When I hear BEDAZZLER, in my head I hear a Infotainment show host voice. He continues by telling me how easy it is to attach colourful rhinestones to my own clothes and fabrics at home, for only $19.99 plus postage and packing.
I feel exactly the same. Perhaps with the promise of decent underlying backbones the ISP's and hardware owners will finally shell out some money and upgrade the most critical section for residential customers.
Holy shit, I made my laugh so much I spilt my cup of tea...
Maybe the world doesn't need another tip calculator...
Why do we need any? Is it really that hard to work out a fairly simple percentage in your head? Perhaps it's easier to leave a small tip when a machine is telling you to do it. "It's not me that's cheap, it's my iPhone."
I take your point, but with exact figures like "a million every minute for 30 years" we can a little better than a ballpark estimate. It took me 10 seconds to come to 15 trillion. Why should we settle for an answer that's 33% off the mark?
Perhaps if more big names come out in opposition of measures like this the PRS in Britain and the RIAA in the US won't be able to hide behind excuses like "we're doing this for the artists".
The maths in the article is just plainly wrong, but you've also misunderstood. It states a million mirrors every minute for the next thirty years. So we have 30 years, or 10,950 days, that's 262,800 hours, which happens to be 15,768,000 minutes. Multiply that by a million (mirrors every minute from TFA) and you get 15,768,000,000,000 which in my book is 15 trillion, not 10. Good to see BBC reporters have access to calculators and know how to use them.
XP is supported for quite a few years to come. If you're still using a PC with those awful specifications when XP stops getting patched then perhaps it's time for a new PC.
In other news my very first PC, a 486 with 32Mb of RAM and a 4x CD drive can't run Windows 7, and those pigs at Microsoft have stopped supporting Windows 95, forcng me to upgrade.
Duplicate usernames? Well right off the top of my head appending XB360_, PS3_ and WII_ (for example) either visibly or invisibly would solve that right away. All the problems you mentioned are indeed non-trivial, but that's not the same as them being impossible. There's simply no motivation to do it.
PC World released a statement saying they were disappointed that Which? magazine had slated their employees for knowing sod-all about computers, and that they train their staff to be knowledgeable about all things electrical. I recently went there to buy a new mouse (small peripherals are just about the only thing I'd consider buying there) and for a laugh I asked some guy about the difference between ball mice, optical mice and laser mice. Not a clue. He must have been waiting for training on mice.
my i815+celeron, 512 megs from 10 years ago still does perfectly well... under XP. 7 won't run on it, so I'll be forced to junk it.
Who's forcing you to junk it? You think MS are going to come around to your house, tell you XP is outdated and threaten to kill you unless you upgrade your hardware? That PC can run XP just fine for the foreseeable future. No-one is forcing you to use the latest version of any OS.
Hasn't every previous version of Windows been guilty (or at least accused) of these very same "sins"?
Besides, I would imagine that the majority of Windows users won't ever see or hear of this campaign anyway, your average PC World customer won't have a clue what free software is, what DRM is, and most probably don't even know that there are alternative operating systems available anyway. My parents, parents-in-law, my siblings.....hell just about everybody I know that doesn't work in IT. Perhaps if the FSF could get some TV advertising...
A good point, and I agree that without any evidence you probably shouldn't trust archive data to a flash drive.
However, I'm really intrigued now by this particular problem. Nowhere at all can I find even a theoretical discussion or description of data decay in solid state memory like flash drives. They're supposed to be non-volatile, and while I understand that it's by no means perfect and that charge can dissipate over time, I really want to know how much charge is lost over what amount of time. If anyone has sources then please post them.
Yeah I already saw that result in my own searching, but again I think that is more to do with an average amount of reading and writing from the drive and degradation of memory cells over time rather than how long data will last if the flash drive isn't used. This is the weird thing - nowhere have I been able to find a decent piece about "bit rot" in solid state memory flash drives. I'm actually intrigued now. I do understand that charge can leak from an imperfect capacitance medium, but is it a few milliamps a month or more like one picoamp a year?
I'm not entirely sure that's true in the timescales we're talking about. I cannot find a single solid piece of evidence that categorically states "data on a solid-state non-volatile USB flash drive will only last XX years". People throw the 10 years figure around a lot, vaguely mentioning that manufacturers only guarantee the data will still be readable for this amount of time, but I think that's just for their own protection if someone tries to sue their great-grandchild when their data isn't readable in the distant future.
You have a source for that? Constant reading and writing can degrade flash memory, of course, but do you have any source that empirically proves that Solid State memory suffers from data decay over time? All I can find is hearsay and random forum guessing.
I'm intrigued to know how the OP can encode the information he's talking about into bottles of wine. Do you have a plan for that part or should we all reply with our own ideas?
Expect intellectual property zombies to have agents monitoring such recovery processes and possibly interfering with any licensed content you might choose to include.
So you're predicting that within the next 16 years the film and music industry will begin using the undead in their war against copyright infringement? A bold prediction my friend...bold indeed.
Put it all on a USB memory stick, and when you next come to buy a new PC or laptop simply keep the old one in a box somewhere (suitably protected against dust and moisture). If for some reason in 16 years you find that USB sticks have become obselete and your files are totally outdated you can just get the old equipment out, fire it up and you're all set.
Slashdot Mirror
When I hear BEDAZZLER, in my head I hear a Infotainment show host voice. He continues by telling me how easy it is to attach colourful rhinestones to my own clothes and fabrics at home, for only $19.99 plus postage and packing.
I feel exactly the same. Perhaps with the promise of decent underlying backbones the ISP's and hardware owners will finally shell out some money and upgrade the most critical section for residential customers. Holy shit, I made my laugh so much I spilt my cup of tea...
Maybe the world doesn't need another tip calculator...
Why do we need any? Is it really that hard to work out a fairly simple percentage in your head? Perhaps it's easier to leave a small tip when a machine is telling you to do it. "It's not me that's cheap, it's my iPhone."
From TFA they implied that a decent firewall would reduce the risk. Now whether you choose to believe that is entirely up to you...
Thanks for the correction. Nonetheless I think you get the point I was trying to make.
I take your point, but with exact figures like "a million every minute for 30 years" we can a little better than a ballpark estimate. It took me 10 seconds to come to 15 trillion. Why should we settle for an answer that's 33% off the mark?
Dammit man, now you've told me there's a bold dramatic arc in the story too. Will the spoilers never end...?
Perhaps if more big names come out in opposition of measures like this the PRS in Britain and the RIAA in the US won't be able to hide behind excuses like "we're doing this for the artists".
"Do no evil" is more of a guideline than a rule with Google. Maybe they should file a copyright for "We do less evil than everyone else"
If they're less evil than everyone else, doesn't that make them the nicest company in existence by default?
Possibly, though if we actually need 15 trillion to make it to space, with a 33% failure rate, we should launch about 22.7 trillion of the buggers.
That's an awful lot of glass and silver foil. They still make mirrors that way, right?
Thanks for spoiling the trilogy for me, I just started reading it...
The maths in the article is just plainly wrong, but you've also misunderstood. It states a million mirrors every minute for the next thirty years. So we have 30 years, or 10,950 days, that's 262,800 hours, which happens to be 15,768,000 minutes. Multiply that by a million (mirrors every minute from TFA) and you get 15,768,000,000,000 which in my book is 15 trillion, not 10. Good to see BBC reporters have access to calculators and know how to use them.
XP is supported for quite a few years to come. If you're still using a PC with those awful specifications when XP stops getting patched then perhaps it's time for a new PC.
In other news my very first PC, a 486 with 32Mb of RAM and a 4x CD drive can't run Windows 7, and those pigs at Microsoft have stopped supporting Windows 95, forcng me to upgrade.
You should have gone with:
5 linked rings
4 carbon bonds
3 electrons
2 tiny dots
and a grainy image on my PC...
Duplicate usernames? Well right off the top of my head appending XB360_, PS3_ and WII_ (for example) either visibly or invisibly would solve that right away. All the problems you mentioned are indeed non-trivial, but that's not the same as them being impossible. There's simply no motivation to do it.
PC World released a statement saying they were disappointed that Which? magazine had slated their employees for knowing sod-all about computers, and that they train their staff to be knowledgeable about all things electrical. I recently went there to buy a new mouse (small peripherals are just about the only thing I'd consider buying there) and for a laugh I asked some guy about the difference between ball mice, optical mice and laser mice. Not a clue. He must have been waiting for training on mice.
my i815+celeron, 512 megs from 10 years ago still does perfectly well... under XP. 7 won't run on it, so I'll be forced to junk it.
Who's forcing you to junk it? You think MS are going to come around to your house, tell you XP is outdated and threaten to kill you unless you upgrade your hardware? That PC can run XP just fine for the foreseeable future. No-one is forcing you to use the latest version of any OS.
Hasn't every previous version of Windows been guilty (or at least accused) of these very same "sins"?
Besides, I would imagine that the majority of Windows users won't ever see or hear of this campaign anyway, your average PC World customer won't have a clue what free software is, what DRM is, and most probably don't even know that there are alternative operating systems available anyway. My parents, parents-in-law, my siblings.....hell just about everybody I know that doesn't work in IT. Perhaps if the FSF could get some TV advertising...
However, I'm really intrigued now by this particular problem. Nowhere at all can I find even a theoretical discussion or description of data decay in solid state memory like flash drives. They're supposed to be non-volatile, and while I understand that it's by no means perfect and that charge can dissipate over time, I really want to know how much charge is lost over what amount of time. If anyone has sources then please post them.
Yeah I already saw that result in my own searching, but again I think that is more to do with an average amount of reading and writing from the drive and degradation of memory cells over time rather than how long data will last if the flash drive isn't used. This is the weird thing - nowhere have I been able to find a decent piece about "bit rot" in solid state memory flash drives. I'm actually intrigued now. I do understand that charge can leak from an imperfect capacitance medium, but is it a few milliamps a month or more like one picoamp a year?
I'm not entirely sure that's true in the timescales we're talking about. I cannot find a single solid piece of evidence that categorically states "data on a solid-state non-volatile USB flash drive will only last XX years". People throw the 10 years figure around a lot, vaguely mentioning that manufacturers only guarantee the data will still be readable for this amount of time, but I think that's just for their own protection if someone tries to sue their great-grandchild when their data isn't readable in the distant future.
You have a source for that? Constant reading and writing can degrade flash memory, of course, but do you have any source that empirically proves that Solid State memory suffers from data decay over time? All I can find is hearsay and random forum guessing.
I'm intrigued to know how the OP can encode the information he's talking about into bottles of wine. Do you have a plan for that part or should we all reply with our own ideas?
Expect intellectual property zombies to have agents monitoring such recovery processes and possibly interfering with any licensed content you might choose to include.
So you're predicting that within the next 16 years the film and music industry will begin using the undead in their war against copyright infringement? A bold prediction my friend...bold indeed.
Put it all on a USB memory stick, and when you next come to buy a new PC or laptop simply keep the old one in a box somewhere (suitably protected against dust and moisture). If for some reason in 16 years you find that USB sticks have become obselete and your files are totally outdated you can just get the old equipment out, fire it up and you're all set.