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).
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A "time warp" failure that you don't notice could result in you sending out of date info in an important email.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.
But how many car thieves steal cars in "clever" ways? Would such measures actually reduce the theft rates and decrease the average cost (factoring risk * impact of theft etc)? Think more expensive locks, more expensive calls to locksmiths when they can't break into their own cars coz they lost or forgot the "keys";).
So far thieves use bricks, and/or they just tow the entire car away (or put in a truck). Or hijack the car (either directly confronting you, or by crashing into your car so that you get out).
You raise an important point, which is that we are essentially learning how to win friends and influence people, not subconsciously as part of our character, but as a learned discipline. It scares me sometimes. Is this what sociopaths do also?
I just run my browser as a different user account from my main account. You can do it on Unix or Windows. Just set the permissions so that your main account can access the downloads if necessary, and the browser account can't access much.
It's not 100%, but as the joke goes, I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than the average person;).
Another thing, many parents actually want to do a good job with their kids but know they don't know how to.
So in additional to better preschools, affordable/free courses for parents to learn how to teach and bring up their kids would be good (there are quite a few basics that transcend cultures - e.g. kid is punished severely if he/she asks one parent for permission, gets a "No" and tries with the other parent).
My church has a pretty good preschool, and I've heard that some parents don't even know how to play with their kids, so they actually learn how to do that at the preschool. The atheists might frown at the "brainwashing", but as you've seen Nike and friends start their brainwashing early too, and if the parents aren't doing anything about it, it's better us than McD, Nike, Coca Cola, MTV, etc;).
If Gates wanted to improve the quality of humans, he should have invested in creating more and better preschool/kindergartens.
By the time the kids are in school more of their brains/minds have already "set".
That said, some of the most important things kids learn in school are: learning to wake up early, go to school, sit for hours quietly, do a bit of work or pretend to, interact well with authority and peers and not cause too much trouble, then go home. In a number of companies, as long as you do this, you can keep your job till maybe some braindead HQ policy requires your boss to sack 10% even though your department did well (e.g. you're hired as cannonfodder;) ).
Making friends and dealing with enemies are also an important things to learn:).
IT folks who know what they are doing usually prefer CLIs to GUIs. A GUI is fine for configuring a single server once (or trying to;) ). Not so nice when you have more than a handful. And good luck having your developers rapidly create decent GUIs for every feature/configuration/task you want to add.
Heck even Microsoft has realized that and made powershell. Perhaps due to the pain of running Hotmail on Windows;).
A good GUI can probably beat a CLI in many things, but not usually for stuff like "advanced configuration" of servers.
I think the criteria should be whether a reasonable person would believe that that guy had the power and ability to actually do it.
So even a specific threat like "I'm going to kill you with my rifle, two weeks from now" might not count for much if it comes from a quadriplegic.
Whereas a nonspecific threat by a US President like "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority." has to be taken quite seriously especially if it is followed by certain actions. He does have a lot more power...
A little chihuahua barking behind a gate can bark all he wants. No big deal. But I'd definitely be concerned about a rottweiler or pitbull that's loose and unleashed, it doesn't even have to bark - just baring its teeth would scare me...
Not quite what you're looking for, but better than nothing - go to google maps, and use streetview to do a virtual drive down the streets and paths of various places.
Zoom out and drag the "streetview figure" to wherever that's blue.
You could do a tour of various famous bridges, or landmarks (like the Cristo Redentor, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil). Or Akihabara Japan.
Not the same as being there, but it's cheap way to get an overview;). You might even learn some things that the geography books don't tell you...
Yeah. We could make more intelligent pets or livestock, but are we really doing a good job with the billions we have already?
To me this hybrid stuff is definitely in dangerous territory.
There's lots of stuff that technology allows us to do and could in future allow us to do, but more and more we should ask the questions: Are we ready for it, and ready to pay the price? And the main cost is not in money.
At what point would a hybrid be LEGALLY entitled to the rights and privileges of a human, and subject to the responsibilities/punishments as well?
Many of us are nice to our pets, but they don't get voting rights and they live in a dictatorship (hopefully benevolent). Things change if Fido has the right to reelect Obama and the right to bear arms etc.
If a human has hybrid organs is that human still entitled to vote? What if some of the human's brain cells are replaced with hybrid/animal ones? If an animal has human organs is that animal entitled to vote? If an animal has hybrid organs is that animal entitled to vote?
What gives you the right to slaughter and eat something, or enslave them, or use them as a "natural resource"? You're smarter? You contain human DNA? What is human DNA? What percentage of human DNA and how do you measure it?
If I'm smarter than most of the people posting here can I slaughter them and use their fat to make soap?
Now consider all this from a Homo Superior vs Human perspective (if we blindly continue in this research there will likely be "Homo Superior" and "not-so-superior" hybrids).
Only fools think there is no problem and we should research/do anything as long as technology and resources allow us. What short term and long term benefits would we get out of pursuing this line of research? Are they really worth the cost to us? Could we do this later? Must we all turn vegan? There's ample scientific evidence that humans do better on a diet that includes fish.
It could force us to draw a line before we are ready to do so. And we could draw a pretty stupid line.
p.s. it's similar problem for creating Strong AIs.
The problem with OSX as a server is people have the impression that Apple has a habit of removing stuff rather fast (i.e. actually remove, not merely deprecate) .
What server people want in an OS is for the same server apps to work on the OS for years or even decades, and for the OS to keep being patched/updated against security and other problems. You can release a new version and remove the old version, as long as there is backward compatibility.
Once something works and helps the company make money, if it keeps working and net gain remains constant or increases, the Company is happy. New fancy features are nice, but not often a big deal winner.
Vehicle analogy: think about those boring delivery goods vans/trucks vs the CxOs fancy cars. Companies just want those vans to keep working and be supported for years/decades with no fuss. They don't care that the latest van model has some fancy touchscreen interface, unless it prevents them from using it the old way, or they stop being able to buy the van models that allow them to use it the old way.
Servers are "delivery goods vans" not "fancy cars". Guess which market Apple is in?
Microsoft does change stuff, but if you buy the latest they have, you usually have more than 5 years before your stuff becomes incompatible with any of their supported OSes.
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.
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.
Yeah but: 1) SSDs cost a lot more - you can get fair sized RAID for the price of one SSD. 2) SSD failure modes don't appear to be as graceful as they should be in theory - too often their failure mode is to become completely unaccessible. Whereas I've been able to recover some data from many failed HDDs, 3) SSD failure modes are weird - they have a "time warp" failure (google it) - the drive apparently goes back to the state it say a few days ago but otherwise works as normal. That's not confidence inspiring, and can be worse than a complete failure in some cases - since you might not realize that the data is out of date.
That said I am really tempted to buy an SSD anyway;).
I'd rather be able to wear a pair of special spectacles that make it look like I've got a huge hi-res virtual screen. If possible it should be overlayed on the "real world", and stay where it is even if I move my head (unless I choose to move it).
Then I don't need to lug about kilograms worth of screen, plus I might save some battery power - screens use up a significant part of the battery budget.
The disadvantage is I can't easily show someone else my screen (unless I share it). But that's not always a disadvantage...
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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
But how many car thieves steal cars in "clever" ways? Would such measures actually reduce the theft rates and decrease the average cost (factoring risk * impact of theft etc)? Think more expensive locks, more expensive calls to locksmiths when they can't break into their own cars coz they lost or forgot the "keys" ;).
So far thieves use bricks, and/or they just tow the entire car away (or put in a truck). Or hijack the car (either directly confronting you, or by crashing into your car so that you get out).
Thieves could resort to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r9VW0nTTrk
But I doubt most would even bother.
You raise an important point, which is that we are essentially learning how to win friends and influence people, not subconsciously as part of our character, but as a learned discipline. It scares me sometimes. Is this what sociopaths do also?
The main difference is the motive.
1) In case you're not already aware of it: are you smiling with your eyes as well? A smile is not just in the mouth.
;) ).
2) The "fading" might be normal. Many people don't normally hold their smiles for more than a second (when not posing or being a politician
3) From what I see most of the "normals" don't have much charisma either... So don't worry too much about it.
As an AV author, how would you deal with polymorphic malware written in perl or similar? OSX supports perl out of the box.
Is it possible to pay their bill by credit card, 1 cent at a time?
I just run my browser as a different user account from my main account. You can do it on Unix or Windows. Just set the permissions so that your main account can access the downloads if necessary, and the browser account can't access much.
;).
It's not 100%, but as the joke goes, I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than the average person
There's the increased latency as well. Light travels fast but not that fast.
But Japan is in a different world from the rest of us. Maybe even 5 years or so in the future ;).
Another thing, many parents actually want to do a good job with their kids but know they don't know how to.
;).
So in additional to better preschools, affordable/free courses for parents to learn how to teach and bring up their kids would be good (there are quite a few basics that transcend cultures - e.g. kid is punished severely if he/she asks one parent for permission, gets a "No" and tries with the other parent).
My church has a pretty good preschool, and I've heard that some parents don't even know how to play with their kids, so they actually learn how to do that at the preschool. The atheists might frown at the "brainwashing", but as you've seen Nike and friends start their brainwashing early too, and if the parents aren't doing anything about it, it's better us than McD, Nike, Coca Cola, MTV, etc
If Gates wanted to improve the quality of humans, he should have invested in creating more and better preschool/kindergartens.
;) ).
:).
By the time the kids are in school more of their brains/minds have already "set".
That said, some of the most important things kids learn in school are: learning to wake up early, go to school, sit for hours quietly, do a bit of work or pretend to, interact well with authority and peers and not cause too much trouble, then go home. In a number of companies, as long as you do this, you can keep your job till maybe some braindead HQ policy requires your boss to sack 10% even though your department did well (e.g. you're hired as cannonfodder
Making friends and dealing with enemies are also an important things to learn
IT folks who know what they are doing usually prefer CLIs to GUIs. A GUI is fine for configuring a single server once (or trying to ;) ). Not so nice when you have more than a handful. And good luck having your developers rapidly create decent GUIs for every feature/configuration/task you want to add.
;).
Heck even Microsoft has realized that and made powershell. Perhaps due to the pain of running Hotmail on Windows
A good GUI can probably beat a CLI in many things, but not usually for stuff like "advanced configuration" of servers.
Seems like a lot of them keep getting reelected/reappointed.
So the voters etc think they're the best candidates for the job.
I think the criteria should be whether a reasonable person would believe that that guy had the power and ability to actually do it.
So even a specific threat like "I'm going to kill you with my rifle, two weeks from now" might not count for much if it comes from a quadriplegic.
Whereas a nonspecific threat by a US President like "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority." has to be taken quite seriously especially if it is followed by certain actions. He does have a lot more power...
A little chihuahua barking behind a gate can bark all he wants. No big deal. But I'd definitely be concerned about a rottweiler or pitbull that's loose and unleashed, it doesn't even have to bark - just baring its teeth would scare me...
Not quite what you're looking for, but better than nothing - go to google maps, and use streetview to do a virtual drive down the streets and paths of various places.
Zoom out and drag the "streetview figure" to wherever that's blue.
You could do a tour of various famous bridges, or landmarks (like the Cristo Redentor, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil). Or Akihabara Japan.
Not the same as being there, but it's cheap way to get an overview ;). You might even learn some things that the geography books don't tell you...
Does not compute. How can it be costing the USA of twice the population of the country (hint: USA has a population of 300 million),
Compute better then. I think the AIs are gaining on you.
It's sad if AIs pass the Turing test because the humans have become stupider ;).
Another thing. Biology is messy just because you put a hybrid organ in a human doesn't mean the hybrid cells will stay in that organ.
The organ will have stem cells and stem cells do move about. Stem cells can get across the blood-brain barrier and form new brain cells: http://brainethics.wordpress.com/2006/07/20/on-a-mothers-mind/
Yeah. We could make more intelligent pets or livestock, but are we really doing a good job with the billions we have already?
To me this hybrid stuff is definitely in dangerous territory.
There's lots of stuff that technology allows us to do and could in future allow us to do, but more and more we should ask the questions: Are we ready for it, and ready to pay the price? And the main cost is not in money.
At what point would a hybrid be LEGALLY entitled to the rights and privileges of a human, and subject to the responsibilities/punishments as well?
Many of us are nice to our pets, but they don't get voting rights and they live in a dictatorship (hopefully benevolent). Things change if Fido has the right to reelect Obama and the right to bear arms etc.
If a human has hybrid organs is that human still entitled to vote? What if some of the human's brain cells are replaced with hybrid/animal ones? If an animal has human organs is that animal entitled to vote? If an animal has hybrid organs is that animal entitled to vote?
What gives you the right to slaughter and eat something, or enslave them, or use them as a "natural resource"? You're smarter? You contain human DNA? What is human DNA? What percentage of human DNA and how do you measure it?
If I'm smarter than most of the people posting here can I slaughter them and use their fat to make soap?
Now consider all this from a Homo Superior vs Human perspective (if we blindly continue in this research there will likely be "Homo Superior" and "not-so-superior" hybrids).
Only fools think there is no problem and we should research/do anything as long as technology and resources allow us. What short term and long term benefits would we get out of pursuing this line of research? Are they really worth the cost to us? Could we do this later? Must we all turn vegan? There's ample scientific evidence that humans do better on a diet that includes fish.
It could force us to draw a line before we are ready to do so. And we could draw a pretty stupid line.
p.s. it's similar problem for creating Strong AIs.
A chicken may be an egg's way of making another egg. But a chicken is way more than merely that to a/the chicken.
;)
And a chicken is a human's way of making more eggs. So that they can make more omelettes, cakes, ice cream, bread, pasta, cookies, etc.
The problem with OSX as a server is people have the impression that Apple has a habit of removing stuff rather fast (i.e. actually remove, not merely deprecate) .
What server people want in an OS is for the same server apps to work on the OS for years or even decades, and for the OS to keep being patched/updated against security and other problems. You can release a new version and remove the old version, as long as there is backward compatibility.
Once something works and helps the company make money, if it keeps working and net gain remains constant or increases, the Company is happy. New fancy features are nice, but not often a big deal winner.
Vehicle analogy: think about those boring delivery goods vans/trucks vs the CxOs fancy cars. Companies just want those vans to keep working and be supported for years/decades with no fuss. They don't care that the latest van model has some fancy touchscreen interface, unless it prevents them from using it the old way, or they stop being able to buy the van models that allow them to use it the old way.
Servers are "delivery goods vans" not "fancy cars". Guess which market Apple is in?
Microsoft does change stuff, but if you buy the latest they have, you usually have more than 5 years before your stuff becomes incompatible with any of their supported OSes.
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.
Yeah but:
;).
1) SSDs cost a lot more - you can get fair sized RAID for the price of one SSD.
2) SSD failure modes don't appear to be as graceful as they should be in theory - too often their failure mode is to become completely unaccessible. Whereas I've been able to recover some data from many failed HDDs,
3) SSD failure modes are weird - they have a "time warp" failure (google it) - the drive apparently goes back to the state it say a few days ago but otherwise works as normal. That's not confidence inspiring, and can be worse than a complete failure in some cases - since you might not realize that the data is out of date.
That said I am really tempted to buy an SSD anyway
I'd rather be able to wear a pair of special spectacles that make it look like I've got a huge hi-res virtual screen. If possible it should be overlayed on the "real world", and stay where it is even if I move my head (unless I choose to move it).
Then I don't need to lug about kilograms worth of screen, plus I might save some battery power - screens use up a significant part of the battery budget.
The disadvantage is I can't easily show someone else my screen (unless I share it). But that's not always a disadvantage...
Wars in the old days (and today I bet ;) ) involved killing/raping/enslaving/pillaging.
The raping and enslaving bit often results in progeny.