It is pretty incredible how the larger capacity SSDs have come down in price. $149 is in the affordable range. However, 500GB used to be sufficient to store multimedia, but that is no longer the case. Each of my daughter's school performance videos is a 30-50GB file, and they quickly add up. The cloud is okay as a backup, but for primary file storage it's more costly, higher latency, and less convenient. For non-multimedia storage, we already had affordable SSDs in usable capacities, so I'm not sure I would get a $149 500GB over a $70 128GB SSD plus $90 3TB HDD.
It may not be the principal's fault. Many schools have "zero tolerance" policies, which is basically PC-speak for common sense and reasoning is prohibited. In my daughter's school, using your fingers to form a pretend gun will get you in trouble.
If the school monitoring student or staff internet activity at home, at the library, or one personal devices accessing non-school networks, I would be concerned. However, this is no different than a company saying that on their network and when employees are on the clock, they should be using the network for activities directly related to the companies interests.
Almost all students and staff have alternate access to the internet during the majority of their awake hours, so this is not a big deal.
There are different issues depending on one's point of view. For developers and businesses, deployment and maintenance are greatly simplified by web/cloud services. However, from a user's point of view, there are pros and cons. On the plus side, there are no installation and patching issues (aside from the issues of not being able to roll back to previous versions or to prevent updates). On the minus side, there is loss of control. Access to the service or data is dependent on network connectivity and can disappear at times, although there are ways to cache code/data to somewhat mimic desktop applications. The user can no longer run previous versions or prevent updates, so if the service providers rolls out buggy code or eliminates features, the user is stuck. If the service provider decides to impose or increase fees, the user's only options are to accept increased costs or dump the service entirely. There is also a dependence on browsers, along with potential issues with performance and stability.
The Windows Phone platform and tools may indeed be inferior to Android and iOS. However, this business decision doesn't suggest that anymore than the fact that far more software is written for Windows than Mac proves the inherent superiority of Windows.
That Google is able to employ such tactics with the implicit understanding that its customers will not abandon it for a competitor argues that it has coercive monopoly power
It's implying no such thing. The actions of a company can not be linked to coercive power without understand the needs or wants of the customer first. There is some benefit to both parties that Google's results are promoted to the top and many customers like getting consistent and understandable results. I.e. if I type "maps" into Google I would see it as a sign of a failing search algorithm to not promote Google Maps to the very top of the list. It is incredibly interesting that Bing will also list Google as the top result for maps, and only lists itself as number 4.
Coerciveness and lack of effective competition is orthogonal to both relative ability to competitors and benefit to consumers. Government entities including courts have sometimes made decisions based on the impact to consumers, but the coercive nature of a business and its ability to unilaterally impose its will on the market can still remain.
That Google is able to employ such tactics with the implicit understanding that its customers will not abandon it for a competitor argues that it has coercive monopoly power.
Google customers will not abandon Google because Google is doing exactly what Google customers want: promoting Google things and things the customers have paid them to promote.
The issue is one of competition and customer choice. That the lack of competition might have arisen from a combination of Google's competence and a lack of competence on the part of their competitors is orthogonal. Lack of competition is inherently anti-consumer because market forces are not allowed to influence pricing. This is true even if Google follows their slogan and is completely devoid of evil.
Oh, you thought YOU were the customer when you did a search? When you send a check to Google for their data you can be a customer. Until then, you are a product. Your click-throughs are what the customers pay for.
I have never been under any illusion that I am a Google customer. In Google's eyes, I am cattle.
The issue isn't one of market share, although 75% is definitely at least dominant. We're talking about monopolies in the sense of Microsoft and Intel, neither of which is a government-granted monopoly. The key is whether Google has a coercive monopoly that is able to restrain competition and operate without fear of competition. Near 100% market share is not necessary. That Google is able to employ such tactics with the implicit understanding that its customers will not abandon it for a competitor argues that it has coercive monopoly power. Whether this situation arises due to Google's ability or its competitors' incompetency does not detract from the coercive nature of Google's market position.
I realize these comments are intended to be slightly humorous, but consider the annual inflation rate needed for that prediction to come true:
Optomist...
$9k in 40 years will be worth what, $500 bucks in today's money before taxes?
This would require an annual inflation rate of 7.5%! In the US, we haven't had monthly inflation that high since 1982!
Optomist...
$9,000 US dollars in 40 years will be about $5.00 US value. In fact a large Coffee at starbucks will cost $10,000
This would require an annual inflation rate of 20.6%! In the last 100 years in the US, the monthly inflation rate has only been in the 20% range for a few months and only after the immediate end of the two world wars.
Upon reading the article, I had similar questions about the experimental methodology.
Why repeat the tests? Were these oral tests? If tests were repeated, did they account for time or fatigue-based effects? In elementary school (at least in the US), tests are going to be written, so such tests could easily have been sent to multiple graders without repeating the test.
Also, the tests must not have been objective (e.g., multiple choice, etc.) in order to present the possibility of subjective grading. I didn't get such tests during my schooling.
Finally, if the experimenters wanted to test their theory of gender bias, they should have taken the tests and swapped the names on a subset of tests to directly test the theory that the gender name was the critical factor. The could have easily tested their hypothesis but didn't.
Would it be possible to perpetrate what would effectively be a DDOS attack via the FOIA request mechanism? If the government were required to handle every single request without question, then could an anti-government group send a large number of requests that would waste human, machine, and dollar resources to an extent that was crippling? How should the good intent of the FOIA be balanced against potential misuse?
I love people who take pot shots and don't know what the fuck they're talking about. All school districts are taking tougher stances on punishment and more and more districts across the country are adopting zero tolerance policies.
Zero tolerance is an abomination. It teaches the exact opposite of what kids need to learn. Kids need to learn how to think, how to evaluate situations, and how to reason about the costs and benefits of available options. Zero tolerance is all about protecting schools against lawsuits and abandoning the hard job of teaching kids how to make decisions.
A religion, or more broadly any religious or non-religious creed, that mandates capital punishment for blasphemy is problematic. Adherents of such a religion should be treated the same as any person who cries out death threats in response to perceived verbal offenses.
However, I wonder if this is more a matter of ethnicity rather than religion. Do the roughly half a million Muslim African-Americans hold the same views as those of Arab descent? How about the Muslims from India?
OK, I asked my friend who works as a reliability expert at one of the HDD manufacturers. The 2400 hours refers to the assumed duty cycle of the drive, and this assumption is used to obtain the estimated AFR of 1%. The corresponding MTBF would be around 250,000 hours. And, of course, MTBF is not the expected lifetime of the drive, since the number is based on qualification testing and field data for a population of drives where most of the drives have not yet failed.
So, to get back to the original point of this thread, as intuition would indicate, there is no drive sold that has an expected time to failure of 2400 hours. There may be some individual anecdotal stories of poor reliability, but the analysis of larger populations is a more accurate characterization of a specific HDD model.
I understand the relationship between MTBF and AFR. Of course, no one HDD will last 100 years, let alone on the average. However, think about it. How in the world would an HDD manufacturer come up with an expected 2400 lifetime? Qualification tests involve tests of 1000 drives for 1000 hours, from which a few drives will fail and the AFR and MTBF are derived. There is no way a 2400-lifetime squares with a 1% AFR. AFR numbers are clear. I'm not sure what "power-on hours" mean. It's obviously not MTBF. Is it max lifetime?
For the exact opposite, check out the Seagate Barracuda Data Sheet. Scroll down to where they're rated for 2,400 power-on hours. In other words, they're built to survive a whopping 3 months in a NAS.
If you're buying something to stick in your gaming computer, read the performance specs. If you actually care about the data you're writing, the reliability numbers are way more interesting.
Look at the AFR on the data sheet. It's less than 1%. So, obviously the MTBF is not 2400 hours. It's >875,000 hours. An MTBF of 2400 hours translates to an AFR of 97.4%, which is obviously not going to fare very well in a prototype lab, not to mention the marketplace.
Why shouldn't the news to targeted to what is of greatest interest to the viewers of that particular newscast? Italians should be interested to know if any Italians were on board, and that interest doesn't necessarily indicate that Italian lives are of greater worth than non-Italian lives. If my friend or family member might have been on that flight, the importance of that piece of information trumps all other facets of the situation.
I find this type of sentiment to be fairly common, for example, when Europeans complain about the scarcity of soccer coverage on American TV news, with the implication that subjects of high global interest as gauged statistically should be of interest to all people.
I see that my post got moderated as a troll. Seriously?! There are many intelligent individuals utilizing science and reasoning to support climate change, but there are also idiots who for some reason try to match some of the mudslinging of the anti crowd. Hotheads on either side of the issue are still hotheads and serve to discredit their respective viewpoints.
I personally think there is some human influence on climate change. However, the use of the term "science denier" is plain sensationalism, and it's ridiculous. "Science" does not equal climatology. To say that someone who rejects one set of scientific theories or results necessarily rejects all scientific ideas is pure propaganda. Worse yet, it's unnecessary and makes such speakers appear ignorant. It's best to keep the appearance of idiocy on the target of one's criticism.
If you want to communicate via language and language alone, then this type of study shows the connectivity of those linguistic works. However, there are many more influences in life than pure linguistic works, including economic, political, technological, military, cultural, and religious power. Considering these other powers probably leads to very different conclusions concerning the best languages for influencing the world. Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword, and sometimes the sword has more influence.
Yet no comment on Microsoft or Autodesk and their contributions which cost them essentially $0?
No need to comment on these two companies. In the slashdot universe, Microsoft is already understood to be pure evil, while Autodesk is understood to be insignificant.
I don't doubt the goodness of Apple's heart. However, of that $100 million, about $50 million or less is actual COGS. And, they get a huge multi-million dollar tax deduction. And, they are clearing out their old inventory of last generation hardware that is now worth less due to newly introduced versions, and they place that inventory in the hand of customers who wouldn't necessarily pay for those products on their own (i.e., poor families and schools) and therefore don't fully steal from their own market share. And, they are continuing their strategy of putting their products in the hands of students so that those students become future customers, i.e., fantastic marketing. So, Apple is to be commended for their generosity, but they are to be venerated for their business acumen.
Note that there are two issues with CurrentC: the access medium (app and scanned QR code vs. NFC or mag stripe or smartcard) and the banking system (credit or debit card; Visa/Mastercard/etc with banks vs. debit card with banks). Theoretically all combinations are possible, so the discussions to view the various issues are not necessarily linked. They are currently linked due to the nascent nature of the offerings, but I wouldn't be surprised to see CurrentC paired with NFC in the future. That's a relatively minor technological issue.
The bigger issue is the underlying banking system and whether it's wise to cut Visa/Mastercard/etc. out of the loop. The benefits are cost savings to the merchants and ultimately to the consumer. The supposed drawbacks relate to security and consumer protections. There are differences in legal protections at the federal level as well as state level. It is an incorrect notion that debit cards have no legal protections. For example, for my Chase debit card, there is zero liability for unauthorized transactions and unauthorized charges are reimbursed by the next business day while the charges are investigated. Sounds similar to credit card protections.
There is also the issue of a grace period for repayment with credit cards, but that is relatively minor with today's very low interest rates. If I can delay payment of a monthly total of $2k for one month and keep that money in my 0.9% online savings account, I would gain about $1.50 each month. Not nothing, but close. And that assumes that I'm willing to continually transfer money back and forth between my 0% checking account and my 0.9% savings account.
There are differences between debit cards and credit cards, but I imagine that many people are not aware that the differences are less that what they might assume.
I personally use credit cards all the time, mainly due to the better rewards programs and my desire to limit the number of active payment accounts. However, if CurrentC offers better rewards, then maybe I would consider using it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is pretty incredible how the larger capacity SSDs have come down in price. $149 is in the affordable range. However, 500GB used to be sufficient to store multimedia, but that is no longer the case. Each of my daughter's school performance videos is a 30-50GB file, and they quickly add up. The cloud is okay as a backup, but for primary file storage it's more costly, higher latency, and less convenient. For non-multimedia storage, we already had affordable SSDs in usable capacities, so I'm not sure I would get a $149 500GB over a $70 128GB SSD plus $90 3TB HDD.
It may not be the principal's fault. Many schools have "zero tolerance" policies, which is basically PC-speak for common sense and reasoning is prohibited. In my daughter's school, using your fingers to form a pretend gun will get you in trouble.
If the school monitoring student or staff internet activity at home, at the library, or one personal devices accessing non-school networks, I would be concerned. However, this is no different than a company saying that on their network and when employees are on the clock, they should be using the network for activities directly related to the companies interests.
Almost all students and staff have alternate access to the internet during the majority of their awake hours, so this is not a big deal.
I for one have *never* been afraid of asterisks.
It's good to have a healthy fear of asterisks -- there's a big difference between "rm -rf *.tmp" and "rm -rf * .tmp"
Asterisks are nothing compared to slashes. You should try "rm -rf * /", as root, of course.
There are different issues depending on one's point of view. For developers and businesses, deployment and maintenance are greatly simplified by web/cloud services. However, from a user's point of view, there are pros and cons. On the plus side, there are no installation and patching issues (aside from the issues of not being able to roll back to previous versions or to prevent updates). On the minus side, there is loss of control. Access to the service or data is dependent on network connectivity and can disappear at times, although there are ways to cache code/data to somewhat mimic desktop applications. The user can no longer run previous versions or prevent updates, so if the service providers rolls out buggy code or eliminates features, the user is stuck. If the service provider decides to impose or increase fees, the user's only options are to accept increased costs or dump the service entirely. There is also a dependence on browsers, along with potential issues with performance and stability.
The Windows Phone platform and tools may indeed be inferior to Android and iOS. However, this business decision doesn't suggest that anymore than the fact that far more software is written for Windows than Mac proves the inherent superiority of Windows.
That Google is able to employ such tactics with the implicit understanding that its customers will not abandon it for a competitor argues that it has coercive monopoly power
It's implying no such thing. The actions of a company can not be linked to coercive power without understand the needs or wants of the customer first. There is some benefit to both parties that Google's results are promoted to the top and many customers like getting consistent and understandable results. I.e. if I type "maps" into Google I would see it as a sign of a failing search algorithm to not promote Google Maps to the very top of the list. It is incredibly interesting that Bing will also list Google as the top result for maps, and only lists itself as number 4.
Coerciveness and lack of effective competition is orthogonal to both relative ability to competitors and benefit to consumers. Government entities including courts have sometimes made decisions based on the impact to consumers, but the coercive nature of a business and its ability to unilaterally impose its will on the market can still remain.
That Google is able to employ such tactics with the implicit understanding that its customers will not abandon it for a competitor argues that it has coercive monopoly power.
Google customers will not abandon Google because Google is doing exactly what Google customers want: promoting Google things and things the customers have paid them to promote.
The issue is one of competition and customer choice. That the lack of competition might have arisen from a combination of Google's competence and a lack of competence on the part of their competitors is orthogonal. Lack of competition is inherently anti-consumer because market forces are not allowed to influence pricing. This is true even if Google follows their slogan and is completely devoid of evil.
Oh, you thought YOU were the customer when you did a search? When you send a check to Google for their data you can be a customer. Until then, you are a product. Your click-throughs are what the customers pay for.
I have never been under any illusion that I am a Google customer. In Google's eyes, I am cattle.
The issue isn't one of market share, although 75% is definitely at least dominant. We're talking about monopolies in the sense of Microsoft and Intel, neither of which is a government-granted monopoly. The key is whether Google has a coercive monopoly that is able to restrain competition and operate without fear of competition. Near 100% market share is not necessary. That Google is able to employ such tactics with the implicit understanding that its customers will not abandon it for a competitor argues that it has coercive monopoly power. Whether this situation arises due to Google's ability or its competitors' incompetency does not detract from the coercive nature of Google's market position.
China is bad, but all the evidence suggests that the US is worse.
Maybe China is just much better at preventing the Chinese Edward Snowdens from exposing China programs.
I realize these comments are intended to be slightly humorous, but consider the annual inflation rate needed for that prediction to come true:
Optomist...
$9k in 40 years will be worth what, $500 bucks in today's money before taxes?
This would require an annual inflation rate of 7.5%! In the US, we haven't had monthly inflation that high since 1982!
Optomist...
$9,000 US dollars in 40 years will be about $5.00 US value. In fact a large Coffee at starbucks will cost $10,000
This would require an annual inflation rate of 20.6%! In the last 100 years in the US, the monthly inflation rate has only been in the 20% range for a few months and only after the immediate end of the two world wars.
Upon reading the article, I had similar questions about the experimental methodology.
Why repeat the tests? Were these oral tests? If tests were repeated, did they account for time or fatigue-based effects? In elementary school (at least in the US), tests are going to be written, so such tests could easily have been sent to multiple graders without repeating the test.
Also, the tests must not have been objective (e.g., multiple choice, etc.) in order to present the possibility of subjective grading. I didn't get such tests during my schooling.
Finally, if the experimenters wanted to test their theory of gender bias, they should have taken the tests and swapped the names on a subset of tests to directly test the theory that the gender name was the critical factor. The could have easily tested their hypothesis but didn't.
Would it be possible to perpetrate what would effectively be a DDOS attack via the FOIA request mechanism? If the government were required to handle every single request without question, then could an anti-government group send a large number of requests that would waste human, machine, and dollar resources to an extent that was crippling? How should the good intent of the FOIA be balanced against potential misuse?
I love people who take pot shots and don't know what the fuck they're talking about. All school districts are taking tougher stances on punishment and more and more districts across the country are adopting zero tolerance policies.
Zero tolerance is an abomination. It teaches the exact opposite of what kids need to learn. Kids need to learn how to think, how to evaluate situations, and how to reason about the costs and benefits of available options. Zero tolerance is all about protecting schools against lawsuits and abandoning the hard job of teaching kids how to make decisions.
A religion, or more broadly any religious or non-religious creed, that mandates capital punishment for blasphemy is problematic. Adherents of such a religion should be treated the same as any person who cries out death threats in response to perceived verbal offenses.
However, I wonder if this is more a matter of ethnicity rather than religion. Do the roughly half a million Muslim African-Americans hold the same views as those of Arab descent? How about the Muslims from India?
OK, I asked my friend who works as a reliability expert at one of the HDD manufacturers. The 2400 hours refers to the assumed duty cycle of the drive, and this assumption is used to obtain the estimated AFR of 1%. The corresponding MTBF would be around 250,000 hours. And, of course, MTBF is not the expected lifetime of the drive, since the number is based on qualification testing and field data for a population of drives where most of the drives have not yet failed.
So, to get back to the original point of this thread, as intuition would indicate, there is no drive sold that has an expected time to failure of 2400 hours. There may be some individual anecdotal stories of poor reliability, but the analysis of larger populations is a more accurate characterization of a specific HDD model.
I understand the relationship between MTBF and AFR. Of course, no one HDD will last 100 years, let alone on the average. However, think about it. How in the world would an HDD manufacturer come up with an expected 2400 lifetime? Qualification tests involve tests of 1000 drives for 1000 hours, from which a few drives will fail and the AFR and MTBF are derived. There is no way a 2400-lifetime squares with a 1% AFR. AFR numbers are clear. I'm not sure what "power-on hours" mean. It's obviously not MTBF. Is it max lifetime?
For the exact opposite, check out the Seagate Barracuda Data Sheet. Scroll down to where they're rated for 2,400 power-on hours. In other words, they're built to survive a whopping 3 months in a NAS.
If you're buying something to stick in your gaming computer, read the performance specs. If you actually care about the data you're writing, the reliability numbers are way more interesting.
Look at the AFR on the data sheet. It's less than 1%. So, obviously the MTBF is not 2400 hours. It's >875,000 hours. An MTBF of 2400 hours translates to an AFR of 97.4%, which is obviously not going to fare very well in a prototype lab, not to mention the marketplace.
Why shouldn't the news to targeted to what is of greatest interest to the viewers of that particular newscast? Italians should be interested to know if any Italians were on board, and that interest doesn't necessarily indicate that Italian lives are of greater worth than non-Italian lives. If my friend or family member might have been on that flight, the importance of that piece of information trumps all other facets of the situation.
I find this type of sentiment to be fairly common, for example, when Europeans complain about the scarcity of soccer coverage on American TV news, with the implication that subjects of high global interest as gauged statistically should be of interest to all people.
I see that my post got moderated as a troll. Seriously?! There are many intelligent individuals utilizing science and reasoning to support climate change, but there are also idiots who for some reason try to match some of the mudslinging of the anti crowd. Hotheads on either side of the issue are still hotheads and serve to discredit their respective viewpoints.
I personally think there is some human influence on climate change. However, the use of the term "science denier" is plain sensationalism, and it's ridiculous. "Science" does not equal climatology. To say that someone who rejects one set of scientific theories or results necessarily rejects all scientific ideas is pure propaganda. Worse yet, it's unnecessary and makes such speakers appear ignorant. It's best to keep the appearance of idiocy on the target of one's criticism.
If you want to communicate via language and language alone, then this type of study shows the connectivity of those linguistic works. However, there are many more influences in life than pure linguistic works, including economic, political, technological, military, cultural, and religious power. Considering these other powers probably leads to very different conclusions concerning the best languages for influencing the world. Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword, and sometimes the sword has more influence.
Yet no comment on Microsoft or Autodesk and their contributions which cost them essentially $0?
No need to comment on these two companies. In the slashdot universe, Microsoft is already understood to be pure evil, while Autodesk is understood to be insignificant.
I don't doubt the goodness of Apple's heart. However, of that $100 million, about $50 million or less is actual COGS. And, they get a huge multi-million dollar tax deduction. And, they are clearing out their old inventory of last generation hardware that is now worth less due to newly introduced versions, and they place that inventory in the hand of customers who wouldn't necessarily pay for those products on their own (i.e., poor families and schools) and therefore don't fully steal from their own market share. And, they are continuing their strategy of putting their products in the hands of students so that those students become future customers, i.e., fantastic marketing. So, Apple is to be commended for their generosity, but they are to be venerated for their business acumen.
Note that there are two issues with CurrentC: the access medium (app and scanned QR code vs. NFC or mag stripe or smartcard) and the banking system (credit or debit card; Visa/Mastercard/etc with banks vs. debit card with banks). Theoretically all combinations are possible, so the discussions to view the various issues are not necessarily linked. They are currently linked due to the nascent nature of the offerings, but I wouldn't be surprised to see CurrentC paired with NFC in the future. That's a relatively minor technological issue.
The bigger issue is the underlying banking system and whether it's wise to cut Visa/Mastercard/etc. out of the loop. The benefits are cost savings to the merchants and ultimately to the consumer. The supposed drawbacks relate to security and consumer protections. There are differences in legal protections at the federal level as well as state level. It is an incorrect notion that debit cards have no legal protections. For example, for my Chase debit card, there is zero liability for unauthorized transactions and unauthorized charges are reimbursed by the next business day while the charges are investigated. Sounds similar to credit card protections.
There is also the issue of a grace period for repayment with credit cards, but that is relatively minor with today's very low interest rates. If I can delay payment of a monthly total of $2k for one month and keep that money in my 0.9% online savings account, I would gain about $1.50 each month. Not nothing, but close. And that assumes that I'm willing to continually transfer money back and forth between my 0% checking account and my 0.9% savings account.
There are differences between debit cards and credit cards, but I imagine that many people are not aware that the differences are less that what they might assume.
I personally use credit cards all the time, mainly due to the better rewards programs and my desire to limit the number of active payment accounts. However, if CurrentC offers better rewards, then maybe I would consider using it.