It's interesting that you seem to think that your experience is in some way predictive of what others will encounter. But that's just not so.
Oh, but it is. It's a fact that WD has higher power consumption than other hard drive manufacturers.
I recently discarded a Plextor burner which had seen hard duty for 9 solid years,
My Lite-on CD burner is going strong as well.
I'm still running old 4 and 6 gig drives in a couple of machines here that don't need much for storage.
Same here. I've got a couple 1 and 2 GB hard drives going still. A 20MB MFM drive with controller around here somewhere, too, which still works fine.
My 6.4GB hard drive was destroyed by a PSU short years ago, unfortantely. Through no fault of Maxtor, of course (at least, AFAIK).
My 2x 27GB hard drives are still running fine as well.
With modern hard drives, however, the situation hasn't been as plesant. I have 4 Western Digital HDDs... 2 are older 40GB HDDs, and 2 are 100GB HDDs.
One of the 40GB HDDs hasn't had any problems, though it's been a backup drive most of it's life, and never been heavily used.
The other 40GB drive was in my main desktop machine, and under heavy use, though not always-on. I believe it lasted 9 months. Incidentally, the refurb drive WD sent was unfortunately extremely noisy, while the original was nice and quiet. That drive made it for 2 months, and failed. The (second) replacement drive has been working fine ever since (about a year now).
The first 100GB HDD was in a workstation, that was always-on, for about 10 months. When it had to be replaced, I bought a new 100GB drive, and used the refurb only for backups... Despite its light-duty, it has twice developed read errors, once in the MBR, losing all the (backup) data, and requiring clearing the drive and repartitioning.
The (new) 100GB HDD is the one in question which failed exactly 1 year and 1 day after I bought it. The refurb has worked for a few months now with no problems yet.
I'd say that's a bit stronger than just one-off anecdotal evidence, wouldn't you?
In a lot of very large storage installations, the existing arrays are already capacity underutilized because excess spindles and actuators have to be added to lower the average access time for multiple requests.
I think you missed the context, here. I was explaining that the much lower capacity means that this drive probably doesn't have higher data density than a 3.5" drive, so it won't (necessarily) have higher throughput.
Good thing this is in Canada......where we believe that governments have a responsibility to set policy for, and even fund, public health initiatives that are not necessarily advantageous to any given industry sector or corporation.
As opposed to the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the US... because those guys are just dicks?
authority has been given to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
That's nice. How many requests has this court denied, or is it just a rubber stamp like FISA?
-1 for not realizing that FISA _IS_ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Or more specifically, the Court was established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
But, because AOL does not want to serve up two static files, each of which is smaller than the "Netscape Reports" graphic on the netscape.com home page, Netscape is abandoning a service they told people to use.
They told people to use SIX YEARS AGO. I'd say they kept their promise pretty damn well. That's an eternity in internet terms.
Who else would you expect to have provided such a free service, longer?
I've had 2 of them for a year and not a single issue.
Well you're just reaching the point where you can expect problems.
My last WD HDD (100GBs) turned to crap exactly ONE DAY after the end of the 1 year warranty. To WD's credit, they agreed to allow a replacement under warrant, with only minimal complaints and little hassle.
Smaller drives should be generally faster due to increased density,
Only if EVERYTHING ELSE remains equal, which it NEVER does.
In this case, they've got many times lower capacity than even their 10k RPM 2.5" HDD, never mind their 3.5" HDDs.
Plus, you can accomplish high capacity by having more platters (rather than denser info on fewer platters) which will obliviate the benefits of smaller drives. No mention of this in the article, but worth consideration.
Personally, I'll wait for 3.5" HDDs with dual servos instead (basically, internal RAID), which will completely smoke this, and everything else out there.
I can't think of the last time a destroyer was used in any meaningful way in combat since WW2.
If there were rail guns after WWII, they likely would have been used.
Instead, development of conventional bombs, missiles, and relatively small self-guided weapons has made aircraft carriers more useful. Of course, if this can be made small enough to fit on an aircraft carrier, this will continue. (Your point will still be moot, though)
but most conflicts that are fought now are on the ground and are more guerilla tactics than formal engagements.
You don't JUST develop weapons for one aspect of war. You need them all.
Without heavy guided bombs, we wouldn't have had to worry about guerrilla tactics, because we wouldn't have made it there in the first place.
It's being shown in Iraq and Afghanistan that all the fancy new technology that the military keeps buying doesn't really mean squat when it comes to fighting a war.
What are you expecting the result of high-tech weapons to be? Zero casualties?
Armored Humvees, and Stryker Light Armored Vehicles have no doubt saved thousands upon thousands of American lives.
Guided missiles have been responsible for most of the Al Qaeda and other insurgent leaders killed.
With such a low death toll, it seems overwhelmingly obvious that the high-tech military equipment is working wonderfully.
In Iraq and Afganistan, the problems are quite obviously ones of leadership.
Of course, if a company funds the research, and it turns out to be useless, then the customers of that company will pay it.
No, as a matter of fact they won't.
Drugs are one of those products that are priced on what will be most profitable for the drug companies. Even if they take more losses that year, they can't just raise their prices, or they will end up losing money.
But more than that, companies have significant incentives not to waste money. Government has no such motivation, as history has shown. Too much spending will kill a company, while too much government spending will keep a segment of the government alive. And they can always get more money, since, unlike companies, there is no alternative to the government.
Therefore if you have cancer and want to give it a whirl, you can just go onto the Sigma-Aldrich website, give them your credit card number and order a bottle.
Yeah, and when you have an infection, you can just eat some moldy bread too...
Pharmaceuticals drugs aren't just the active ingredient. If they were, we'd just eat pieces of willow tree bark for headaches, instead of taking aspirin.
if this molecule has potential, the taxpayer money they put into the research will be peanuts compared to what health care providers will have to pay for licensed medicines.
Unless it turns out that it's not a viable treatment. Then they've spent millions upon millions of dollars, and get nothing out of it.
No problem, of course, since they can raise taxes to cover the loss.
The holders will have to re-apply for them, but will be blocked by reason of Prior Art and/or obviety (since there will be code out there to do the same things as what they're trying to patent).
I don't know UK patent law, but that sounds unlikely. Since the "prior art" in this case will be their own work (made public), I wouldn't expect it to be used as justification for refusing a patent.
Or is there really a secrecy/time requirement for patents in the UK?
(my machine is x86_64. windows blobs won't work there)
Yes they will.
b) I don't have windows. How can I get windows binary blobs without buying windows or breaking the law?
You can freely download the codecs from Microsoft.com (that's how they were aquired in the first place). You may be violating their EULA, but whether that license is legally binding or not is a legal grey area. Claiming it's illegal is just ignorant.
[...] or patent-encumbered free implementations (which can't be distributed with the distro for legal reasons).
WTF? Why is everyone talking about patents like they're magic?
Do you know the "legal reasons" that "patent-encumbered" code isn't distributed with Linux distros? BECAUSE THEY DON'T WANT TO PAY for the patent licenses.
If they did, they could include slightly modified programs like MPlayer/Xine/etc., legally. Why pay for Fluendo's codecs, which include the cost of patent license fees, when you can just pay the patent license fees directly, and distribute popular, open source software?
as licensing some codecs will require signing up to agreements to play nicely with DRM.
Which ones?
WMP's main format, VC-1 (aka. WMV3/WMV9) is an open standard. Microsoft can't impose any terms on anyone. WMA is in a lot of DAP devices, so that must be rather easy to license.
Quicktime uses entirely open formats, h.264, AAC, and mp4.
RealMedia, well, we already have binary codecs from them on multiple 32 and 64-bit Linux and other Unix platforms.
1) I don't believe (for xine at least) that wine is neccessary for asf (wmv) playback (the windows codec dlls are required, but used by xine without wine's help)
You're wrong.
Linux programs aren't magically able to use Win32 DLLs. They are able to use them (AT ALL) because of Wine. Every time you load a Win32 codec, you're using wine code.
Quite some time ago, just the necessary pieces of Wine (needed to load DLLs) were copied, and integrated with MPlayer, Xine, etc. In MPlayer, this is in the loader/ folder, and it's easy to tell that it is wine code (with significant modifications).
You don't need to have the full Wine package installed (seperatly), but you're still using it.
I don't need player who "just works". I need nice grapgical interface (and no, no mplayer, no gxine/xine, no vlc can provide that, they are totally geekish apps.
I have no idea how Play, Pause, Stop, Open, Forward, Reverse, etc. buttons can possibly be "geekish".
In any case, if you don't like the default/official GUIs for MPlayer or Xine, there are NUMEROUS other 3rd party front-ends to chose from.
Mplayer [...] isn't even developed fully anymore.
Now that's just complete and total bullshit. MPlayer is being more actively developed, and by more people, than it ever was before, and that continues to steadily increase as well.
Looking at the MPlayer (essential) binary codecs, there are only a few dozen Win32 DLLs included now, and almost all of them are:
A) Already reverse engineered and natively working, just not on 100% of videos yet, so the Win32 version is still included. B) Oddball codecs you're quite unlikely to see in videos in the wild to begin with.
Even for the people who use i386, this means there would be a legal codec so the big distos could include it with video players out of the box
There's nothing about a codec which makes it legal or illegal. The only issue in question is if license fees have been paid by the distributor.
A commercial Linux distro could just as easily license their own binary of MPlayer, as they could buy these codecs (the former would likely be cheaper, faster, etc).
That they don't, suggests they simply don't want to be responsible for paying the necessary fees.
There is no viable alternative. Theora is just too obscure to be useful.
MPEG-1 isn't obscure. The quality is much better than VP3/Theora. In low-bitrate situations like web video, MPEG-1 often looks better than MPEG-4, when encoded with a modern codec like lavc (found in mplayer/mencoder, ffmpeg, avidemux, et al.)
The audio codec (MP2) isn't quite as good as MP3 (commonly used with MPEG-4/Divx), but you only need about a 25% higher _audio_ bitrate for similar quality. Besides, audio is always a tiny fraction of the video bitrate anyhow.
So, for ensuring that everybody can watch a video, you have to go with WMV or Quicktime, or avi with mpeg4 video (divx, xvid).
MPEG-1 will play on every video player program made for many years now, as well as DVDs, and many portable hardware players. No extra codecs to be installed, no specific player program needed. No platform issues. It works everywhere. It's far ahead of any other codec in many respects, and just happens to be free due to patent expiration.
If you can give me a Linux distribution that is supported and comes bundled with legal implementations of all the codecs at a reasonable price point, I'll buy it.
It's called Linspire. They've been doing it for a while.
Those that want a different schedule at a different time of the year can have it, and those who prefer not to have their schedule change don't change it. It's sort of a freedom of choice thing.
Daylight savings time isn't about people waking up earlier... It's about people being about to DO THINGS 1 hour earlier.
You can't start work earlier unless you know the other companies/supplier you depend on are going to be starting work earlier, as well. And with everything being interconnected, work hours would become lowest-common-denominator, very quickly leading to no-one EVER changing their schedules.
But hey, by your argument, you can just choose to sleep an hour later, and completely nullify daylight savings times. Right???
Finally, the underlying absurdity that I thought would be more evident is "mucking about with time" as a solution.
You could make the same complaints about time zones. Both serve a very real purpose.
NO basis in reality? Really, none at all? I find that hard to believe.
None. There is nothing inherent about price that makes the more expensive product inherently better. Using it as a metric to judge products is moronic.
But one is 50% more than the other. Oh, and yes, one goes a lot harder and faster than the other.
You can find plenty of examples where something better is more expensive. But for every one, I can find two where the more expensive one is either no better than the cheaper option, or even worse.
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Oh, but it is. It's a fact that WD has higher power consumption than other hard drive manufacturers.
My Lite-on CD burner is going strong as well.
Same here. I've got a couple 1 and 2 GB hard drives going still. A 20MB MFM drive with controller around here somewhere, too, which still works fine.
My 6.4GB hard drive was destroyed by a PSU short years ago, unfortantely. Through no fault of Maxtor, of course (at least, AFAIK).
My 2x 27GB hard drives are still running fine as well.
With modern hard drives, however, the situation hasn't been as plesant. I have 4 Western Digital HDDs... 2 are older 40GB HDDs, and 2 are 100GB HDDs.
One of the 40GB HDDs hasn't had any problems, though it's been a backup drive most of it's life, and never been heavily used.
The other 40GB drive was in my main desktop machine, and under heavy use, though not always-on. I believe it lasted 9 months. Incidentally, the refurb drive WD sent was unfortunately extremely noisy, while the original was nice and quiet. That drive made it for 2 months, and failed. The (second) replacement drive has been working fine ever since (about a year now).
The first 100GB HDD was in a workstation, that was always-on, for about 10 months. When it had to be replaced, I bought a new 100GB drive, and used the refurb only for backups... Despite its light-duty, it has twice developed read errors, once in the MBR, losing all the (backup) data, and requiring clearing the drive and repartitioning.
The (new) 100GB HDD is the one in question which failed exactly 1 year and 1 day after I bought it. The refurb has worked for a few months now with no problems yet.
I'd say that's a bit stronger than just one-off anecdotal evidence, wouldn't you?
I think you missed the context, here. I was explaining that the much lower capacity means that this drive probably doesn't have higher data density than a 3.5" drive, so it won't (necessarily) have higher throughput.
As opposed to the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the US... because those guys are just dicks?
What?
-1 for not realizing that FISA _IS_ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Or more specifically, the Court was established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
You're just completely wrong.
The relevent patent holders have no say in the matter.
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, h.2646, AAC, mp4, etc., are handled by MPEG-LA specifically to ensure open, documented, non-discrminatory license terms and fees.
VC-1 is an SMPTE standard, preventing Microsoft from exerting any control over licensing of that (major) codec, as well.
That takes care of the vast majority of codecs in popular use today.
No, it suggest Fluendo doesn't want them to be open source. That's all.
They told people to use SIX YEARS AGO. I'd say they kept their promise pretty damn well. That's an eternity in internet terms.
Who else would you expect to have provided such a free service, longer?
Well you're just reaching the point where you can expect problems.
My last WD HDD (100GBs) turned to crap exactly ONE DAY after the end of the 1 year warranty. To WD's credit, they agreed to allow a replacement under warrant, with only minimal complaints and little hassle.
Only if EVERYTHING ELSE remains equal, which it NEVER does.
In this case, they've got many times lower capacity than even their 10k RPM 2.5" HDD, never mind their 3.5" HDDs.
Plus, you can accomplish high capacity by having more platters (rather than denser info on fewer platters) which will obliviate the benefits of smaller drives. No mention of this in the article, but worth consideration.
Personally, I'll wait for 3.5" HDDs with dual servos instead (basically, internal RAID), which will completely smoke this, and everything else out there.
If there were rail guns after WWII, they likely would have been used.
Instead, development of conventional bombs, missiles, and relatively small self-guided weapons has made aircraft carriers more useful. Of course, if this can be made small enough to fit on an aircraft carrier, this will continue. (Your point will still be moot, though)
You don't JUST develop weapons for one aspect of war. You need them all.
Without heavy guided bombs, we wouldn't have had to worry about guerrilla tactics, because we wouldn't have made it there in the first place.
What are you expecting the result of high-tech weapons to be? Zero casualties?
Armored Humvees, and Stryker Light Armored Vehicles have no doubt saved thousands upon thousands of American lives.
Guided missiles have been responsible for most of the Al Qaeda and other insurgent leaders killed.
With such a low death toll, it seems overwhelmingly obvious that the high-tech military equipment is working wonderfully.
In Iraq and Afganistan, the problems are quite obviously ones of leadership.
No, as a matter of fact they won't.
Drugs are one of those products that are priced on what will be most profitable for the drug companies. Even if they take more losses that year, they can't just raise their prices, or they will end up losing money.
But more than that, companies have significant incentives not to waste money. Government has no such motivation, as history has shown. Too much spending will kill a company, while too much government spending will keep a segment of the government alive. And they can always get more money, since, unlike companies, there is no alternative to the government.
Yeah, and when you have an infection, you can just eat some moldy bread too...
Pharmaceuticals drugs aren't just the active ingredient. If they were, we'd just eat pieces of willow tree bark for headaches, instead of taking aspirin.
Unless it turns out that it's not a viable treatment. Then they've spent millions upon millions of dollars, and get nothing out of it.
No problem, of course, since they can raise taxes to cover the loss.
I don't know UK patent law, but that sounds unlikely. Since the "prior art" in this case will be their own work (made public), I wouldn't expect it to be used as justification for refusing a patent.
Or is there really a secrecy/time requirement for patents in the UK?
Yes they will.
You can freely download the codecs from Microsoft.com (that's how they were aquired in the first place). You may be violating their EULA, but whether that license is legally binding or not is a legal grey area. Claiming it's illegal is just ignorant.
WTF? Why is everyone talking about patents like they're magic?
Do you know the "legal reasons" that "patent-encumbered" code isn't distributed with Linux distros? BECAUSE THEY DON'T WANT TO PAY for the patent licenses.
If they did, they could include slightly modified programs like MPlayer/Xine/etc., legally. Why pay for Fluendo's codecs, which include the cost of patent license fees, when you can just pay the patent license fees directly, and distribute popular, open source software?
Which ones?
WMP's main format, VC-1 (aka. WMV3/WMV9) is an open standard. Microsoft can't impose any terms on anyone. WMA is in a lot of DAP devices, so that must be rather easy to license.
Quicktime uses entirely open formats, h.264, AAC, and mp4.
RealMedia, well, we already have binary codecs from them on multiple 32 and 64-bit Linux and other Unix platforms.
You're wrong.
Linux programs aren't magically able to use Win32 DLLs. They are able to use them (AT ALL) because of Wine. Every time you load a Win32 codec, you're using wine code.
Quite some time ago, just the necessary pieces of Wine (needed to load DLLs) were copied, and integrated with MPlayer, Xine, etc. In MPlayer, this is in the loader/ folder, and it's easy to tell that it is wine code (with significant modifications).
You don't need to have the full Wine package installed (seperatly), but you're still using it.
Every MPlayer release has always been a stable version.
The numbering scheme is being switched because many people got that mistaken impression.
I have no idea how Play, Pause, Stop, Open, Forward, Reverse, etc. buttons can possibly be "geekish".
In any case, if you don't like the default/official GUIs for MPlayer or Xine, there are NUMEROUS other 3rd party front-ends to chose from.
Now that's just complete and total bullshit. MPlayer is being more actively developed, and by more people, than it ever was before, and that continues to steadily increase as well.
What Windows DLLs do you need?
Looking at the MPlayer (essential) binary codecs, there are only a few dozen Win32 DLLs included now, and almost all of them are:
A) Already reverse engineered and natively working, just not on 100% of videos yet, so the Win32 version is still included.
B) Oddball codecs you're quite unlikely to see in videos in the wild to begin with.
There's nothing about a codec which makes it legal or illegal. The only issue in question is if license fees have been paid by the distributor.
A commercial Linux distro could just as easily license their own binary of MPlayer, as they could buy these codecs (the former would likely be cheaper, faster, etc).
That they don't, suggests they simply don't want to be responsible for paying the necessary fees.
MPEG-1 isn't obscure. The quality is much better than VP3/Theora. In low-bitrate situations like web video, MPEG-1 often looks better than MPEG-4, when encoded with a modern codec like lavc (found in mplayer/mencoder, ffmpeg, avidemux, et al.)
The audio codec (MP2) isn't quite as good as MP3 (commonly used with MPEG-4/Divx), but you only need about a 25% higher _audio_ bitrate for similar quality. Besides, audio is always a tiny fraction of the video bitrate anyhow.
MPEG-1 will play on every video player program made for many years now, as well as DVDs, and many portable hardware players. No extra codecs to be installed, no specific player program needed. No platform issues. It works everywhere. It's far ahead of any other codec in many respects, and just happens to be free due to patent expiration.
It's called Linspire. They've been doing it for a while.
Daylight savings time isn't about people waking up earlier... It's about people being about to DO THINGS 1 hour earlier.
You can't start work earlier unless you know the other companies/supplier you depend on are going to be starting work earlier, as well. And with everything being interconnected, work hours would become lowest-common-denominator, very quickly leading to no-one EVER changing their schedules.
But hey, by your argument, you can just choose to sleep an hour later, and completely nullify daylight savings times. Right???
You could make the same complaints about time zones. Both serve a very real purpose.
None. There is nothing inherent about price that makes the more expensive product inherently better. Using it as a metric to judge products is moronic.
You can find plenty of examples where something better is more expensive. But for every one, I can find two where the more expensive one is either no better than the cheaper option, or even worse.
You're right, XFce isn't close... It doesn't copy ANY of the worst parts of CDE at all.