"PC Load Letter" will finally mean something! The fact that it means that your motherboard won't POST until you refill the paper tray and replace all ink cartridges with cryptographically verified and datestamped new ones(see also, HP 'all-in-one' devices that refuse to scan if the printer's consumables are not in good order...) is sort of a downer; but at least that puzzle will finally be solved...
More seriously, I imagine that there might be some economies to be wrung out of combining two divisions that both specialize in the logistics of rebadging and regurgitating plastic shit; but I cannot think of a single positive design or engineering lesson to be shared between the two.
TFA does make it sound like crossword puzzles are the paper equivalent of the most horrible, broken, 'adventure'/'puzzle' games of the 90s. The ones that were only solvable by either having a direct mind-meld with the developer and gaining mystic insight into "puzzles" or by brute-force-clicking every single pixel on every single ill-drawn background to interact with the entire set of interactable objects in the gameworld in all possible orders...
There is a fine line between 'subtle clue' and 'inside joke with a population of one', and it is entirely possible to cross it.
In the spirit of patriotic helpfulness, a coalition of Your Friends In Industry has formed to, voluntarily and at no cost to you, write and provide for free distribution an entirely new, 100% cooler, set of standards!
Replace that pricey, stick-in-the-mud 'ASTM D 3559A' that some 4-eyes loser at the EPA wants you to use with the new American Chemistry Council "Eh, it looks clean to me, what're you so worried about?" testing solution!
Don't bother with boring old 'FAO Nutrition Meeting Report Series, No. 45A' when you can rely on the National Cattlemen's Beef Association's new "Scale from 1 to Delicious" food quality metrics!
All jokes aside, relying on standards that you can't look at without shelling out a bundle when writing laws is bad. We pay people to write laws, we should be able to see all of the product. However, we should be very careful that some less-than-exactly-disinterested asshole's 'cost saving' solution doesn't end up replacing expensive; but at least sometimes best-expert-position, standards with the finest in free-because-they-are-worth-far-less-than-what-you-pay lobbying under the guise of assistance...
Matthew Garrett(Redhat kernel/power management) has some fun writings on the subject, and a talk somewhere on youtube "EFI and Linux: the future is here, and it's awful").
I've also had the pleasure of either owning or IT-monkeying for people who owned computers at a couple of the ugly changeover periods, along with a layman's interest in the whole EFI/Secure Boot thing. And some manual mucking with MBRs for reasons that have Nothing. Whatsoever. No. Indeed. Not. with my having done stupid things to my system late at night...
If you have root access, the underlying linux(while spare) isn't terribly alien, fucking with DNS would be a definite option). If not, You Are Product.
Unfortunately, EFI essentially 'solves' the problem of the BIOS by taking every vice available and adding a giant screaming heap of complexity(the quality of which is generally at the mercy of your motherboard maker)... It's sort of an enormous clusterfuck, pretty much what would happen if you took the people who gave us ACPI and told them to write an operating system...
Wintel EFI firmwares are lurching toward ubiquity and not-complete-brokenness(albeit defined pretty much exclusively by whether Windows7 works properly, not by any reference to standards, where they exist), while Mac ones are blatantly contemptuous of things that are supposed to be nailed down by the 'standard'; but at least tend to fairly closely track the hardware and OS, since Apple is behind all of them.
There are all sorts of methods, some more creative and convincing than others(at the low end, if you and your target audience simply don't give a damn about this 'empiricism' nonsense and consider goddidit! to be a valid solution, things of any apparent age are no problem: an omnipotent entity wouldn't have any trouble magic-ing something that looks ten million years old into existence ten seconds ago...).
However, I have heard a number of stories from buddies who got into archaeology and did some fertile crescent digs; that there is an interesting demographic who has a real, visceral attack of this problem:
Your sharper breed of American christian fundamentalists, coming from an area where any evidence of human habitation is either a few hundred years old, max, or fairly subtle and 'radiocarbon dating/the flood/etc/etc. awayed' during their growing up decide that they want to do some biblical archaeology. So, off they go and they find themselves grubbing through masonry that just oozesOLD in a much more immediately dramatic way than some of the subtler isotopic dating results or other inferrential work does. Apparently some of them find it quite traumatic or transformative: The "This wall/building/house/whatever had already been standing for at least a few millenia at the point when God is supposed to have created the earth" thing is much more potent than the "Some scientists say that C14/C12 ratios in cave charcoal suggest timeline... yaddda, yadda..."
Here in glorious America, we will naturally let Visa track every last penny spent, because the private sector is superior, and they will simply sell that data to law enforcement, among other interested stakeholders, as part of their process of 'monetizing consumer metrics'. Free as in 'Free Market'!
Seriously, is child slavery in my tantalum pits really so different from the 'spring break' that first-worlders voluntarily pay to experience?
It looks pretty similar from my air conditioned compound: Baking sun, strenuous physical activity, mud, wet t-shirts, very limited sleep, lots and lots of children your age, no 'parents' there to look over your shoulder, an exotically corrupt law enforcement environment, questionably consensual debauchery...
The power budget for the laser obviously isn't zero; but if you only want to heat a very small area for a small fraction of a second the total power required to achieve truly alarming "watts/meter^2" is surprisingly small.
More broadly, Seagate probably knows as well as anybody(although certainly isn't happy about it) that the small-n'-low power market is basically lost for mechanical HDDs. Game over. They'll stick around in cheapie laptops because they are cheap, and in crazed-enthusiast DTR and workstation models because they are huge; but Flash is taking over the good bits.
In those areas where Serious Storage Capacity still counts, the energy cost of having X platters and 2X heads fighting air resistance as they zip around at high speeds really starts to add up. If you increase the areal density of a platter, you increase the storage capacity of a given number of platters, allowing your customers to either reduce platter counts for a constant workload, or maintain constant platter counts under an increased workload.
You're absolutely right!!! Why didn't they measure it in meters??? Then I'd have some scale being able to compare it to the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second! I mean, everyone has some idea what that is...
Don't listen to those pointy-headed physicists and their ivory-tower propaganda! The One True Metre is a piece of Platinum/Iridium bar-stock painstakingly stored by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures and roughly the same length as 1/10,000,000th of an incorrect estimate of 1/4 of a terrestrial meridian!
To the best of my understanding, there is one major difference: the magneto-optical drives(minidisc and others) used the laser to do reads as well as to heat sectors to lower their coercivity so that the magnetic head could rewrite them. This HDD-derived technology does magnetic reads; but incorporates a laser for heating during writes, allowing you to use high-coercivity materials(which allow smaller sectors to remain stable over time; but would be prohibitive to rewrite in their normal state).
It's a legacy thing, not an intentional-crippling thing:
The BIOS' handling of block devices dates back to when booting your OS off a floppy wasn't considered deviant behavior, and a 5MB HDD was some pretty serious gear. The details are kind of messy...
Most reasonably contemporary stuff should at least do 48-bit LBA; but there are still a lot of systems in the wild that still need MBR, at least on the boot disk(which limits you to 2TB partitions).
This seems like a logically valid(please note, dear reader, the difference between validity and truth) deduction, according to the official MPAA-math axioms:
1. All pirates have a willingness to pay equal to the MSRP for a given MPAA-member copyrighted work.
2. All storage devices not sold filled with an MPAA-approved copyrighted work are intended for use by pirates.
3. (Bonus Axiom of Choice): A content cartel hatchetman may, at his option, choose to replace "MPAA" with "RIAA" in these axioms.
Also wondering, will this set back SSD by 5 years?
Probably not: This advance(while definitely helpful to the HDD, and no doubt some very impressive engineering work from the R&D team) is a reinforcement of exactly the same virtues that HDDs have historically had and of virtually no value in addressing their historical weaknesses:
1. Capacity/dollar: Once the production is tooled up, the cost/gigabyte for HDDs can be expected to continue to decline.
2. Linear read/write speed: Because of their high areal density and fairly swift rotation, HDDs can read or write like a bat out of hell as long as they don't have to do much seeking. Seeky or random I/O tanks them because of the need to physically move the head around and possibly wait the better part of a platter rotation for the spot you want.
It will continue to be the case that HDDs are cheap for the capacity, and fast as hell for nice, linear, streaming operations; but SSDs can churn out the random I/O without breaking a sweat and are available in physically smaller and more shock-resistant packages(the economical range for HDDs is basically defined in multiples of the volume of a 2.5inch HDD, and don't drop them, SSDs start at BGAs the size of your fingernail and scale in multiples of those until your wallet explodes...
Depends on your definition of 'current'; but it shouldn't be an issue(density strictly speaking, isn't even meaningfully visible to the motherboard, except in the broad terms that denser=greater capacity from whatever number of platters is viable).
That said, there are probably still a large number of motherboards that will be questionably bootable from the greater-than-2-terabyte drives that these platters are presumably intended for(some ghastly MBR thing); but anything new enough for 48-bit LBA and a modern OS should, at least, support perfectly normal OS use of the drive once everything is booted.
The main saving grace of the humble 1U is that it doesn't have a vendor who has you by the balls for the next 14-ish systems you buy, along with a variety of option cards and things. Your basic rack doesn't provide much in the way of amenities, leading to lots of messy duplication of 40mm jet-fans and PSUs and a cable mess; but it just doesn't have the lock-in of a physically and logically proprietary cardcage...
So far, the blade guys have had a difficult time not pocketing as much of the extra efficiency value as they can, while the commodity 1U knife-fight is wasteful; but it is rather harder for your vendor to achieve market power over you.
My sense is that 'blade' as in "Wow, look how many basically-just-a-1U-with-the-economics-of-a-laptop we can cram into a proprietary cage that costs $15k empty!" isn't as trendy as it used to be; but that some of the cuter setups that offer integrated switching, dynamic allocation of a pool of disks to individual blades, and other functions that help save on switches, cabling, SAN architecture, and so on were still in a slightly tense state: On the one hand, they had the potential to be more cost effective that the discrete stuff, for certain applications(because they genuinely saved on interconnect silicon, cables, and various overprovisioned-because-every-1U-needs-to-have-one components); but vendors were having a terribly difficult time resisting the temptation to use the fact that you had to purchase all the bits from them to start gouging and slacking off on standardized management interfaces.
Again, I'm not totally deep on the dirty details; but it is my understanding that you can use Access as a friendly rapid frontend development tool for any database that there is an ODBC driver that makes Windows happy available for, which I think includes Oracle stuff. I'm sure that the further from the One Intended Path you travel, the uglier the subtle gotchas get; but your Access enthusiasts must really have been drinking the kool-aide if nobody was able to sneak an ODBC connection to a database that they actually wanted to deal with in the future into the picture...
I'm pretty sure that Access' mission in life is making it comparatively easy for people to develop database frontends(and often get in over their heads and produce some real nightmares...) not to be a database per se. Although I think that MS has been moving toward killing JET, in favor of SQL Server 3-legged-puppy edition, to make upselling to SQL server proper easier, the point is making it easy to dump some forms and buttons in place without having to be a real programmer.
The one thing that I find very unfortunate about the timing of the 'ribbon' is that it managed to coincide with the massive shift in the most common and cheapest PC displays(especially in laptops) from 4:3 to a brief period of 16:10 followed by a rush to 16:9. Having the menu bar expanding even as vertical resolution was being nibbled away at made the always-slightly-awkward editing of 8.5x11 or A4 documents on computer screens even more irritating.
I mostly blame the fuckers who killed 16:10, since that can't be fixed in software; but it wasn't a helpful coincidence.
Its even stupider than that because (in addition to being wildly unsympathetic to just about any member of the public whose morality core hasn't been replaced by a board of directors) it appears to rest on the assumption that the demand for books is wholly inelastic and not at all governed by the production of new readers or competition from other sources of entertainment.
Sure, maybe sometime before the advent of radio it was a trivial competition between 'reading' and 'backbreaking domestic drudgery' for the home entertainment market; but that hasn't been true for a while...
Slashdot Mirror
"PC Load Letter" will finally mean something! The fact that it means that your motherboard won't POST until you refill the paper tray and replace all ink cartridges with cryptographically verified and datestamped new ones(see also, HP 'all-in-one' devices that refuse to scan if the printer's consumables are not in good order...) is sort of a downer; but at least that puzzle will finally be solved...
More seriously, I imagine that there might be some economies to be wrung out of combining two divisions that both specialize in the logistics of rebadging and regurgitating plastic shit; but I cannot think of a single positive design or engineering lesson to be shared between the two.
TFA does make it sound like crossword puzzles are the paper equivalent of the most horrible, broken, 'adventure'/'puzzle' games of the 90s. The ones that were only solvable by either having a direct mind-meld with the developer and gaining mystic insight into "puzzles" or by brute-force-clicking every single pixel on every single ill-drawn background to interact with the entire set of interactable objects in the gameworld in all possible orders...
There is a fine line between 'subtle clue' and 'inside joke with a population of one', and it is entirely possible to cross it.
In the spirit of patriotic helpfulness, a coalition of Your Friends In Industry has formed to, voluntarily and at no cost to you, write and provide for free distribution an entirely new, 100% cooler, set of standards!
Replace that pricey, stick-in-the-mud 'ASTM D 3559A' that some 4-eyes loser at the EPA wants you to use with the new American Chemistry Council "Eh, it looks clean to me, what're you so worried about?" testing solution!
Don't bother with boring old 'FAO Nutrition Meeting Report Series, No. 45A' when you can rely on the National Cattlemen's Beef Association's new "Scale from 1 to Delicious" food quality metrics!
All jokes aside, relying on standards that you can't look at without shelling out a bundle when writing laws is bad. We pay people to write laws, we should be able to see all of the product. However, we should be very careful that some less-than-exactly-disinterested asshole's 'cost saving' solution doesn't end up replacing expensive; but at least sometimes best-expert-position, standards with the finest in free-because-they-are-worth-far-less-than-what-you-pay lobbying under the guise of assistance...
Matthew Garrett(Redhat kernel/power management) has some fun writings on the subject, and a talk somewhere on youtube "EFI and Linux: the future is here, and it's awful").
I've also had the pleasure of either owning or IT-monkeying for people who owned computers at a couple of the ugly changeover periods, along with a layman's interest in the whole EFI/Secure Boot thing. And some manual mucking with MBRs for reasons that have Nothing. Whatsoever. No. Indeed. Not. with my having done stupid things to my system late at night...
If you have root access, the underlying linux(while spare) isn't terribly alien, fucking with DNS would be a definite option). If not, You Are Product.
Unfortunately, EFI essentially 'solves' the problem of the BIOS by taking every vice available and adding a giant screaming heap of complexity(the quality of which is generally at the mercy of your motherboard maker)... It's sort of an enormous clusterfuck, pretty much what would happen if you took the people who gave us ACPI and told them to write an operating system...
Wintel EFI firmwares are lurching toward ubiquity and not-complete-brokenness(albeit defined pretty much exclusively by whether Windows7 works properly, not by any reference to standards, where they exist), while Mac ones are blatantly contemptuous of things that are supposed to be nailed down by the 'standard'; but at least tend to fairly closely track the hardware and OS, since Apple is behind all of them.
How are young earthers going to explain this one?
There are all sorts of methods, some more creative and convincing than others(at the low end, if you and your target audience simply don't give a damn about this 'empiricism' nonsense and consider goddidit! to be a valid solution, things of any apparent age are no problem: an omnipotent entity wouldn't have any trouble magic-ing something that looks ten million years old into existence ten seconds ago...).
However, I have heard a number of stories from buddies who got into archaeology and did some fertile crescent digs; that there is an interesting demographic who has a real, visceral attack of this problem:
Your sharper breed of American christian fundamentalists, coming from an area where any evidence of human habitation is either a few hundred years old, max, or fairly subtle and 'radiocarbon dating/the flood/etc/etc. awayed' during their growing up decide that they want to do some biblical archaeology. So, off they go and they find themselves grubbing through masonry that just oozes OLD in a much more immediately dramatic way than some of the subtler isotopic dating results or other inferrential work does. Apparently some of them find it quite traumatic or transformative: The "This wall/building/house/whatever had already been standing for at least a few millenia at the point when God is supposed to have created the earth" thing is much more potent than the "Some scientists say that C14/C12 ratios in cave charcoal suggest timeline... yaddda, yadda..."
We understand your concern, citizen.
Here in glorious America, we will naturally let Visa track every last penny spent, because the private sector is superior, and they will simply sell that data to law enforcement, among other interested stakeholders, as part of their process of 'monetizing consumer metrics'. Free as in 'Free Market'!
You labor activists, always with your whining.
Seriously, is child slavery in my tantalum pits really so different from the 'spring break' that first-worlders voluntarily pay to experience?
It looks pretty similar from my air conditioned compound: Baking sun, strenuous physical activity, mud, wet t-shirts, very limited sleep, lots and lots of children your age, no 'parents' there to look over your shoulder, an exotically corrupt law enforcement environment, questionably consensual debauchery...
The power budget for the laser obviously isn't zero; but if you only want to heat a very small area for a small fraction of a second the total power required to achieve truly alarming "watts/meter^2" is surprisingly small.
More broadly, Seagate probably knows as well as anybody(although certainly isn't happy about it) that the small-n'-low power market is basically lost for mechanical HDDs. Game over. They'll stick around in cheapie laptops because they are cheap, and in crazed-enthusiast DTR and workstation models because they are huge; but Flash is taking over the good bits.
In those areas where Serious Storage Capacity still counts, the energy cost of having X platters and 2X heads fighting air resistance as they zip around at high speeds really starts to add up. If you increase the areal density of a platter, you increase the storage capacity of a given number of platters, allowing your customers to either reduce platter counts for a constant workload, or maintain constant platter counts under an increased workload.
You're absolutely right!!! Why didn't they measure it in meters??? Then I'd have some scale being able to compare it to the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second! I mean, everyone has some idea what that is...
Don't listen to those pointy-headed physicists and their ivory-tower propaganda! The One True Metre is a piece of Platinum/Iridium bar-stock painstakingly stored by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures and roughly the same length as 1/10,000,000th of an incorrect estimate of 1/4 of a terrestrial meridian!
To the best of my understanding, there is one major difference: the magneto-optical drives(minidisc and others) used the laser to do reads as well as to heat sectors to lower their coercivity so that the magnetic head could rewrite them. This HDD-derived technology does magnetic reads; but incorporates a laser for heating during writes, allowing you to use high-coercivity materials(which allow smaller sectors to remain stable over time; but would be prohibitive to rewrite in their normal state).
It's a legacy thing, not an intentional-crippling thing:
The BIOS' handling of block devices dates back to when booting your OS off a floppy wasn't considered deviant behavior, and a 5MB HDD was some pretty serious gear. The details are kind of messy...
Most reasonably contemporary stuff should at least do 48-bit LBA; but there are still a lot of systems in the wild that still need MBR, at least on the boot disk(which limits you to 2TB partitions).
This seems like a logically valid(please note, dear reader, the difference between validity and truth) deduction, according to the official MPAA-math axioms:
1. All pirates have a willingness to pay equal to the MSRP for a given MPAA-member copyrighted work.
2. All storage devices not sold filled with an MPAA-approved copyrighted work are intended for use by pirates.
3. (Bonus Axiom of Choice): A content cartel hatchetman may, at his option, choose to replace "MPAA" with "RIAA" in these axioms.
Also wondering, will this set back SSD by 5 years?
Probably not: This advance(while definitely helpful to the HDD, and no doubt some very impressive engineering work from the R&D team) is a reinforcement of exactly the same virtues that HDDs have historically had and of virtually no value in addressing their historical weaknesses:
1. Capacity/dollar: Once the production is tooled up, the cost/gigabyte for HDDs can be expected to continue to decline.
2. Linear read/write speed: Because of their high areal density and fairly swift rotation, HDDs can read or write like a bat out of hell as long as they don't have to do much seeking. Seeky or random I/O tanks them because of the need to physically move the head around and possibly wait the better part of a platter rotation for the spot you want.
It will continue to be the case that HDDs are cheap for the capacity, and fast as hell for nice, linear, streaming operations; but SSDs can churn out the random I/O without breaking a sweat and are available in physically smaller and more shock-resistant packages(the economical range for HDDs is basically defined in multiples of the volume of a 2.5inch HDD, and don't drop them, SSDs start at BGAs the size of your fingernail and scale in multiples of those until your wallet explodes...
Depends on your definition of 'current'; but it shouldn't be an issue(density strictly speaking, isn't even meaningfully visible to the motherboard, except in the broad terms that denser=greater capacity from whatever number of platters is viable).
That said, there are probably still a large number of motherboards that will be questionably bootable from the greater-than-2-terabyte drives that these platters are presumably intended for(some ghastly MBR thing); but anything new enough for 48-bit LBA and a modern OS should, at least, support perfectly normal OS use of the drive once everything is booted.
"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."
The main saving grace of the humble 1U is that it doesn't have a vendor who has you by the balls for the next 14-ish systems you buy, along with a variety of option cards and things. Your basic rack doesn't provide much in the way of amenities, leading to lots of messy duplication of 40mm jet-fans and PSUs and a cable mess; but it just doesn't have the lock-in of a physically and logically proprietary cardcage...
So far, the blade guys have had a difficult time not pocketing as much of the extra efficiency value as they can, while the commodity 1U knife-fight is wasteful; but it is rather harder for your vendor to achieve market power over you.
My sense is that 'blade' as in "Wow, look how many basically-just-a-1U-with-the-economics-of-a-laptop we can cram into a proprietary cage that costs $15k empty!" isn't as trendy as it used to be; but that some of the cuter setups that offer integrated switching, dynamic allocation of a pool of disks to individual blades, and other functions that help save on switches, cabling, SAN architecture, and so on were still in a slightly tense state: On the one hand, they had the potential to be more cost effective that the discrete stuff, for certain applications(because they genuinely saved on interconnect silicon, cables, and various overprovisioned-because-every-1U-needs-to-have-one components); but vendors were having a terribly difficult time resisting the temptation to use the fact that you had to purchase all the bits from them to start gouging and slacking off on standardized management interfaces.
Again, I'm not totally deep on the dirty details; but it is my understanding that you can use Access as a friendly rapid frontend development tool for any database that there is an ODBC driver that makes Windows happy available for, which I think includes Oracle stuff. I'm sure that the further from the One Intended Path you travel, the uglier the subtle gotchas get; but your Access enthusiasts must really have been drinking the kool-aide if nobody was able to sneak an ODBC connection to a database that they actually wanted to deal with in the future into the picture...
For who among us has not heard the refrain "Eh, it seemed stable on the test box, push it to the Production instances."?
I'm pretty sure that Access' mission in life is making it comparatively easy for people to develop database frontends(and often get in over their heads and produce some real nightmares...) not to be a database per se. Although I think that MS has been moving toward killing JET, in favor of SQL Server 3-legged-puppy edition, to make upselling to SQL server proper easier, the point is making it easy to dump some forms and buttons in place without having to be a real programmer.
The one thing that I find very unfortunate about the timing of the 'ribbon' is that it managed to coincide with the massive shift in the most common and cheapest PC displays(especially in laptops) from 4:3 to a brief period of 16:10 followed by a rush to 16:9. Having the menu bar expanding even as vertical resolution was being nibbled away at made the always-slightly-awkward editing of 8.5x11 or A4 documents on computer screens even more irritating.
I mostly blame the fuckers who killed 16:10, since that can't be fixed in software; but it wasn't a helpful coincidence.
Its even stupider than that because (in addition to being wildly unsympathetic to just about any member of the public whose morality core hasn't been replaced by a board of directors) it appears to rest on the assumption that the demand for books is wholly inelastic and not at all governed by the production of new readers or competition from other sources of entertainment.
Sure, maybe sometime before the advent of radio it was a trivial competition between 'reading' and 'backbreaking domestic drudgery' for the home entertainment market; but that hasn't been true for a while...
Do your showers constitute public performances? If so, rightsholders want their cut.