if you have no backups you would just have to deal with the data loss).

The other failure mode is the "time warp" failure.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue

Also updated windows fully, customized everything to my liking... in short, a good 2-3h of work.

This morning, I open up the laptop and surprise... EVERYTHING's back to the pre-format. I have no idea how this is even remotely possible.

The big problem with this failure mode would be if the user doesn't notice anything wrong till too late.

A 100% dead drive sucks, but if you do regular backups you lose 1 day of data.

A "time warp" failure that you don't notice could result in you sending out of date info in an important email. Or overwriting something important with invalid data and not noticing. The resulting damage could be far far worse than a dead drive.

In my experience "spinning rust" rarely fails 100% without warning (or abuse - e.g. you drop the drive ;) ). You can often salvage some stuff out (just hope it's the stuff you want ;) ). I've managed to use knoppix to salvage data from people's failed spinning disk drives.

In contrast these SSDs just go totally dead. Or really weird shit happens.

In both cases the manufacturer might get an RMA. But they're not the same. If OCZ drives are getting RMA'ed at higher rates than spinning drives, and their failure modes are 100% dead or "time warp" they are far worse than the stats show: http://news.softpedia.com/news/French-Website-Publishes-HDD-SSD-and-Motherboard-RMA-Statistics-196538.shtml

To pick just one example, do you know of any CF cards which compress all data on the fly in order to increase effective flash lifespan by reducing the total amount of data written?

You shouldn't be calling people morons "with shallow expertise", because if you actually understand how and why things break you would realize that your remark actually supports his point: which is all that fancy stuff makes it more likely for you to lose data.

Or worse, lose data without realizing it, see this: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/552728-fresh-os-install-ocz-ssd-r3.html
To quote:

any firmware before 1.29 can result in you experiencing what OCZ refers to as "Time Warp" (you lose all info stored on drive since last boot - happens at random). 1.29 decreases likelihood of this happening, but does not eliminate the possibility.

If you don't notice that the drive has reverted, you might have bigger problems than if the drive goes totally dead. e.g. If the drive is dead, you restore what you can from your backups, tell everyone that you have a problem etc, whereas if the drive reverts, you might send the wrong info to a customer, or commit partially out-of-date code to a repository.

Videos and music do it the same way anything else does. A simple malformed data packet, buffer overflow, and you're compromised. Most players do a good job santiy-checking buffers, but the iPod was compromised.

http://bilb02.livejournal.com/373.html
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/823

Also, the old trick of having an executable with the filename "Bandname Songname.mp3.exe" and the icon set to WMP's MP3 icon would fool most folks. Drag-and-drop would give just an error message, but double-clicking would get you the UAC "Are you sure you want to run this?" to which people say yes (or turn it off) and it runs. That's more likely what GP was talking about. Download something that looks promising, and you can see it's suspicious so you delete it, annoyed and sick of it.

"Go download the codec is popular", as well as the WMA popups about needing to unlock the DRM, although I think WMA DRM hole has been fixed for a while.

BT viruses do work on the honor system - you download piles of stuff, make one mistake, and you have virus. But people continue to fall for it. There are viruses still circulating 5 years after being discovered. People have not updated their signatures, or disabled antivirus completely. These people can figure out hulu, the same way they get infected - click everything you can find and say OK.

Well, the internet probably does need more bandwidth to support Netflix.

And I'm not a fan of QoS to get better streaming video either. But is Cerf giving up on fixing the problems with streaming (and any realtime internet work) that we know about, bufferbloat? I heard about that from Jim Gettys (thanks to a tweet from John Carmack). Here's a two-page intro in IEEE magazine or a (more interesting IMHO) PDF slide presentation with nice graphs and there is other advice and documents and code on that bufferbloat website.

See, the problem with streaming isn't just bandwidth, it's latency, and the variability thereof. We always measure and marketers talk about bandwidth, but only rarely if ever about latency. Thus ISPs don't optimize for it as a rule. The result? You get these occassional 6-second lags and other phenomena and little economic incentive to track them or fix them. (And certain data ISPs are at least mildly incented to look the other way since it protects their VOIP/PSTN revenues).

How about ISPs actually implement ECN to deal with it? How about router manufacturers design for this (or we all switch to OpenWRT?) How about we techies develop tools to help consumers monitor line quality latency (ping times) over time? How about consumers actually learn to care about latency or we educate them? It's not "too complicated" for consumers to understand; consumers can differentiate between velocity ("what's your car's fastest speed?") and acceleration ("how quickly can it go from 0 to 60?") so I'm sure we could get them to understand bandwidth versus latency. It's just not well measured/monitored right now. (I think we need a better phrase/metric that captures the notion of latency like the "0 to 60" one for cars.)

If you want to help develop measures of latency, use Bismark (or vote for it in the FCC open apps competition) or come up with an open source ping-until-quit tool that logs timestamps for long time periods and displays the results graphically and/or competitively. Better yet, make a phone app that does this and hooks it to google/whoever's maps and shares the data so fellow consumers can see which areas of the phone company networks really suck. (I'm open to hearing about other tools. I used to use a freeware one but it went payware and the best tools I know of are DSLReports's SmokePing and their other tools.)

100x greater bandwidth may make recorded video faster, but it won't solve core problems with realtime (streaming or video conferencing) video faster, nor web conferencing, nor necessarily online gaming. I sure as hell don't want the internet's quality to become as lousy as cell phones and that's what'll happen over time if we don't keep ISPs we pay the big bucks to focused on fixing the problems.

    --LP

I think most of the smart IT people are beginning to view the U.S. as a threat to their business. If U.S. investigative agencies can disrupt dozens, or even thousands, of innocent individuals and businesses with impunity, why the hell would anyone take the risk hosting in the U.S.?

A HD movie from netflix is on average 1.7GB/hour (3800kbps). At 5 hours a night, that would be 8.5GB/night, and a 250GB cap would last you 29.4 days.

Reference here: http://www.dslreports.com/speak/slideshow/22179750?c=1415814&ret=L2ZvcnVtL3IyMjE2NDQ4MS1OZXRmbGl4LWJhbmR3aWR0aC1Jcy0xR0Joci1hdC1IRC1hY2N1cmF0ZQ%3D%3D

Netflix on the other hand currently says that they are averaging about 2200kbps for HD movies. Reference here: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gC6nMAI6mu8/TUHG6jsQq-I/AAAAAAAAADE/Bwe1fkAUxzA/s1600/isp_usa.png

If you have to ask... There are sites that still don't hash or salt their passwords. BBR recently had a break in via a SQL injection. No hash, no salt for their passwords. It's stupid enough to make me wonder if they've properly sanitized their database inputs or not.

You may have to hunt around a bit, but they did confirm that they didn't hash or salt.