It's really unfortunate that this happened. If they had simply had a backup snapshot of the DB they could have restored it. RAID only saves you from disk failures. It doesn't work on OS/user failures.
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing you tend to learn from experience (either yours or someone else). It's very easy to think "RAID 1 = disks are safe".
Just like a database cluster wouldn't have saved them. A clustering database can save you from load, or you can swap servers if a disk goes bad. But when someone issues "DELETE * FROM..." the other cluster nodes start to happily run the same thing and now you have 2 (or 3 or 10 or...) empty database boxes.
I hope those bloggers had a backup of some sort of their own.
Have you ever met someone who was convinced that a specific safety feature in their car (or it's excellent engineering) saved their life?
My family has met someone who was in a horrible high-speed accident in a Honda S2000 (little sports coupe) and walked away (cuts and bruises, I think) with the car totaled. They are convinced (and quite possibly right) that many other small soft-topped cars would have been lethal for in the same crash. They immediately went out and bought another one to replace it because it did such a good job (and was a nice car).
Those people will tell their stories and it will spread. That's GREAT advertising. If your airbag goes off because of a minor collision just on the sensor it's annoying and expensive, but people were more willing to listen to the "airbag saved my life" stories than the "cost me $1500 I didn't need to spend" stories. Eventually they were made mandatory. I'm guessing this will work the same way.
As I've said in other comments in this story, I'm more interested in everyone else having this system than having it myself, although I'd gladly take one.
By the time a system like this kicks in, you really should be on the brake pedal. To try to rely on this system would be so terrifying as you constantly got in near-collisions I wouldn't think most people would in the end.
That said, when those drivers are thrown in jail or ticked for $3000 for following too close, causing an accident, not paying attention, endangering public safety, etc... the word will get out you can't rely on these things. And you'll lose your license. "I don't need to use the brake, my car does it for me" isn't going to stand up very well in court.
It's an emergency helper. You're still in charge of the vehicle and the law will take that into account.
The drivers in my neck of the woods are often... well... stupid. Things can be really bad when you are near one of the local high schools or the local college. Lots of inexperienced drivers in one area is never good, and when you add in winter snow/sleet/ice or sudden summer downpours and often steep hills it can get dangerous.
I'd rather give up that little bit of control (which, if you have a brain, you should already be on the brake pedal and stopping by the time the system decides to act) for the cases where it helps me.
I'd rather have that system around if something happens to me (say I pass out due to some unforeseen medical condition). I'd rather have it help prevent me from being hit by the idiot on the cell phone, or putting on makeup while going 80+ on the highway.
I'd rather have it stop the idiot who isn't watching in the fast-food line than get a small hole punched in my rear bumper because someone gunned the gas since they were watching the wrong car.
Will one of these help me personally? Maybe. I wouldn't mind one.
Will one of these help me by helping prevent accidents caused by idiots around me who don't pay enough attention while driving? Almost certainly. I support that.
It seems like a pretty reasonable goal under normal driving circumstances. Sure a car won't be able to handle a train, but I assume they are referring to standard highway driving with other vehicles withing a few dozen times the mass of yours.
Anti-lock brakes are designed to keep the wheels from locking up. They don't do anything to fix the problem of having absolutely no traction in some circumstances.
It's nice to see this. Some companies have been offering radar based cruise control for a while. It's unfortunate this is going to go through a series of lawsuits ("my car didn't stop for me", "my car stopped and spilled my soda over my priceless work of art", etc.).
Don't forget that the car could combine the information about external temperature and traction (from the traction control slip sensors, and the steering assist) to realize it would be hard to stop and plan for a larger stopping distance.
It will be REALLY interesting when this is combined with other sensors (like all the little proximity sensors that Ford's recently announced "help me parallel park" system has) to be able to not only brake, but identify that the lane to the right is empty and swerve to avoid the accident. This will be a while away though.
I wonder how much this will be abused? While it would be easy to try to let the computer do all the work (basically rely on it in emergencies) I would think that would be so nerve wracking most people wouldn't do it.
Every once in a while get panicked calls from people in other departments saying "really important web-based product is DOWN! FIX IT NOW! We're losing money".
It has taken us quite a bit of time to train the users to first check if another site is reachable (usually Google.com, since it's so reliable). Our internet connection (the actual link, the router, or some other part) goes down at least 6x as often as the system. It's a rare occurrence now. Our system is highly redundant, our office connection isn't (or at least wasn't, it's much better now than it used to be).
I have, in one place, been emailed that the internet was down. Our mail server was external. What happened is the cheap little WiFi access point died, and they couldn't access the 'net on their laptop. It worked fine on the wired desktop, which they sent the email from. And were surfing on.
I'm very skeptical of this (due to the complete lack of details). That said, here is what jumped out at me from the article (emphasis mine):
The second part of his invention is an electronic board that regulates the percentage of air and oxygen entering into the appliance, and the third component is an air pump using electrical power.
Why not just cook with the electricity in the first place? Either the electricity in the area is reliable enough that you could, or it's not stable in which case this device won't operate. Is the electricity just too expensive?
It's perfectly possible to cook with electricity. I do it every day. I don't have any gas appliances at my place. There is the standard electric cook top (like a hot plate, or most electric stoves), then there is induction cook tops which are supposed to be much better.
I realize cooking with electricity is not ideal (I'd prefer gas to the electric burners I have, although I might change my mind with an induction cook top), but it would work.
Besides, if this thing is real and sells, don't you think that Israel would get their hands on one stop shipments of whatever chemicals it uses, or at least slow them (if they are common enough) pushing the price way up? If a government is trying to stop you, switching off one substance to another one won't fix your problem. The government will just make the second thing hard to get.
I've been spending the past few weeks enjoying the HD streaming they recently enabled on TiVos. It's great to be able to go just watch any movie in my instant queue, all using the TiVo interface. There are nice little touches like TV series show up as a folder with one "recording" per episode instead.
It works very well, and I can get full quality (or sometimes one mark under, according to the little display) on my 6 Mb DSL line.
So far I've watched Meet the Robinsons, King of Kong, and a couple of other things. The quality is superior to DVD, I believe.
The only problem I have with it is the idea of a "instant queue". That seems rather unnecessary to me. I'd rather just have my instant queue mirror my main queue, just without the non-streamable movies. I'm sure it's useful for some people, but for me it's just a (minor) complication.
Having the additional options would be great for Roku users. Right now I have access to Amazon Unbox, YouTube, and Netflix through my TiVo. I'd LOVE to get Hulu access or something like that.
I agree. I think you could easily add Dead Rising to the genre, as well as the (hopefully) forthcoming Alan Wake. What about the recent Alone in the Dark game?
While not a big genre at this point, games are still being made. Things are changing too. RE4 was a big step above the previous games. Dead Space is outside the standard mold since it's in space. Dead Rising was very different from the standard "I'm all alone and once in a while something jumps out at me" game.
I'm really hoping Alan Wake comes out soon and is good. It sounds so interesting.
As all games have been evolving to various levels, perhaps the old strict definition of a survivor-horror game may not fit, but you could make a good argument the genre isn't totally dead. It seems to be getting some shooter blood, but it's still there.
As someone I trust quite a bit has said before, when it's a social/personality problem there isn't much that can be done.
But once you call it a disease or an addiction, then it's something to be managed with an hour or two a week at $400 on someone's insurance for the rest of their life.
This is one reason why there are so many new "addictions" out there.
Not only can you do that, if you want to keep things simpler (stay in the same transaction, for example) Hibernate can run native SQL queries in addition to HQL. You can code your own queries but still have the hibernate call return a full managed object that you can do the normal Hibernate magic on.
I'm not sure about media players (could be iTunes related), but remember that Mozilla gets quite a bit of revenue due to the Google search in Firefox. Ignoring how Apple likes to control things in general, it's a fair assumption they get a little bit of money when someone searches for something and then clicks an ad, just like Mozilla does.
Really? On my Sprint phones the only software available was what Sprint approved. If they didn't like it (say it competed with their wannabe-MP3 service or TV service) they wouldn't approve it.
Cell phone applications having to be approved is quite routine. Smartphones may be different, but with most phones the companies like to lock them down to prevent people from messing with their revenue streams. This is no different.
If felons were barred from serving in the Senate / Congress, then all you'd have to do is get people you don't like convicted of little petty things which may technically be felonies (due to their positions) and you could control who was in charge. It's probably for the best things are this way. The leaders of the Senate can kick him out if they want, as that MSN article says.
Should a few parking tickets get someone kicked out of congress? I'm not supporting being a scoff-law about them, but would that really necessitate removing them from office?
That said, I'd support a mandatory recall election on representatives who are convicted of felonies.
Or I would if he wasn't up for re-election in less than 2 weeks anyway.
Once the phones are going, they know just how much power they can use to communicate with the tower.
But when the call is first started (or you get a text, etc) phones generally use a much higher power level (or maybe even full) for the first contact to the tower until it is told just how much lower a level it can use and still be heard by the tower clearly.
It's that high level that makes the noise. If you set things up right (low shielding speakers, you and the phone were near the edge of it's coverage area) you'd probably hear the noise more.
That's the odd thing about this. I have a 3G iPhone and it doesn't do this because it spends all its time on the 3G network. If if did drop back, the GSM buzz would be there.
But why is this news now? This happened when the phone was released 3-4 months ago. This happened when the LAST VERSION was released over a YEAR ago.
This is basically blog spam. It shouldn't have made the front page, it's too bad the firehose failed us here.
PS: Well made devices (like computer speakers that cost over $10) are shielded and filtered to reduce/eliminate this kind of stuff. Of course the $5 generic came-with-the-computer-no-shielding-frayed-cable speakers on my boss's desk do this.
Good points. While magnetic media is problematic, SSDs are going to become a very viable option for the home backup (compared to stacks of DVDs or the possible reliability of old magnetic HDs).
I've always understood it as RAID exists to keep you running either during the 'outage' (i.e. until a new disk is built) or at least long enough to shut things down safely and coherently (as opposed to computer just locking up or some such).
It's designed to give you redundancy until you fix the problem. It's designed to let you limp along. It's not designed to be a backup solution.
As others have mentioned: if you want a backup set of hard drives, you run RAID 10 or 15 or something where you have two(+) full copies of your data. And even that won't work in many situations (i.e. computer suddenly finds it's self in a flood).
All that said, the guy has a possible point. How long would it take to build a new 1TB drive into an array? That could be problematic.
There is a reason SANs and other such things have 2+ hot spares in them.
Right. I'm thinking more of a XBox company, an Office company, a server company (Exchange, MS SQL, etc), maybe a Windows company (possibly two), software company (MS Trips, utility programs, etc), hardware (mice, keyboards, Zune, etc), 'net (Live mail, Live search...), whatever.
I can see a ton of benefits to this, the competition aspect is the one I'm thinking of as most important. That plus the sink or swim aspect. The Zune guys know that MS will continue to exist next year with or without them. They can do very little and be OK. If they were more on their own, they'd have to fight to survive. Being a big company can allow MS to take big risks, but they don't seem to do it. The riskiest thing I see they've done in quite a while was the new interface for Office (which is hit and miss).
I agree it won't happen, at least the way I describe. If it were to happen it will either be government intervention (which I think we've seen to be useless right now) or the company starts sinking and starts spinning off divisions.
When I first got my XBox 360 I went around trying to create my user account and such and just about went nuts. It was taking FOREVER to type any text in, because it was so difficult to move the cursor left or right (or up or down) without hitting another direction.
I finally finished by using the analog stick for digital movement. The D-pad is completely unusable for anything other than a really simple set of four hot keys. It can't be used for precision.
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It's really unfortunate that this happened. If they had simply had a backup snapshot of the DB they could have restored it. RAID only saves you from disk failures. It doesn't work on OS/user failures.
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing you tend to learn from experience (either yours or someone else). It's very easy to think "RAID 1 = disks are safe".
Just like a database cluster wouldn't have saved them. A clustering database can save you from load, or you can swap servers if a disk goes bad. But when someone issues "DELETE * FROM..." the other cluster nodes start to happily run the same thing and now you have 2 (or 3 or 10 or...) empty database boxes.
I hope those bloggers had a backup of some sort of their own.
Have you ever met someone who was convinced that a specific safety feature in their car (or it's excellent engineering) saved their life?
My family has met someone who was in a horrible high-speed accident in a Honda S2000 (little sports coupe) and walked away (cuts and bruises, I think) with the car totaled. They are convinced (and quite possibly right) that many other small soft-topped cars would have been lethal for in the same crash. They immediately went out and bought another one to replace it because it did such a good job (and was a nice car).
Those people will tell their stories and it will spread. That's GREAT advertising. If your airbag goes off because of a minor collision just on the sensor it's annoying and expensive, but people were more willing to listen to the "airbag saved my life" stories than the "cost me $1500 I didn't need to spend" stories. Eventually they were made mandatory. I'm guessing this will work the same way.
As I've said in other comments in this story, I'm more interested in everyone else having this system than having it myself, although I'd gladly take one.
By the time a system like this kicks in, you really should be on the brake pedal. To try to rely on this system would be so terrifying as you constantly got in near-collisions I wouldn't think most people would in the end.
That said, when those drivers are thrown in jail or ticked for $3000 for following too close, causing an accident, not paying attention, endangering public safety, etc... the word will get out you can't rely on these things. And you'll lose your license. "I don't need to use the brake, my car does it for me" isn't going to stand up very well in court.
It's an emergency helper. You're still in charge of the vehicle and the law will take that into account.
I understand the sentiment, however I disagree.
The drivers in my neck of the woods are often... well... stupid. Things can be really bad when you are near one of the local high schools or the local college. Lots of inexperienced drivers in one area is never good, and when you add in winter snow/sleet/ice or sudden summer downpours and often steep hills it can get dangerous.
I'd rather give up that little bit of control (which, if you have a brain, you should already be on the brake pedal and stopping by the time the system decides to act) for the cases where it helps me.
I'd rather have that system around if something happens to me (say I pass out due to some unforeseen medical condition). I'd rather have it help prevent me from being hit by the idiot on the cell phone, or putting on makeup while going 80+ on the highway.
I'd rather have it stop the idiot who isn't watching in the fast-food line than get a small hole punched in my rear bumper because someone gunned the gas since they were watching the wrong car.
Will one of these help me personally? Maybe. I wouldn't mind one.
Will one of these help me by helping prevent accidents caused by idiots around me who don't pay enough attention while driving? Almost certainly. I support that.
Duh.
That why they'll invent Internial Dampeners.
It seems like a pretty reasonable goal under normal driving circumstances. Sure a car won't be able to handle a train, but I assume they are referring to standard highway driving with other vehicles withing a few dozen times the mass of yours.
Anti-lock brakes are designed to keep the wheels from locking up. They don't do anything to fix the problem of having absolutely no traction in some circumstances.
It's nice to see this. Some companies have been offering radar based cruise control for a while. It's unfortunate this is going to go through a series of lawsuits ("my car didn't stop for me", "my car stopped and spilled my soda over my priceless work of art", etc.).
Don't forget that the car could combine the information about external temperature and traction (from the traction control slip sensors, and the steering assist) to realize it would be hard to stop and plan for a larger stopping distance.
It will be REALLY interesting when this is combined with other sensors (like all the little proximity sensors that Ford's recently announced "help me parallel park" system has) to be able to not only brake, but identify that the lane to the right is empty and swerve to avoid the accident. This will be a while away though.
I wonder how much this will be abused? While it would be easy to try to let the computer do all the work (basically rely on it in emergencies) I would think that would be so nerve wracking most people wouldn't do it.
Users really don't 'get' the internet.
Every once in a while get panicked calls from people in other departments saying "really important web-based product is DOWN! FIX IT NOW! We're losing money".
It has taken us quite a bit of time to train the users to first check if another site is reachable (usually Google.com, since it's so reliable). Our internet connection (the actual link, the router, or some other part) goes down at least 6x as often as the system. It's a rare occurrence now. Our system is highly redundant, our office connection isn't (or at least wasn't, it's much better now than it used to be).
I have, in one place, been emailed that the internet was down. Our mail server was external. What happened is the cheap little WiFi access point died, and they couldn't access the 'net on their laptop. It worked fine on the wired desktop, which they sent the email from. And were surfing on.
I'm very skeptical of this (due to the complete lack of details). That said, here is what jumped out at me from the article (emphasis mine):
Why not just cook with the electricity in the first place? Either the electricity in the area is reliable enough that you could, or it's not stable in which case this device won't operate. Is the electricity just too expensive?
It's perfectly possible to cook with electricity. I do it every day. I don't have any gas appliances at my place. There is the standard electric cook top (like a hot plate, or most electric stoves), then there is induction cook tops which are supposed to be much better.
I realize cooking with electricity is not ideal (I'd prefer gas to the electric burners I have, although I might change my mind with an induction cook top), but it would work.
Besides, if this thing is real and sells, don't you think that Israel would get their hands on one stop shipments of whatever chemicals it uses, or at least slow them (if they are common enough) pushing the price way up? If a government is trying to stop you, switching off one substance to another one won't fix your problem. The government will just make the second thing hard to get.
I've been spending the past few weeks enjoying the HD streaming they recently enabled on TiVos. It's great to be able to go just watch any movie in my instant queue, all using the TiVo interface. There are nice little touches like TV series show up as a folder with one "recording" per episode instead.
It works very well, and I can get full quality (or sometimes one mark under, according to the little display) on my 6 Mb DSL line.
So far I've watched Meet the Robinsons, King of Kong, and a couple of other things. The quality is superior to DVD, I believe.
The only problem I have with it is the idea of a "instant queue". That seems rather unnecessary to me. I'd rather just have my instant queue mirror my main queue, just without the non-streamable movies. I'm sure it's useful for some people, but for me it's just a (minor) complication.
Having the additional options would be great for Roku users. Right now I have access to Amazon Unbox, YouTube, and Netflix through my TiVo. I'd LOVE to get Hulu access or something like that.
Don't worry, you'll be given a free pack of 3 AAs once every 36 fortnights, tax free, as an additional payback on your investment.
It will be sort of like the Alaskan Permanent Fund, but weirder and more pointless.
I agree. I think you could easily add Dead Rising to the genre, as well as the (hopefully) forthcoming Alan Wake. What about the recent Alone in the Dark game?
While not a big genre at this point, games are still being made. Things are changing too. RE4 was a big step above the previous games. Dead Space is outside the standard mold since it's in space. Dead Rising was very different from the standard "I'm all alone and once in a while something jumps out at me" game.
I'm really hoping Alan Wake comes out soon and is good. It sounds so interesting.
As all games have been evolving to various levels, perhaps the old strict definition of a survivor-horror game may not fit, but you could make a good argument the genre isn't totally dead. It seems to be getting some shooter blood, but it's still there.
As someone I trust quite a bit has said before, when it's a social/personality problem there isn't much that can be done.
But once you call it a disease or an addiction, then it's something to be managed with an hour or two a week at $400 on someone's insurance for the rest of their life.
This is one reason why there are so many new "addictions" out there.
Not only can you do that, if you want to keep things simpler (stay in the same transaction, for example) Hibernate can run native SQL queries in addition to HQL. You can code your own queries but still have the hibernate call return a full managed object that you can do the normal Hibernate magic on.
I'm not sure about media players (could be iTunes related), but remember that Mozilla gets quite a bit of revenue due to the Google search in Firefox. Ignoring how Apple likes to control things in general, it's a fair assumption they get a little bit of money when someone searches for something and then clicks an ad, just like Mozilla does.
Really? On my Sprint phones the only software available was what Sprint approved. If they didn't like it (say it competed with their wannabe-MP3 service or TV service) they wouldn't approve it.
Cell phone applications having to be approved is quite routine. Smartphones may be different, but with most phones the companies like to lock them down to prevent people from messing with their revenue streams. This is no different.
If felons were barred from serving in the Senate / Congress, then all you'd have to do is get people you don't like convicted of little petty things which may technically be felonies (due to their positions) and you could control who was in charge. It's probably for the best things are this way. The leaders of the Senate can kick him out if they want, as that MSN article says.
Should a few parking tickets get someone kicked out of congress? I'm not supporting being a scoff-law about them, but would that really necessitate removing them from office?
That said, I'd support a mandatory recall election on representatives who are convicted of felonies.
Or I would if he wasn't up for re-election in less than 2 weeks anyway.
Once the phones are going, they know just how much power they can use to communicate with the tower.
But when the call is first started (or you get a text, etc) phones generally use a much higher power level (or maybe even full) for the first contact to the tower until it is told just how much lower a level it can use and still be heard by the tower clearly.
It's that high level that makes the noise. If you set things up right (low shielding speakers, you and the phone were near the edge of it's coverage area) you'd probably hear the noise more.
That's the odd thing about this. I have a 3G iPhone and it doesn't do this because it spends all its time on the 3G network. If if did drop back, the GSM buzz would be there.
But why is this news now? This happened when the phone was released 3-4 months ago. This happened when the LAST VERSION was released over a YEAR ago.
This is basically blog spam. It shouldn't have made the front page, it's too bad the firehose failed us here.
PS: Well made devices (like computer speakers that cost over $10) are shielded and filtered to reduce/eliminate this kind of stuff. Of course the $5 generic came-with-the-computer-no-shielding-frayed-cable speakers on my boss's desk do this.
Good points. While magnetic media is problematic, SSDs are going to become a very viable option for the home backup (compared to stacks of DVDs or the possible reliability of old magnetic HDs).
I've always understood it as RAID exists to keep you running either during the 'outage' (i.e. until a new disk is built) or at least long enough to shut things down safely and coherently (as opposed to computer just locking up or some such).
It's designed to give you redundancy until you fix the problem. It's designed to let you limp along. It's not designed to be a backup solution.
As others have mentioned: if you want a backup set of hard drives, you run RAID 10 or 15 or something where you have two(+) full copies of your data. And even that won't work in many situations (i.e. computer suddenly finds it's self in a flood).
All that said, the guy has a possible point. How long would it take to build a new 1TB drive into an array? That could be problematic.
There is a reason SANs and other such things have 2+ hot spares in them.
The largest bit became a one? It overflowed?
So now it's negative?
We're rich! So that's how we were going to pay for the bail-out, SS, medicare, medicaid...
Right. I'm thinking more of a XBox company, an Office company, a server company (Exchange, MS SQL, etc), maybe a Windows company (possibly two), software company (MS Trips, utility programs, etc), hardware (mice, keyboards, Zune, etc), 'net (Live mail, Live search...), whatever.
I can see a ton of benefits to this, the competition aspect is the one I'm thinking of as most important. That plus the sink or swim aspect. The Zune guys know that MS will continue to exist next year with or without them. They can do very little and be OK. If they were more on their own, they'd have to fight to survive. Being a big company can allow MS to take big risks, but they don't seem to do it. The riskiest thing I see they've done in quite a while was the new interface for Office (which is hit and miss).
I agree it won't happen, at least the way I describe. If it were to happen it will either be government intervention (which I think we've seen to be useless right now) or the company starts sinking and starts spinning off divisions.
True, but that's because it's non-functional.
When I first got my XBox 360 I went around trying to create my user account and such and just about went nuts. It was taking FOREVER to type any text in, because it was so difficult to move the cursor left or right (or up or down) without hitting another direction.
I finally finished by using the analog stick for digital movement. The D-pad is completely unusable for anything other than a really simple set of four hot keys. It can't be used for precision.