I have seen both Dell RAID-5 and Sun RAID-6 arrays fail with 3+ simultaneous disk failures each. Google ran a Petabyte Sort benchmark in 2008 (6 hours to sort 10 trillion 100-byte records) and was not at all surprised that they had at least one hard drive failure on every attempt (4+ drive failures per day). I have seen enterprise tape systems fail to read their data (hopefully there was redundancy, but I don't know). I have seen backup systems have major performance glitches and fail to restore within their needed time frame. Facebook, for example, only has a few seconds to recover from a failed server before customers might get angry, and has built systems to handle it because it's necessary to provide a good service. The major players who are succeeding and profiting at giving away free services to hundreds of millions plan that all data storage will fail regularly, and plan accordingly.
A little primer for those of us who haven't kept up with new storage technologies since the 90's.
Google deals with enough data that they cannot consider any of your technologies reliable enough. Five years ago, they were already processing 20PB of data every single day with map reduce, and if you have to buy enough systems, even the best RAID6 SAN systems will break regularly. Statistically, a small chance repeated often enough gives you a virtual guarantee of probability. Google generally doesn't bother with expensive technologies like SAN's and RAID, or even bother with enterprise drives (spinning disks -- they probably use an enterprise PCIe flash). You can make what you want of the enterprise drive decision, but I'm pretty sure I've read from at least a couple of sources that enterprise drives are just as prone to failure as regular drives. The major differences are warranty and firmware (e.g. supporting RAID friendly reads). Numerous sources have substantiated that the manufacturers' MTBF numbers are pure marketing fiction. They probably boast a lower error rate, but I have not seen a comparison, only reports that they are off by several orders of magnitude.
What Google does is avoid any redundancy in their machines and take the "redundant array" to a whole new level: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Servers. Multiple copies of the data are written to different servers in different cabinets, and with each data block a checksum is stored. Every time the data is read, the checksum is verified. This way you know with 1 single read if you have bitrot, and can correct it with 1 good read. Now you no longer have to keep comparing 3 copies of the data to correct bitrot. The Hadoop project copied this with their HDFS, and many other large scale technologies have followed suit.
At a desktop level, ZFS, BTRFS and (I think) Windows Storage Spaces do something similar, combining RAID technology (0/1/5/6 maybe 1E) with checksums inside the file system. If a drive fails or even just that the checksum doesn't verify there can be redundancy to attempt to rebuild from automatically in the file system, giving you a better data guarantee than any RAID card I have seen. If the journaling is done correctly, it shouldn't be susceptible to losing data from a power loss either, but home battery backups aren't too expensive. The OP was asking specifically about bitrot. A lot of URE's (uncorrectable read errors) get labeled and treated as bitrot, but it sounds like data he has previously verified is now corrupt (actual rot), not that the reason for corrupt blocks matters once they are corrupt. Bitrot happens more frequently when you don't have such stringent environmental controls in your home as you would in a data center, and I have personally seen it with only 10's of GB of my data.
In my experience, data that is backed up and archived, isn't a prime target for user error nor gross negligence regarding data backups. The user is definitely experiences some sort of URE. In this case, a proper file system is quite important for protecting the data. I would recommend setting up a multi-drive NAS using
The WHO ranks the US health care system #1 in responsiveness to the needs and choices of the individual patient (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704130904574644230678102274). If that is nowhere near good, then what are you grading it on? Are you flunking it because Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, the Koch brothers and the Walton family aren't pooling their money to give you free access to healthcare?
Where the US famously ranked 37th in overall performance is more based on our funding and distribution than how well it responds to patients needs (by a factor of 5). We tend to charge people for health care somewhat based on what goods and services they use, instead of making Mark Zuckerberg fund unlimited access to a 30 year old bum living in his mother's basement dividing his time among reddit, McD's and drinking himself sick (notice no job). Actually, those factors only get the US downgraded to 15th in overall attainment. The remaining downfall is that the WHO thinks we should have a better health care ranking with our resources. (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/14/paul-hipp/rocker-viral-video-mocks-us-37th-best-health-care-/)
To summarize...The UK sets records for wait times for a hospital bed. The US guarantees that anyone can walk into any emergency room with no money or resources and get excellent care (i.e. not sleeping in hospital hallways -- http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/long545.html). In the end, the WHO decides UK has better healthcare because there the harder you work to have more money, the more money it costs to get the same pitiful access.
Actually (IIRC), the head of the MPAA thinks that making a backup copy of the DVD you purchased qualifies as fair use. It's the DMCA and the US Federal Government that considers it illegal. The Library of Congress is responsible as the legal authority of what is fair use, and I have yet to see them issue an exemption for making a personal backup. Rules on Blu-Ray are potentially different, as the CSS protection has been given exemptions that don't apply to other DRM. Rules on copying CD's are completely different, as it has no encryption to break before copying, and you are legally entitled to make a personal duplicate of any CD you own.
Reading the official Google Enterprise blog post linked to in the article that slashdot linked to "we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015."
The official announcement is a minimum date for support, not a date where they plan on killing updates. Google isn't stupid. They make most of their money off of searches, so keeping a healthy ecosystem of usable web pages for everybody is in their best interest. A better web experience->more time online->more searches & visits to ad partners->more ad revenue for Google. A better web experience for more people was their primary reason for pushing Chrome into the market to begin with. I'm sure they would like to stop supporting XP at some point (e.g. Win2k isn't supported), but not if that would alienate too many people from having an up to date browser.
If there are enough computer users willing to buy antivirus for XP, then a company will be willing to sell it to them. Personally, I find antivirus to be too big of an intrusive hassle to deal with, eats too many resources, and does nothing against my primary thread of "potentially unwanted programs." Using Chrome, it has warnings for sites with malware and even once told me when I downloaded a virus. That's plenty for me. On rare occasion, I would like to be able to scan suspicious files on demand, but it's not worth the hassle of maintaining AVG or Avast for a year or two per scan (especially if Chrome did the last one for me). With so much of my computing in the cloud, it's much easier to just plan to reinstall everything when there is a problem or even partially automate regular reinstalls.
I'm pretty sure that the cars are constantly watching in front, back and both sides (too lazy to double check). They have been tested accident free (or at least fault free) in San Francisco, and successfully navigated Lombard Street. There is also driverless technology to allow them to see traffic (possibly just driverless traffic) around blind corners, obscured by buildings.
I suspect the overall use of office programs is declining, now that we have enough smartphones, tablets and laptops that are good enough to replace printed media much of the time. Such a change is bound to hit tech-savvy & price sensitive markets first. Why use excel when your analytic cloud crunches enough numbers to choke excel, while using live data or Google Docs could turn your spreadsheet into a simple web app? Why use MS Word, when you can either publish directly through WordPress or or through a web template system to deliver the document as a website? PowerPoint is losing some ground to niche presentation software, more novel presentation designs than the boring slide title with bullet points, and zany, Doc-Brown-like scientists who just draw their presentations on their hand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wue2A4iMV5c -- well maybe 1 license tops).
The report would be more fair if it included some of the major web services replacing uses of office suites (e.g. WordPress, Wikis, custom web app, straight email without attached memo.doc, etc.) or at least presented some information on how much office suites are used.
It's a violation of the DMCA (therefore illegal) for me to even rip my encrypted DVD's to my hard drive, and as of a year or two ago, the Library of Congress had not officially declared this fair use. Thankfully, at least the MPAA does consider this fair use.
MySQL documentation is astoundingly better than Oracle (which actually has problems that could lead to data loss). Most top level Apache projects I've seen have better documentation as well. Also, I generally get better free support from free open source than I got from paid Oracle support.
I will admit that Oracle responses were usually more timely, but mostly useless. The times they were useful, it was an embarrassment to their product that I even needed support for the problem.
The US healthcare system is consistently ranked #1 in responsiveness to the needs and decisions of patients.
We don't score as well on overall health, life expectancy and infant mortality. I'm not sure why on infant mortality, other than seeing a report of very high mortality rate for the first day in the US. We don't score very well on price. I know policies can help, but what do you expect for the best care, other than the highest price? We also don't score well on fairness of pricing because we tend to charge people their actual costs, instead of making the rich pay the bills for those who are unemployed, living in their parent's basement, not even looking for work and divide their time among eating Taco Bell, playing World of Warcraft, and drinking themselves sick.
People often spout information like citing our healthcare as ranked #34, and we pay more than any other country, who all have socialized medical care. If you're just looking at medical care (not overall health), separately from pricing and payment models, then it's fair to say our healthcare is ranked #1, but we pay more than any other country and don't have socialized pricing. It's also fair to say our healthcare is ranked #34 because we pay more than any other country and don't have socialized pricing. The first statement is very misleading, and if you know the reason for the ranking, probably a lie (intentional deception, whether the statement is technically true or not).
In my opinion, avoiding socialism (government paid healthcare, high minimum wage, possibly others) has helped push the US to have the most productive workers (most hours worked and most work per hour). Norway (oil) and Luxembourg (banking) are the only economies with a higher per capita GDP (PPP).
According to the WHO, nobody else produces health care that is as good as the US in responding to the needs and decisions of patients. It's expensive to be #1.
Yeah, I only know of women having legally guaranteed rights to property and real estate as recently as the Code of Hammurabi in the 18th century BC. While the Code of Ur-Nammu (21st century BC) and the Code of Urukagina (ca 24th century BC) both give some property rights to women, I haven't seen any laws specifically giving them concrete, irrevocable ownership.
I know of a company that wrote a system that will run a visio flow chart back in the 90's, so they could run programs from managers "who didn't know how to program." It's probably still in use. My 6 year old is playing with logo on her birthday by moving some code blocks around. GUI based programming is useful because it brings programming to more people.
However, these people would never be able to write something as complex as Google's PageRank. People who can solve complex computing problems can probably type code into a good editor faster than they can manage a cumbersome GUI, especially as program complexity grows and requires you to navigate more code. In my opinion, the speed of keyboard input is a big part of what is keeping the terminal programs so popular in Linux, despite many years of decent or good file managers and other GUI's, so I doubt traditional program editing will go away either, since programmin is more open-ended, making a good GUI-only system more difficult.
The ToS state that they have the right to use this data to improve their services and the right to republish the data to promote their services. I cannot imagine this being outside the terms of service.
We are allowing people to sue because they don't like their contract on a free service.
The problem these companies are facing is that the laws and regulations are so complex that the government can tie any company up in red tape and choke them out of business, if they aren't friendly enough towards government spying. On top of that, failure to comply with the NSA can be considered treason.
To round things off, the government make Google face charges of violating wiretapping law and charges for people being too stupid to read their terms of service.
Facebook uses a NoSQL database (HBase) for their messaging system, and some related tech for data analysis (Hadoop). They also have custom photo serving software (haystack) for their photo storage. The main data (status updates, friends, likes, etc.) is in MySQL with memcache in front of it. There is also a cache layer (varnish) in front of the web servers. They said NoSQL isn't ready and point to the smaller messaging system needing more staff.
Remember their motto of "move fast, break things." Go look at their data load some time. I doubt they're running a version close enough to stock that Oracle would be able to support it if they wanted to. Their backup/recovery system alone is insane, and they host 2 custom branches of MySQL on GitHub. When was the last time a software vendor supported a client's custom patches?
Keep in mind that Facebook employs more than 10x as many people as MySQL, and has multiple MySQL teams. It wouldn't surprise me if Facebook has a bigger MySQL dev effort than the company. Either way, they handle all database support internally.
Facebook is a lot more open than Google about their hardware, so I will use them. Facebook has a hadoop cluster that holds 250+ PB and a cluster for pics/video that holds 100+ PB. That puts them at having 80,000+ drives. Based on average write speeds from Tom's Hardware Guide, it would take under 6 hours to fill a 3TB drive, and Facebook needs at most 5 batches. 30 hours is within the time period mentioned, and at 70 hours instead of 40, is still slightly faster (assuming the microSD was the original data location and didn't need to be copied there).
However, the article neglects both 100GB Ethernet and bonded ports, making this still useless.
Sometimes whale specifically means the suborder of mysticeti (baleen whales), and others it includes all cetacea (namely odontoceti or toothed whales, which includes dolphins). I'm no expert, but I would consider toothed whales as whales, which is how I've typically seen it classified.
So you're telling me there is a chance they might be wrong when they say prehistoric animals lost their spine when evolving into whales, and that I shouldn't necessarily trust them?
They have orders from NSA and Prism was a state secret. Failure to comply is an act of treason, and after enough resistance from a company they would probably seize all the computer equipment (Internet without Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.). Of course, they would run the proper propaganda campaign first, so we don't execute the politicians for treason ourselves.
Companies have been fighting in unhelpful courts instead. What they should also do is run disturbing political ads against all incumbents in Congress who are supporting the NSA (e.g. "Big Brother is watching you" billboards, with the politician's face), and start the campaigning before the politicians do.
I would accept a compromise of gutting software patents to 5-7 years. It would be much easier to get large companies and patent trolls to agree to it, and cause much less damage.
I can't count the times I had to ship Windows code to Linux in order to sort out an error in compiling. Also, bunch of vim windows is much more powerful than the MS IDE, not to mention all the command utilities and ease of scripting.
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I have seen both Dell RAID-5 and Sun RAID-6 arrays fail with 3+ simultaneous disk failures each. Google ran a Petabyte Sort benchmark in 2008 (6 hours to sort 10 trillion 100-byte records) and was not at all surprised that they had at least one hard drive failure on every attempt (4+ drive failures per day). I have seen enterprise tape systems fail to read their data (hopefully there was redundancy, but I don't know). I have seen backup systems have major performance glitches and fail to restore within their needed time frame. Facebook, for example, only has a few seconds to recover from a failed server before customers might get angry, and has built systems to handle it because it's necessary to provide a good service. The major players who are succeeding and profiting at giving away free services to hundreds of millions plan that all data storage will fail regularly, and plan accordingly.
A little primer for those of us who haven't kept up with new storage technologies since the 90's.
Google deals with enough data that they cannot consider any of your technologies reliable enough. Five years ago, they were already processing 20PB of data every single day with map reduce, and if you have to buy enough systems, even the best RAID6 SAN systems will break regularly. Statistically, a small chance repeated often enough gives you a virtual guarantee of probability. Google generally doesn't bother with expensive technologies like SAN's and RAID, or even bother with enterprise drives (spinning disks -- they probably use an enterprise PCIe flash). You can make what you want of the enterprise drive decision, but I'm pretty sure I've read from at least a couple of sources that enterprise drives are just as prone to failure as regular drives. The major differences are warranty and firmware (e.g. supporting RAID friendly reads). Numerous sources have substantiated that the manufacturers' MTBF numbers are pure marketing fiction. They probably boast a lower error rate, but I have not seen a comparison, only reports that they are off by several orders of magnitude.
What Google does is avoid any redundancy in their machines and take the "redundant array" to a whole new level: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Servers. Multiple copies of the data are written to different servers in different cabinets, and with each data block a checksum is stored. Every time the data is read, the checksum is verified. This way you know with 1 single read if you have bitrot, and can correct it with 1 good read. Now you no longer have to keep comparing 3 copies of the data to correct bitrot. The Hadoop project copied this with their HDFS, and many other large scale technologies have followed suit.
At a desktop level, ZFS, BTRFS and (I think) Windows Storage Spaces do something similar, combining RAID technology (0/1/5/6 maybe 1E) with checksums inside the file system. If a drive fails or even just that the checksum doesn't verify there can be redundancy to attempt to rebuild from automatically in the file system, giving you a better data guarantee than any RAID card I have seen. If the journaling is done correctly, it shouldn't be susceptible to losing data from a power loss either, but home battery backups aren't too expensive. The OP was asking specifically about bitrot. A lot of URE's (uncorrectable read errors) get labeled and treated as bitrot, but it sounds like data he has previously verified is now corrupt (actual rot), not that the reason for corrupt blocks matters once they are corrupt. Bitrot happens more frequently when you don't have such stringent environmental controls in your home as you would in a data center, and I have personally seen it with only 10's of GB of my data.
In my experience, data that is backed up and archived, isn't a prime target for user error nor gross negligence regarding data backups. The user is definitely experiences some sort of URE. In this case, a proper file system is quite important for protecting the data. I would recommend setting up a multi-drive NAS using
Won't it wear down any drive over time?
Either way, Google uses consumer grade drives. If there is a difference, it cannot be significant enough to justify the higher cost.
The WHO ranks the US health care system #1 in responsiveness to the needs and choices of the individual patient (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704130904574644230678102274). If that is nowhere near good, then what are you grading it on? Are you flunking it because Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, the Koch brothers and the Walton family aren't pooling their money to give you free access to healthcare?
Where the US famously ranked 37th in overall performance is more based on our funding and distribution than how well it responds to patients needs (by a factor of 5). We tend to charge people for health care somewhat based on what goods and services they use, instead of making Mark Zuckerberg fund unlimited access to a 30 year old bum living in his mother's basement dividing his time among reddit, McD's and drinking himself sick (notice no job). Actually, those factors only get the US downgraded to 15th in overall attainment. The remaining downfall is that the WHO thinks we should have a better health care ranking with our resources. (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/14/paul-hipp/rocker-viral-video-mocks-us-37th-best-health-care-/)
To summarize...The UK sets records for wait times for a hospital bed. The US guarantees that anyone can walk into any emergency room with no money or resources and get excellent care (i.e. not sleeping in hospital hallways -- http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/long545.html). In the end, the WHO decides UK has better healthcare because there the harder you work to have more money, the more money it costs to get the same pitiful access.
Actually (IIRC), the head of the MPAA thinks that making a backup copy of the DVD you purchased qualifies as fair use. It's the DMCA and the US Federal Government that considers it illegal. The Library of Congress is responsible as the legal authority of what is fair use, and I have yet to see them issue an exemption for making a personal backup. Rules on Blu-Ray are potentially different, as the CSS protection has been given exemptions that don't apply to other DRM. Rules on copying CD's are completely different, as it has no encryption to break before copying, and you are legally entitled to make a personal duplicate of any CD you own.
Reading the official Google Enterprise blog post linked to in the article that slashdot linked to "we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015."
The official announcement is a minimum date for support, not a date where they plan on killing updates. Google isn't stupid. They make most of their money off of searches, so keeping a healthy ecosystem of usable web pages for everybody is in their best interest. A better web experience->more time online->more searches & visits to ad partners->more ad revenue for Google. A better web experience for more people was their primary reason for pushing Chrome into the market to begin with. I'm sure they would like to stop supporting XP at some point (e.g. Win2k isn't supported), but not if that would alienate too many people from having an up to date browser.
If there are enough computer users willing to buy antivirus for XP, then a company will be willing to sell it to them. Personally, I find antivirus to be too big of an intrusive hassle to deal with, eats too many resources, and does nothing against my primary thread of "potentially unwanted programs." Using Chrome, it has warnings for sites with malware and even once told me when I downloaded a virus. That's plenty for me. On rare occasion, I would like to be able to scan suspicious files on demand, but it's not worth the hassle of maintaining AVG or Avast for a year or two per scan (especially if Chrome did the last one for me). With so much of my computing in the cloud, it's much easier to just plan to reinstall everything when there is a problem or even partially automate regular reinstalls.
I'm pretty sure that the cars are constantly watching in front, back and both sides (too lazy to double check). They have been tested accident free (or at least fault free) in San Francisco, and successfully navigated Lombard Street. There is also driverless technology to allow them to see traffic (possibly just driverless traffic) around blind corners, obscured by buildings.
I suspect the overall use of office programs is declining, now that we have enough smartphones, tablets and laptops that are good enough to replace printed media much of the time. Such a change is bound to hit tech-savvy & price sensitive markets first. Why use excel when your analytic cloud crunches enough numbers to choke excel, while using live data or Google Docs could turn your spreadsheet into a simple web app? Why use MS Word, when you can either publish directly through WordPress or or through a web template system to deliver the document as a website? PowerPoint is losing some ground to niche presentation software, more novel presentation designs than the boring slide title with bullet points, and zany, Doc-Brown-like scientists who just draw their presentations on their hand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wue2A4iMV5c -- well maybe 1 license tops).
The report would be more fair if it included some of the major web services replacing uses of office suites (e.g. WordPress, Wikis, custom web app, straight email without attached memo.doc, etc.) or at least presented some information on how much office suites are used.
It's a violation of the DMCA (therefore illegal) for me to even rip my encrypted DVD's to my hard drive, and as of a year or two ago, the Library of Congress had not officially declared this fair use. Thankfully, at least the MPAA does consider this fair use.
MySQL documentation is astoundingly better than Oracle (which actually has problems that could lead to data loss). Most top level Apache projects I've seen have better documentation as well. Also, I generally get better free support from free open source than I got from paid Oracle support.
I will admit that Oracle responses were usually more timely, but mostly useless. The times they were useful, it was an embarrassment to their product that I even needed support for the problem.
The US healthcare system is consistently ranked #1 in responsiveness to the needs and decisions of patients.
We don't score as well on overall health, life expectancy and infant mortality. I'm not sure why on infant mortality, other than seeing a report of very high mortality rate for the first day in the US. We don't score very well on price. I know policies can help, but what do you expect for the best care, other than the highest price? We also don't score well on fairness of pricing because we tend to charge people their actual costs, instead of making the rich pay the bills for those who are unemployed, living in their parent's basement, not even looking for work and divide their time among eating Taco Bell, playing World of Warcraft, and drinking themselves sick.
People often spout information like citing our healthcare as ranked #34, and we pay more than any other country, who all have socialized medical care. If you're just looking at medical care (not overall health), separately from pricing and payment models, then it's fair to say our healthcare is ranked #1, but we pay more than any other country and don't have socialized pricing. It's also fair to say our healthcare is ranked #34 because we pay more than any other country and don't have socialized pricing. The first statement is very misleading, and if you know the reason for the ranking, probably a lie (intentional deception, whether the statement is technically true or not).
In my opinion, avoiding socialism (government paid healthcare, high minimum wage, possibly others) has helped push the US to have the most productive workers (most hours worked and most work per hour). Norway (oil) and Luxembourg (banking) are the only economies with a higher per capita GDP (PPP).
According to the WHO, nobody else produces health care that is as good as the US in responding to the needs and decisions of patients. It's expensive to be #1.
Yeah, I only know of women having legally guaranteed rights to property and real estate as recently as the Code of Hammurabi in the 18th century BC. While the Code of Ur-Nammu (21st century BC) and the Code of Urukagina (ca 24th century BC) both give some property rights to women, I haven't seen any laws specifically giving them concrete, irrevocable ownership.
I know of a company that wrote a system that will run a visio flow chart back in the 90's, so they could run programs from managers "who didn't know how to program." It's probably still in use. My 6 year old is playing with logo on her birthday by moving some code blocks around. GUI based programming is useful because it brings programming to more people.
However, these people would never be able to write something as complex as Google's PageRank. People who can solve complex computing problems can probably type code into a good editor faster than they can manage a cumbersome GUI, especially as program complexity grows and requires you to navigate more code. In my opinion, the speed of keyboard input is a big part of what is keeping the terminal programs so popular in Linux, despite many years of decent or good file managers and other GUI's, so I doubt traditional program editing will go away either, since programmin is more open-ended, making a good GUI-only system more difficult.
The ToS state that they have the right to use this data to improve their services and the right to republish the data to promote their services. I cannot imagine this being outside the terms of service.
We are allowing people to sue because they don't like their contract on a free service.
The problem these companies are facing is that the laws and regulations are so complex that the government can tie any company up in red tape and choke them out of business, if they aren't friendly enough towards government spying. On top of that, failure to comply with the NSA can be considered treason.
To round things off, the government make Google face charges of violating wiretapping law and charges for people being too stupid to read their terms of service.
Facebook uses a NoSQL database (HBase) for their messaging system, and some related tech for data analysis (Hadoop). They also have custom photo serving software (haystack) for their photo storage. The main data (status updates, friends, likes, etc.) is in MySQL with memcache in front of it. There is also a cache layer (varnish) in front of the web servers. They said NoSQL isn't ready and point to the smaller messaging system needing more staff.
Does Oracle even sell support for custom forks of MySQL for Facebook to buy?
Remember their motto of "move fast, break things." Go look at their data load some time. I doubt they're running a version close enough to stock that Oracle would be able to support it if they wanted to. Their backup/recovery system alone is insane, and they host 2 custom branches of MySQL on GitHub. When was the last time a software vendor supported a client's custom patches?
Keep in mind that Facebook employs more than 10x as many people as MySQL, and has multiple MySQL teams. It wouldn't surprise me if Facebook has a bigger MySQL dev effort than the company. Either way, they handle all database support internally.
Facebook is a lot more open than Google about their hardware, so I will use them. Facebook has a hadoop cluster that holds 250+ PB and a cluster for pics/video that holds 100+ PB. That puts them at having 80,000+ drives. Based on average write speeds from Tom's Hardware Guide, it would take under 6 hours to fill a 3TB drive, and Facebook needs at most 5 batches. 30 hours is within the time period mentioned, and at 70 hours instead of 40, is still slightly faster (assuming the microSD was the original data location and didn't need to be copied there).
However, the article neglects both 100GB Ethernet and bonded ports, making this still useless.
.... CDs....
Old people and their ancient technology ways...
Sometimes whale specifically means the suborder of mysticeti (baleen whales), and others it includes all cetacea (namely odontoceti or toothed whales, which includes dolphins). I'm no expert, but I would consider toothed whales as whales, which is how I've typically seen it classified.
So you're telling me there is a chance they might be wrong when they say prehistoric animals lost their spine when evolving into whales, and that I shouldn't necessarily trust them?
They have orders from NSA and Prism was a state secret. Failure to comply is an act of treason, and after enough resistance from a company they would probably seize all the computer equipment (Internet without Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.). Of course, they would run the proper propaganda campaign first, so we don't execute the politicians for treason ourselves.
Companies have been fighting in unhelpful courts instead. What they should also do is run disturbing political ads against all incumbents in Congress who are supporting the NSA (e.g. "Big Brother is watching you" billboards, with the politician's face), and start the campaigning before the politicians do.
I would accept a compromise of gutting software patents to 5-7 years. It would be much easier to get large companies and patent trolls to agree to it, and cause much less damage.
I can't count the times I had to ship Windows code to Linux in order to sort out an error in compiling. Also, bunch of vim windows is much more powerful than the MS IDE, not to mention all the command utilities and ease of scripting.