I have yet to see actual figures that show an SSD with a higher MTBF than a decent, new hard drive.
The last time I looked at the stats, which I admit was about a year ago, it was more like 100 to 1 in the other direction. You might be surprised just how reliable hard drives are these days.
I admit this is slightly off-topic, but I recently saw a 32GB Class 10 SD card for under $30... and it got me remembering back to when -- not as long ago as some might think -- it took an hour to transfer the contents of one 10MB... that's MB not GB... 5.25" HDD, which cost $400, from one machine to another over the network.
Well, as I stated in the beginning, I don't know about your state, But that certainly is not true here. Public employee compensation is ridiculous. I have followed the actual stats, so I do know.
Just for example: our city employs clerical staff that may have B.S.s in secretarial studies or some such thing, but who pull in salaries many engineers would envy and even better health benefits.
We finally got a Mayor who has a head on her shoulders and has managed to pare things back a bit, but the unions won't let her do too much. Not without striking anyway, and I think she's afraid of that.
"Been there, done that with the degrees in electrical and computer engineering, 20 years in the field. I used to write 6502 assembly code by hand..." (Rambling story about walking uphill in the snow both ways, barefoot.)
Me too. I first learned assembly language on a PDP-11 that used a godawful implementation of octal representation.
I'll seriously invest in SSDs when they consistently surpass 1 or 2 million write-cycles per block (not just per cell). Until then, they might be great for caching but I'm not seeing the reliability I want.
(P.S. Please don't lecture me about wear-leveling, etc. I know how they work.)
By the way: I love Minchin's song (you can find the video on YouTube, it's called "Storm").
I am a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. But I have to say that there is a difference between me and many people I know who claim to be skeptics: I actually try to look at evidence before I scoff.
By the way: Minchin's bit about alternative medicine is very true... about "alternative medicines" that have been around for a few generations. But one must also keep in mind that nearly all new treatments start out as "alternative".
Who proved Burzynski a fraud? When, where and how?
If he is a proven fraud, why does the National Cancer Institute have him listed as currently having 11 different government-approved clinical cancer trials in the works? Why did government agencies patent the very same compounds, specifically for the treatment of cancer, which were then reversed when it was shown that Burzynski already owned patents on them?
Of course it does vary by state, but that was then, man. Check it out now. Most places, that situation has changed drastically.
A few years on the job gets you tenure and you are almost impossible to fire. Health benefits are FAR above what the average citizen sees, and it rarely comes out of the teacher's salary. And the salaries themselves have gone way up, in proportion to the average income.
Yes, indeedy, it's a different day.
Some of that is changing now, though. There has been something of rebound effect. People are getting very pissed off.
Note: I say they "would have", because in fact they had already done that very thing, when the state proposed to give good teachers extra money. No lowering of anybody else's salary was involved.
"Invest the money in training/sceening teachers properly."
The unions would have your ass, given a chance. They've done it time and again.
I won't go into the long story about how corrupt unions and politicians messed up the Winsconsin schools, but the fact is that after the unions lost their power, the state and local budgets went up and districts could actually afford to give raises to some of their better teachers... something the union would have sued, at the least, to prevent. If they had still been around to do it.
Bits and bytes (well, bits anyway) are the ONLY feasible implementation of digital logic for the foreseeable future. Good Grid, man, have you ever tried to do anything useful in trinary? Good luck. Theoretically it's perfectly workable, but honestly I don't think humans were built to think that way.
I do agree, however, that if a cheaper (not just workable) way were found to make the internal workings trinary, it is likely that it would be adopted, strictly for internal use. The interface to the machine would still be in powers of 2.
Still, because of the brain-twisting aspects (if you are used to binary) of trinary would prevent its widespread adoption. I thing manufacturers would wait for quaternary to come around.
Of course, then you have qubits, which are none of the above...
When I was in the 8th Grade, I could tell you what a transistor or a laser was made from, and even some details about how they were manufactured. And how photolithography worked to build integrated circuits. But none of that had anything at all to do with school. It's a matter of interest. I was a science geek. Some people aren't. There's nothing wrong with being an artist.
No, they don't "matter less and less". Larger structures are being built around them, but that's like saying the bigger and fancier the car, the less important the engine. It''s nonsense.
You might be able to drive a car, but if anything goes wrong, if you don't know anything abut the engine, you're SOL. The same is true of programming. Maybe most of the time you can ignore those "little details" (just like you can your engine), but by Grid you'd better know about them if anything goes wrong. (And if you are a programmer, things WILL go wrong.)
They matter less and less to the end users, yes. But they don't matter "less" to a programmer, any more than electrons matter "less" to someone doing modern electronics.
Did anyone here besides me find it rather ironic that the article was supposed to be about how humor works, yet the author told that joke so badly that it wasn't funny?
It really is a decent joke, when it's told properly.
One intriguing result was that Germans -- not renowned for their sense of humour -- found just about everything funny and did not express a strong preference for any type of joke.
Apparently it did not occur to the authors that this is precisely why Germans are not noted for their humor.
Hard drive solutions are all well and good. But if you are using discrete disks (CD, DVD) for storage, then I highly recommend Discgear Selector products. While not automatic like a disk changer, finding and getting a disk out is as simple as sliding a knob and lifting the lid. I have several of the larger models.
And you can use the included software to maintain your library index, and print index labels for the containers.
"There's some of that "29" (+ or - a vast, hidden number) million at work, taking you in!"
Actually no, most of the sources I mentioned are solidly behind AGW theory, and were crowing about somebody rich and famous pledging so much money to "the cause"! So you are just about 100% backward.
In addition, given enough time (which I simply may not have this weekend), I am confident that it will be pretty easy to find that much more than a paltry $29 million has been spent on AGW studies (or even "pro-AGW" studies) over the same period.
Yes, it turns out you are correct in that it is for developing new energy sources. However, it WAS specifically intended to help stave off global warming, according to Branson's own statements.
Even so, I am rather dismayed that so many sources would report this incorrectly. I was taken in.
Nevertheless, I do still believe the expenditures are vastly one-sided. But I do not have direct evidence at the moment.
"Oh great. I hang out Watts as bait and you swallow it hook, line and sinker and actually defend the liar?"
Hah! So you admit to being a troll.
I defended nobody; I merely stated facts.
Further, name-calling will get you nowhere. In fact it is pretty funny to see you try to insult my "maturity", when by doing so you demonstrate your own level of same.
Apparently, either you don't know what "hypocrite" means, or you actually like the label.
Slashdot Mirror
"OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB - 2,000,000 hours MTBF Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB - 1,500,000 hours MTBF"
But I should also point out that as far as I know, the MTBF figure is not related to the number of rated write-cycles.
But I don't claim to be certain. I'll check.
"OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB - 2,000,000 hours MTBF Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB - 1,500,000 hours MTBF"
If true, it is the first time I have seen such a figure.
And if true, I would consider it to be good news.
I have yet to see actual figures that show an SSD with a higher MTBF than a decent, new hard drive.
The last time I looked at the stats, which I admit was about a year ago, it was more like 100 to 1 in the other direction. You might be surprised just how reliable hard drives are these days.
I admit this is slightly off-topic, but I recently saw a 32GB Class 10 SD card for under $30... and it got me remembering back to when -- not as long ago as some might think -- it took an hour to transfer the contents of one 10MB... that's MB not GB... 5.25" HDD, which cost $400, from one machine to another over the network.
Great for performance, but you're putting your most important data on your least-durable storage device.
The key word in "MTBF" is "mean". I'm a power-user. Means don't apply.
Well, as I stated in the beginning, I don't know about your state, But that certainly is not true here. Public employee compensation is ridiculous. I have followed the actual stats, so I do know.
Just for example: our city employs clerical staff that may have B.S.s in secretarial studies or some such thing, but who pull in salaries many engineers would envy and even better health benefits.
We finally got a Mayor who has a head on her shoulders and has managed to pare things back a bit, but the unions won't let her do too much. Not without striking anyway, and I think she's afraid of that.
Hahaha. Good point and I agree.
"Been there, done that with the degrees in electrical and computer engineering, 20 years in the field. I used to write 6502 assembly code by hand ..." (Rambling story about walking uphill in the snow both ways, barefoot.)
Me too. I first learned assembly language on a PDP-11 that used a godawful implementation of octal representation.
But I still disagree.
I'll seriously invest in SSDs when they consistently surpass 1 or 2 million write-cycles per block (not just per cell). Until then, they might be great for caching but I'm not seeing the reliability I want.
(P.S. Please don't lecture me about wear-leveling, etc. I know how they work.)
By the way: I love Minchin's song (you can find the video on YouTube, it's called "Storm").
I am a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. But I have to say that there is a difference between me and many people I know who claim to be skeptics: I actually try to look at evidence before I scoff.
By the way: Minchin's bit about alternative medicine is very true... about "alternative medicines" that have been around for a few generations. But one must also keep in mind that nearly all new treatments start out as "alternative".
Who proved Burzynski a fraud? When, where and how?
:o)
If he is a proven fraud, why does the National Cancer Institute have him listed as currently having 11 different government-approved clinical cancer trials in the works? Why did government agencies patent the very same compounds, specifically for the treatment of cancer, which were then reversed when it was shown that Burzynski already owned patents on them?
Just wondering.
Of course it does vary by state, but that was then, man. Check it out now. Most places, that situation has changed drastically.
A few years on the job gets you tenure and you are almost impossible to fire. Health benefits are FAR above what the average citizen sees, and it rarely comes out of the teacher's salary. And the salaries themselves have gone way up, in proportion to the average income.
Yes, indeedy, it's a different day.
Some of that is changing now, though. There has been something of rebound effect. People are getting very pissed off.
Note: I say they "would have", because in fact they had already done that very thing, when the state proposed to give good teachers extra money. No lowering of anybody else's salary was involved.
"Invest the money in training/sceening teachers properly."
The unions would have your ass, given a chance. They've done it time and again.
I won't go into the long story about how corrupt unions and politicians messed up the Winsconsin schools, but the fact is that after the unions lost their power, the state and local budgets went up and districts could actually afford to give raises to some of their better teachers... something the union would have sued, at the least, to prevent. If they had still been around to do it.
Bits and bytes (well, bits anyway) are the ONLY feasible implementation of digital logic for the foreseeable future. Good Grid, man, have you ever tried to do anything useful in trinary? Good luck. Theoretically it's perfectly workable, but honestly I don't think humans were built to think that way.
I do agree, however, that if a cheaper (not just workable) way were found to make the internal workings trinary, it is likely that it would be adopted, strictly for internal use. The interface to the machine would still be in powers of 2.
Still, because of the brain-twisting aspects (if you are used to binary) of trinary would prevent its widespread adoption. I thing manufacturers would wait for quaternary to come around.
Of course, then you have qubits, which are none of the above...
When I was in the 8th Grade, I could tell you what a transistor or a laser was made from, and even some details about how they were manufactured. And how photolithography worked to build integrated circuits. But none of that had anything at all to do with school. It's a matter of interest. I was a science geek. Some people aren't. There's nothing wrong with being an artist.
No, they don't "matter less and less". Larger structures are being built around them, but that's like saying the bigger and fancier the car, the less important the engine. It''s nonsense.
You might be able to drive a car, but if anything goes wrong, if you don't know anything abut the engine, you're SOL. The same is true of programming. Maybe most of the time you can ignore those "little details" (just like you can your engine), but by Grid you'd better know about them if anything goes wrong. (And if you are a programmer, things WILL go wrong.)
They matter less and less to the end users, yes. But they don't matter "less" to a programmer, any more than electrons matter "less" to someone doing modern electronics.
Did anyone here besides me find it rather ironic that the article was supposed to be about how humor works, yet the author told that joke so badly that it wasn't funny?
It really is a decent joke, when it's told properly.
One intriguing result was that Germans -- not renowned for their sense of humour -- found just about everything funny and did not express a strong preference for any type of joke.
Apparently it did not occur to the authors that this is precisely why Germans are not noted for their humor.
Hard drive solutions are all well and good. But if you are using discrete disks (CD, DVD) for storage, then I highly recommend Discgear Selector products. While not automatic like a disk changer, finding and getting a disk out is as simple as sliding a knob and lifting the lid. I have several of the larger models.
And you can use the included software to maintain your library index, and print index labels for the containers.
"There's some of that "29" (+ or - a vast, hidden number) million at work, taking you in!"
Actually no, most of the sources I mentioned are solidly behind AGW theory, and were crowing about somebody rich and famous pledging so much money to "the cause"! So you are just about 100% backward.
In addition, given enough time (which I simply may not have this weekend), I am confident that it will be pretty easy to find that much more than a paltry $29 million has been spent on AGW studies (or even "pro-AGW" studies) over the same period.
Yes, it turns out you are correct in that it is for developing new energy sources. However, it WAS specifically intended to help stave off global warming, according to Branson's own statements.
Even so, I am rather dismayed that so many sources would report this incorrectly. I was taken in.
Nevertheless, I do still believe the expenditures are vastly one-sided. But I do not have direct evidence at the moment.
Haha! It's pretty hilarious to see that comment modded as "troll"!
"Oh great. I hang out Watts as bait and you swallow it hook, line and sinker and actually defend the liar?"
Hah! So you admit to being a troll.
I defended nobody; I merely stated facts.
Further, name-calling will get you nowhere. In fact it is pretty funny to see you try to insult my "maturity", when by doing so you demonstrate your own level of same.
Apparently, either you don't know what "hypocrite" means, or you actually like the label.