This is the same fallacious argument that says that we shouldn't regulate carbon dioxide emissions because incoming solar radiation is so much higher than the radiative forcing from carbon dioxide. It ignores the easiest thing to do to reduce global warming. (Analogously, getting rid of the war would have been the easiest way reduce the growth in the national debt.)
Whoops, technically it seems the "unrecoverable" expansion is more popular than "uncorrectable". But in either case, ECC should already be factored in.
Thanks for the real-world data! Out of curiosity, what was the claimed URE rate on those drives?
The reason I ask is: It looks like your observed rate is better than 1 in 10^15 with 96% confidence, and probably nearer to 10^16. Getting an extra order of magnitude (i.e. from enterprise drives, which are 10^15) would be pretty impressive. But it would be quite astonishing if they claimed only 10^14 and actually gave 10^16 instead.
Goodness, even the summary says "didn't back up? bummer!". Yes, we all know RAID only hedges against hardware failure. The point of this whole exercise is that RAID 5 doesn't even adequately help with hardware failures once data per drive grows large enough.
(I forgot, don't forget the drives' spec'ed URE rate needs to be 1:10^14 for things to go theoretically downhill; there are a few random terabyte drives with 1:10^15 floating out there.... And yes, I know the "once or twice" won't give a statistically significant result; maybe up to a dozen times if you want to be more precise...)
I concur but in a less-condescending way: if there are any people that are already on the way towards building a giant RAID, can someone please give this a try to see what actually happens? (That is, fill the drives with test data, make the array rebuild once or twice, and see if bad stuff happens.) The article is based off the URE spec, but maybe real-world URE rate is lower.
But to be fair to the article, note the date on the post: July 18th, 2007. It wasn't "trivially testable" at the time; terabyte drives weren't exactly cheap yet.
Since he is still the full copyright holder, can he still sell, say, a single "normal" hard copy? The copy sold in this way should have strictly less value than if he had been selling the books copyrighted in the first place (since there are already so many free copies out there), and thus it establishes a lower bound on the value of a copy, no?
What makes it a snake oil, is that ESI works on electrically chargeable subtrates...
Actually, they're claiming a totally different effect: electrorheology, as in electrorheological fluids.
From that Wikipedia article (emphasis mine):
"Electrorheological (ER) fluids are suspensions of extremely fine non-conducting particles (up to 50 micrometres diameter) in an electrically insulating fluid. The apparent viscosity of these fluids changes reversibly by an order of up to 100,000 in response to an electric field. For example, a typical ER fluid can go from the consistency of a liquid to that of a gel, and back, with response times on the order of milliseconds. "
Note that the Wikipedia article doesn't mention this fuel thing at all (it mentions valves and bulletproof vests and such), so I doubt the article was made or edited to provide legitimacy to this. The thing I'm not sure about is: is gasoline really an electrorheological fluid?
I think it should be noted that "sector 34" is not the 34th out of some large number, it's "the sector between points 3 and 4", which is an entire eighth of the assembly.
I agree. It's a nice thought experiment, but nobody is going to do this unless we were really, really desperate to change our climate. I hope we don't see this implemented, because it would probably mean that we'd have gotten in trouble of Hollywood-esque proportions.
That article is talking about the North Pole, i.e. the spot right above zero degrees north latitude. There are ways to see open water at the pole while still having other places in the arctic covered by ice (due to ocean currents and varying thicknesses and such). It's still astonishing, but not on the order of "all melted".
We also know that water vapor soaks up 25 times as much heat as CO2, and that there's a lot more of it, especially over the oceans.
Part of the warming effect of carbon dioxide is due to higher temperatures causing an increase in water vapor, which also then causes a warming effect. This is all already taken into account, and only acts to boost the effect of carbon dioxide. Please keep up.
There's more evidence to dark matter than just the rotation curves. For some rather compelling evidence that there really is some sort of mass there, see the Bullet Cluster.
Sudoku, in the way that it's being solved here and how most people think of it (with 9 digits and 3x3 boxes), is not NP-complete. Its board size is finite, so there are a bounded number of possibilities to try (fewer than (9!)^9), so there exists a constant-time algorithm (trying every one of the possibilities, of which there must be less than 9!^9). But if you want to generalize to nxn boards, that changes things considerably.
If one really believes "...the browser is arguably the most important thing to keep updated on your system..." then it should update automatically, quietly and unobtrusively. The user should never be asked if they want to go out of date.
Firefox already does nearly-silent auto-updates whenever the choice seems obvious (no major problems such as known incompatibility problems). The drawback of the Fx2 to Fx3 update is that some add-ons can/will break, so it's probably reasonable to offload that risk-reward balance to the user.
By the way, I'm not sure why some software never takes this route. When I see scanners and other tools ask me if it is okay to update I wonder what power are they really trying to give me.
I think this is similar; they are offloading some of the responsibility of the risk-reward balance to you (i.e. for a virus scanner, a false positive). It might not be malicious or lazy; they can't really see ahead of time what the risk is other than it's under a certain threshold according to their testing, and they know that their testing is not infinite.
Neither my insurance premiums nor healthcare costs have been reduced.
Perhaps because it prevented an increase in premiums? Or it went into preventing a decrease (or an outright increase) in quality of care? (And don't forget about inflation - if your costs didn't rise, then your real cost went down.)
If you drink and drive and kill someone, it doesn't matter that the person you hit and killed already in an ambulance dying of a heart attack, and thus you contributed very little to his death.
My observation: if you take a reckless action that increases the risk of grave harm to others, you might or might not actually cause that harm, and the extent may vary. If you don't directly cause the harm, you can often get away with it. But if you do directly cause harm, you should and do get hit with the full consequence of the risk that you failed to calculate. She took the risk - why wouldn't she take the blame?
And in case your brain glosses over Engrish like mine does (I've seen too much of it): note that "translate server error" wasn't a result returned by the automatic translator. "Traslate server error" is an actual error returned by the "translate server".
It doesn't take a triple digit IQ to know the phone didn't have SSH and a terminal
I'm pretty sure that the parent was expecting to get the third-party app(s) without jailbreaking, and wasn't expecting that there wouldn't/couldn't be those tools (back when the apps had to be all Safari-based). At least give the guy a little credit.
Oh, you do realize you can buy a replacement battery from Apple right?
Ordering a battery from Apple means nothing. Oh yeah, you need to actually crack open the iPhone to get at the battery - it's not exactly friendly towards user-replacement, with "green opener tools" required and what-not. Want to sit through this 15-minute how-to video (the first how-to hit on a Google for "iPhone battery replacement") for details? I'm sure this situation will end up a cash cow once batteries start failing (either money via their replacement program or through people saying "screw it, I'll just buy the newest generation iPhone").
how about the user interface
Oh, you've done it now. *rant on* I've used my mother's iPhone, and to me, the UI feels like a bad knockoff of Vanilla Sky's fictional UI. My mother struggles with text input. Reading is strenuous too. Why can't you zoom into text? Where is cut/copy and paste? (since you don't have an iPhone, you should realize that they don't have cut/copy/paste at all) I can see how the gestures for text selection and zoom could conflict, but at least have one of the two? I really noticed that there were far too many silly sliders for binary on-off values instead of simpler toggles (worried about accidental presses? perhaps have vibration with a slow highlight-flip-dehighlight animation). I also think the UI isn't very consistent or intuitive, like: Why are settings hidden under tiny little "i" circles, which almost look like a (c), and when "i" usually means "info" or "about" and not "settings"? Why can't I get any details about the battery's capacity by pressing the little battery icon? *rant off*
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This is the same fallacious argument that says that we shouldn't regulate carbon dioxide emissions because incoming solar radiation is so much higher than the radiative forcing from carbon dioxide. It ignores the easiest thing to do to reduce global warming. (Analogously, getting rid of the war would have been the easiest way reduce the growth in the national debt.)
Oh, so it has nothing to do with unnecessary war and poor economic management, then? Wow, and here I thought...
Whoops, technically it seems the "unrecoverable" expansion is more popular than "uncorrectable". But in either case, ECC should already be factored in.
Thanks for the real-world data! Out of curiosity, what was the claimed URE rate on those drives?
The reason I ask is: It looks like your observed rate is better than 1 in 10^15 with 96% confidence, and probably nearer to 10^16. Getting an extra order of magnitude (i.e. from enterprise drives, which are 10^15) would be pretty impressive. But it would be quite astonishing if they claimed only 10^14 and actually gave 10^16 instead.
URE stands for uncorrectable read error, so corrections via ECC should already be factored into that spec.
Goodness, even the summary says "didn't back up? bummer!". Yes, we all know RAID only hedges against hardware failure. The point of this whole exercise is that RAID 5 doesn't even adequately help with hardware failures once data per drive grows large enough.
(I forgot, don't forget the drives' spec'ed URE rate needs to be 1:10^14 for things to go theoretically downhill; there are a few random terabyte drives with 1:10^15 floating out there.... And yes, I know the "once or twice" won't give a statistically significant result; maybe up to a dozen times if you want to be more precise...)
I concur but in a less-condescending way: if there are any people that are already on the way towards building a giant RAID, can someone please give this a try to see what actually happens? (That is, fill the drives with test data, make the array rebuild once or twice, and see if bad stuff happens.) The article is based off the URE spec, but maybe real-world URE rate is lower.
But to be fair to the article, note the date on the post: July 18th, 2007. It wasn't "trivially testable" at the time; terabyte drives weren't exactly cheap yet.
Since he is still the full copyright holder, can he still sell, say, a single "normal" hard copy? The copy sold in this way should have strictly less value than if he had been selling the books copyrighted in the first place (since there are already so many free copies out there), and thus it establishes a lower bound on the value of a copy, no?
...the electric field device is called an ESI : electrospray ionisation).
What makes it a snake oil, is that ESI works on electrically chargeable subtrates...
Actually, they're claiming a totally different effect: electrorheology, as in electrorheological fluids.
From that Wikipedia article (emphasis mine):
"Electrorheological (ER) fluids are suspensions of extremely fine non-conducting particles (up to 50 micrometres diameter) in an electrically insulating fluid. The apparent viscosity of these fluids changes reversibly by an order of up to 100,000 in response to an electric field. For example, a typical ER fluid can go from the consistency of a liquid to that of a gel, and back, with response times on the order of milliseconds. "
Note that the Wikipedia article doesn't mention this fuel thing at all (it mentions valves and bulletproof vests and such), so I doubt the article was made or edited to provide legitimacy to this. The thing I'm not sure about is: is gasoline really an electrorheological fluid?
I think it should be noted that "sector 34" is not the 34th out of some large number, it's "the sector between points 3 and 4", which is an entire eighth of the assembly.
i tend to observe suspicious correlations between kids that win science fairs and kids with parents that are scientists or engineers.
...as if many other kids enter. Not so suspicious.
I agree. It's a nice thought experiment, but nobody is going to do this unless we were really, really desperate to change our climate. I hope we don't see this implemented, because it would probably mean that we'd have gotten in trouble of Hollywood-esque proportions.
That article is talking about the North Pole, i.e. the spot right above zero degrees north latitude. There are ways to see open water at the pole while still having other places in the arctic covered by ice (due to ocean currents and varying thicknesses and such). It's still astonishing, but not on the order of "all melted".
We also know that water vapor soaks up 25 times as much heat as CO2, and that there's a lot more of it, especially over the oceans.
Part of the warming effect of carbon dioxide is due to higher temperatures causing an increase in water vapor, which also then causes a warming effect. This is all already taken into account, and only acts to boost the effect of carbon dioxide. Please keep up.
There's more evidence to dark matter than just the rotation curves. For some rather compelling evidence that there really is some sort of mass there, see the Bullet Cluster.
Dark energy, on the other hand....
Sudoku, in the way that it's being solved here and how most people think of it (with 9 digits and 3x3 boxes), is not NP-complete. Its board size is finite, so there are a bounded number of possibilities to try (fewer than (9!)^9), so there exists a constant-time algorithm (trying every one of the possibilities, of which there must be less than 9!^9). But if you want to generalize to nxn boards, that changes things considerably.
A list of HASH DIGESTS of "don't remember these sites" should be perfectly fine.
...until someone builds a lookup table of common naughty sites and their hashes.
If one really believes "...the browser is arguably the most important thing to keep updated on your system..." then it should update automatically, quietly and unobtrusively. The user should never be asked if they want to go out of date.
Firefox already does nearly-silent auto-updates whenever the choice seems obvious (no major problems such as known incompatibility problems). The drawback of the Fx2 to Fx3 update is that some add-ons can/will break, so it's probably reasonable to offload that risk-reward balance to the user.
By the way, I'm not sure why some software never takes this route. When I see scanners and other tools ask me if it is okay to update I wonder what power are they really trying to give me.
I think this is similar; they are offloading some of the responsibility of the risk-reward balance to you (i.e. for a virus scanner, a false positive). It might not be malicious or lazy; they can't really see ahead of time what the risk is other than it's under a certain threshold according to their testing, and they know that their testing is not infinite.
Hah, here comes the moderators modding you up, just to spite you!
...uh, wait a second...
Neither my insurance premiums nor healthcare costs have been reduced.
Perhaps because it prevented an increase in premiums? Or it went into preventing a decrease (or an outright increase) in quality of care? (And don't forget about inflation - if your costs didn't rise, then your real cost went down.)
If you drink and drive and kill someone, it doesn't matter that the person you hit and killed already in an ambulance dying of a heart attack, and thus you contributed very little to his death.
My observation: if you take a reckless action that increases the risk of grave harm to others, you might or might not actually cause that harm, and the extent may vary. If you don't directly cause the harm, you can often get away with it. But if you do directly cause harm, you should and do get hit with the full consequence of the risk that you failed to calculate. She took the risk - why wouldn't she take the blame?
And in case your brain glosses over Engrish like mine does (I've seen too much of it): note that "translate server error" wasn't a result returned by the automatic translator. "Traslate server error" is an actual error returned by the "translate server".
It doesn't take a triple digit IQ to know the phone didn't have SSH and a terminal
I'm pretty sure that the parent was expecting to get the third-party app(s) without jailbreaking, and wasn't expecting that there wouldn't/couldn't be those tools (back when the apps had to be all Safari-based). At least give the guy a little credit.
Oh, you do realize you can buy a replacement battery from Apple right?
Ordering a battery from Apple means nothing. Oh yeah, you need to actually crack open the iPhone to get at the battery - it's not exactly friendly towards user-replacement, with "green opener tools" required and what-not. Want to sit through this 15-minute how-to video (the first how-to hit on a Google for "iPhone battery replacement") for details? I'm sure this situation will end up a cash cow once batteries start failing (either money via their replacement program or through people saying "screw it, I'll just buy the newest generation iPhone").
how about the user interface
Oh, you've done it now. *rant on* I've used my mother's iPhone, and to me, the UI feels like a bad knockoff of Vanilla Sky's fictional UI. My mother struggles with text input. Reading is strenuous too. Why can't you zoom into text? Where is cut/copy and paste? (since you don't have an iPhone, you should realize that they don't have cut/copy/paste at all) I can see how the gestures for text selection and zoom could conflict, but at least have one of the two? I really noticed that there were far too many silly sliders for binary on-off values instead of simpler toggles (worried about accidental presses? perhaps have vibration with a slow highlight-flip-dehighlight animation). I also think the UI isn't very consistent or intuitive, like: Why are settings hidden under tiny little "i" circles, which almost look like a (c), and when "i" usually means "info" or "about" and not "settings"? Why can't I get any details about the battery's capacity by pressing the little battery icon? *rant off*