So the area I mentioned isn't always exposed to Solar Noon, but there's always 1KW:m^2 falling on up to about 1/24th, lessening longitudinally. With 3E14W to start with, even 10% is plenty.
the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water
The Sun dumps up to 1KW:m^2 on the ocean 71% of the Earth, all day long, every day.
361M km^2 is 3.61E14m^2, or maybe 1E14KW: a billion MW. That's a starting point for 150MW per human, throughout the day. 2/3 of humans live within 150Km of a coastline, probably growing to 75% by the time hydrogen fuel would replace petroleum/gasoline as the main energy carrier. In faster growing countries, like China and India, the fraction is even larger and would be larger still if energy and fresh water were more plentiful there.
Cracking seawater with sunlight is clearly a revolution for sustaining human energy consumption. Starting with seawater also pumps more oxygen into the atmosphere, compensating for some trees and sealife we've killed, and some CO2 we've pumped into the air from petrofuels. While leaving the remaining petrofuels for easy production of plastic and other carbon manufacturing. And making more potable water, rather than less.
Petrofuel wars are notorious for creating war and strife. The whole bloody 20th Century was underwritten by wars for access to oil in the Mideast and Russia, while the 21st Century has already been defined by little else. Water wars are coming, and already at base of some intractable conflicts, like Israel's borders.
Then we get "experts" like Boessel, whose g-g-grandfather invented the fuelcell in 1838 Germany, saying
The large amount of energy required to [produce and deliver consumable energy with hydrogen fuel] leaves around 25% for practical use [...]
"More energy is needed to isolate hydrogen from natural compounds than can ever be recovered from its use"
Which doesn't even add up. Not to mention that his 25% is gated through the current 40-50% fuelcell efficiency, rather than the theoretical maximum greater than 85%. And that the current (pun intended:) delivery methods are mostly truck or other vehicle (which get something like <10-20% fuel efficiency), rather than pipelines like household natural gas. And he ignores predictable breakthroughs like cheap separation of H2 from "ore", like biomass processors, nanotech crackers, or just large scale solar/water extraction.
For Boessel, 25% surplus energy isn't enough for a clean, even often renewable resource. For the rest of "out economy" (our civilization), it sure beats the petrofuels which are killing us even before they run out.
Since the display is a pair of projectors, each aimed into one eye, why aren't they boasting a stereo display, like a 3D movie?
What I really want to see is tiny cameras on the fronts of the projectors, registering the 3D scene so the projected display can be mapped closely onto it.
On my Ubuntu/Edgy workstation, OO.o's dependency on python-uno is broken, possibly something to do with python-central:
# apt-get update [OK] # apt-get upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these. The following packages have unmet dependencies:
python-uno: Depends: openoffice.org-core (= 2.0.4-0ubuntu2) but 2.0.4-0ubuntu3 is installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f. # apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following extra packages will be installed:
python-uno The following packages will be upgraded:
python-uno 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 31 not upgraded. 31 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0B/220kB of archives. After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? (Reading database... 156818 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace python-uno 2.0.4-0ubuntu2 (using.../python-uno_2.0.4-0ubuntu3_i386.deb)... Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 1367, in ?
main()
File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 1361, in main
rv = action.run(global_options)
File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 946, in run
pkg.remove(runtimes, remove_script_files=True)
File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 696, in remove
default_runtime.remove_byte_code(self.private_file s) AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'remove_byte_code' dpkg: warning - old pre-removal script returned error exit status 1 dpkg - trying script from the new package instead... Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 1367, in ?
main()
File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 1361, in main
rv = action.run(global_options)
File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 946, in run
pkg.remove(runtimes, remove_script_files=True)
File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 696, in remove
default_runtime.remove_byte_code(self.private_file s) AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'remove_byte_code' dpkg: error processing/var/cache/apt/archives/python-uno_2.0.4-0ubuntu3_ i386.deb (--unpack):
subprocess new pre-removal script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing:/var/cache/apt/archives/python-uno_2.0.4-0ubuntu3_ i386.deb E: Sub-process/usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Politicians (and the lawyers who love them) mostly don't really get the total difference between mass media, broadcast like TV, and interactive media, returned on request. They try to regulate by brand name, like "email" or "the Web", but those apps have different kinds of media among their subtypes, with different risks.
Spam and other unsolicited email (UCE/commercial and otherwise) looks like a good target for regulating content, but instead only its sending should be regulated to enforce consumer choice to receive or not. Without that kind of requirement, spam is not interactive, but maillists are. It also might look like maillists should be forced to adhere to a self-published description of their scope and kinds of content. Who wants to subscribe to a "trojan horse" list about something innocuous and then get unrelated obscene pitches (requiring actual Trojans)? The Web is exactly the same: all request, and a problem only when the offer generating the request is deceptive, then the reply to the request arrives inappropriate to the offer and the reques.
But the power of individual choice in receiving or not is much more powerful than government regulation. The massively parallel, distributed Net "flasher" industry totally overwhelms any conceited government attempt to stand up to it. But Net consumers are an ever larger, more complex, and more powerful group - or the flashers wouldn't make enough money off us to stay in business. When we can choose never to receive "inappropriate" messages, as we decide for ourselves, we can choke off the entire creepy business.
Spam laws requiring opt-in, or even requiring opt-out force spam to be interactive. An effective version working just within that scope might work (so far, my obscene spam receipts have doubled every 3 months for 5 years or so). But that's as far as government can go without worthlessly spinning its wheels, even inviting contempt by "outlaws" who can't be caught. The government could go further in requiring OS makers (Microsoft, Apple) to include facilities that offer at least hooks to automating opt-out, like addressbook whitelists. Or better yet, develop at government labs (like Mosaic was) or encourage development (by investing some of our $3.5T US or other, foreign, budgets) of whitelist social networks. Maybe put some basic, easily enforceable laws on the books to occasionally make examples of the biggest abusers, inhibiting people from expanding the industry with risky investments. Especially if abusers get actual jailtime, not just fines as a "business expense".
Not too many politicians even use email themselves. They usually have a staffer print out their email. Especially a national mediamonger like John McCain - he can't be seen even thumbing a Blackberry without the mass media (and probably some interactive, too) tagging him as a "nerd", which might get some Slashdot votes, but would turn off the anti-intellectuals needed to win elections in America's "specialist" society. I've seen only a couple of politicians who might really instinctively understand the human dynamics behind the "online obscenity" problem. Howard Dean, who freaked out the national "campaign finance" industry by raising unprecedented money on the Internet from individual small donors. And Al Gore, known for (taking the initiative in) creating the Internet. Funny enough, they're both probably running for president in 2008, too. Haven't heard them trying to censor you yet, though.
No, it's just cheaper. Flash is too low density for the dollar to compete with HDs. A parallel controller would cost more, but not sell much more.
You can see that the fast ones do cost significantly more, and really do make a difference (eg. in rapidfire digital cameras), but aren't that popular.
And in fact you can think it through yourself. There's no interaction among data within the chip. Why not just stack several USB Flash drives together, maxxing out the USB bus transfer speed? Then just put them in the same package, and you have a highly parallel single storage device. But multiple USB controllers cost more, and would need special R&D to integrate them. But the existing fast ones don't sell a lot more. So why bother?
When a Flash drive is down to about a dollar per GB or less, or just available in >100GB packages still matchbook sized, then parallel controllers will increase their transfer speed to max the bus on which it's connected. Maye this new tech will bring it. Or just the price/density improvements that has been beating Moore's Law, currently no better than $14:GB and max 16GB, though not in the same product. At the current rate, with max density quadrupling at about 4x per year, and midrange prices quartering, we're probably looking at 256GB in a couple of years, but 64-128GB costing something like $3:GB, or maybe $384 for a 128GB drive. Though HDs will probably cost something like $0.10:GB, with max capacity around 2TB ($200), solid state will beat it in every spec, and be used in the mostly mobile devices we'll think of as "computers".
NASA is planning on testing Europa probes on a pocket of liquid ice buried for centuries (millennia?) within Antarctica's ice. If there is an ecosystem inside, we will contaminate it. This research indicates the possibility of such an isolated ecosystem is higher than purely theoretical.
I have machines that burn DVDs, and do other tedious automated work, for me. Like a 200 disc changer, so I can do other stuff then pick up the finished product.
Get a brain. How many hours are you going to waste with computers you think you have to wind up or something?
The computer is in the networked infosystem. Most humans aren't. Removable discs can connect more people to info than can HDs.
Sarcasm has become an end in itself on Slashdot. Why bother thinking about the post, when you can just shuffle the words around and insert some ellipses?
People still trade porn on Usenet? There's still a Usenet?
Maybe we should chuck all these archival media strategies, and just hide our data in steganographic low bits of porn, uploaded for eternal trading on whatever media Usenet is still "temporarily" stored.
In the original grandparent post to which you replied, I started out by saying that the point of the DVD changer is to make several copies of the same data, on different DVD sets. So if a DVD gets scratched, or otherwise ages (as detailed in the story which we're tangentially discussing), there's another copy. More expendable DVDs, instead of tougher ones.
I'd say that the 4.7TB that $1K will buy, along with the DVD-R burner jukebox, is more than "little bits of data". I already pointed out how to deal with inevitably damaged DVDs.
A 200 disc book can hold a lot of DVD data. For most people, 4.7TB is more data than they own, including all their movies. Since DVDs can actually hold 17GB when double sided/layered, that's 17TB. If you've got more data than that to store, you can afford $10-20K+ for substantial robotic archival systems.
Your attempt to argue with my economics is contradictory only because you didn't understand its plain point. The jukebox costs about $400 (as little as $300). 1000 DVDs cost $200, but only 200 will fit into the jukebox at once. So that first 800GB on 200 discs costs $400 + 40, or about $450 - the rounding error for shipping, and actual price of the jukebox, makes $450 a charitable statement, when it will probably be less.
I'll even parse the next statement you didn't understand. The point is that larger storage than just the first jukebox load quickly becomes much cheaper than HDs. And more incremental, without having to buy an entire 750GB HD to store the next 500GB. Or by spending that money on much more DVDs. Which also bring the the other benefits, including flexibility, that HDs don't offer. And though you don't get it, the point of a pair of jukeboxes is to transfer an entire 200 discs to "fresh" DVDs that haven't aged like the story we're discussing describes. Again, solution to the "expiring DVDs" problem that just uses more DVDs.
I don't know how long the unspecified DVD jukebox would take to burn a full load. So what? The archive is supposed to last for months, years. If you have more frequent archiving demand, use a different tool.
The point isn't "more neat stuff", but the right tool for the right job. Since the job we're discssing is "coping with expiring DVDs", there is a way to just use more DVDs, as I've detailed. There are arguments for using HDs instead, but not necessarily in all situations, or even in most. But then, since you're not discussing the same thing as am I, we haven't gotten anywhere in the point of this thread.
The $400 I cited is for consumer models like the Sony Vaio version for their home theater PC systems. I don't know how reliable, but I expect they probably are, and under warranty. But I still mentioned buying extras for redundancy.
I don't know whether DVDs are easily recyclable, but I believe that they are more recyclable than are hard drives. Maybe not.
Everything fails. HDs have MTBF, as do jukeboxes, though I don't know whether the consumer ones are either really tested and that spec published, or how high it is.
As far as manually changing loaded sets, I haven't seen a consumer model (<$5000) that offers bulk loads of sets in a holder. Though even the holder would get loaded from the packs of DVDs, unless the "cake boxes" could be loaded directly - never seen that. 200 discs takes about a half-hour mind-numbing un/loading to cycle a full load. A half hour every few years doesn't seem like a big deal, though HDs are better. And it does seem like it could be automated, a robot arm to fill other carriers (like a 200-disc book). I'd love to see a Lego Mindstorms robot combined with one of these cheap jukeboxes, with 1000 DVDs in books stacked on top, handling 5TB for under $1000.
This system isn't for everyone. In fact, my post is in response to the strategy in the story to try to get DVDs to last longer. I say just use more DVDs, with an automated redundancy system.
With the single DVD jukebox, the first 800GB is online at one time, for $450. A 750GB HD costs $350. But the next 800GB in DVD costs only $40 - each 4TB costs $200. And there's no limit to how many $50 TBs you can archive, with a sizeable enough closet. The downside is un/loading the jukebox, 200 at a time. But that's archive, "nearline" storage.
Plus, you get a DVD reader and writer. For dealing with the DVDs (and CDs) that still distribute lots of content as a transfer medium. And for those without distributed endpoints to where they can archive data, or insufficient network bandwidth to archive all their data across the WAN frequently enough, DVDs are good and cheap offsite archive repositories. Plus you can burn DVDs that will play in every consumer player, which can connect your data to lots of people without data processing HW. HDs are a cul de sac for data, trapped within the infosystem.
DVD archiving isn't really competition to online HD storage. It's complementary, in different use cases, different user environments. There's considerable overlap in their related extremes, but there's a lot of difference that makes leaves the DVD solution worthwhile for many scenarios.
BTW, while I'm offering detailed factual analysis of HD vs DVD mass storage, don't throw in your "opinion" that "it's absolutely stupid...". Especially if you're going to offer a disagreement worth considering. Do you want to work together to figure out the real merits in a debate, or do you want to get into an obnoxious pissing contest that few other people will want to wade through? Few people worth teaching will learn anything from such unnecessary conflict. Including ourselves.
If you had accepted the semantic argument that even "1" and "0" aren't machine language, but numerical symbols we use to represent voltages or other differential electronic states of digital circuits.
You're just masturbating against my image in a Slashdot post. You're not interested in being right, or anything I say.
True. But there's no inherent reason though. Solid state media can deliver to any bitwidth, if their internal busses are so designed. A 32bit transfer should be native, even 64+. While discs are limited by their parallel read/write head count. Optical discs usually have a maximum of two (usually one), while magnetic discs often have just a pair or 2-3, maybe 4 - not even a byte word width.
And while block reads are common to practically every medium, solid state makes access vs transfer speed very close. Without the access latency from repositioning a physical head, or waiting to rotate. The same schematics mean solid state really cleans up, making sparsely distributed data nearly as quickly accessible as blocks, while discs really suffer from fragmentation.
Cheap but adequate DVD-R media costs $200 for 1000 discs, about 4TB capacity. And a cheap DVD-R changer jukebox costs under $500, about 800GB per load.
Why not just burn a few copies of the archive to a bunch of DVD sets? The DVDs will get defects, but shuffling the chunks across the discs just a little will probably ensure that the random distribution of specific defects will not hit every copy of a given bit, against the odds a low defect rate will produce.
How about a pair of those archivers, which fire up every few years just to transfer the aging DVDs to fresh new ones? For another $1000, that's another 5 cycles of DVDs, 800GB per cycle. Another $1000 gets a pair of backup jukeboxes.
For higher capacities than 800GB, there are pricier pro jukeboxes, but with dual drives for the retranscription cycle (and faster restores). But the architecture is the same. Why try to make the media more reliable, when there's cheaper/easier solutions that just accept unreliable media, and move on?
I hope you kept all your receipts, because that post demonstrates that "recognizable symbols" are different from cliches when the word is the closest accurate name for the phenomenon. While triggering the cliche charge for the "I trademarked it before the Bubble" joke.
No, every post you've made has merely insisted on a semantic argument that "hex" cannot be machine language. While I have offered cited references, examples, logical deduction and inference in every post. I have not condescended, except to stoop to slap you back after you've offered nothing but irrelevant, baseless assertions.
You insist on thinking in binary? How about "I'm right, you're wrong". If you had tried to make some decent sense, you might have gotten some agreement to a semantic argument that a hex representation of binary states is a mnemonic. If you had accepted the semantic argument that even "1" and "0" aren't machine language, but numerical symbols we use to represent voltages or other differential electronic states of digital circuits.
But you blew it. You're too dogmatic to find any agreement. Not interested in learning anything, or helping another to learn. You're interested only in demanding that your narrow view rules. Even when you're only tangentially correct. And an obnoxious, self-absorbed projector, to boot.
Stop thinking about my penis, and get off my case.
Slashdot Mirror
Roombas can be controlled by Bluetooth, so every mobile phone can run them as a remote.
Lego can be controlled by Bluetooth.
Who's got my swarm app run from the phone in my pocket, for my army of Mindstorm Roombas?
Real robotwars, out in the streets, complete with exploding showers of Lego shrapnel...
Roombas can be controlled by Bluetooth, so every mobile phone can run them as a remote.
Lego can be controlled by Bluetooth.
Who's got my swarm app run from the phone in my pocket, for my army of Mindstorm Roombas?
Real robotwars, out in the streets, complete with exploding showers of Lego shrapnel...
Well, yes, but it's always Noon over some ocean.
So the area I mentioned isn't always exposed to Solar Noon, but there's always 1KW:m^2 falling on up to about 1/24th, lessening longitudinally. With 3E14W to start with, even 10% is plenty.
The Sun dumps up to 1KW:m^2 on the ocean 71% of the Earth, all day long, every day.
361M km^2 is 3.61E14m^2, or maybe 1E14KW: a billion MW. That's a starting point for 150MW per human, throughout the day. 2/3 of humans live within 150Km of a coastline, probably growing to 75% by the time hydrogen fuel would replace petroleum/gasoline as the main energy carrier. In faster growing countries, like China and India, the fraction is even larger and would be larger still if energy and fresh water were more plentiful there.
Cracking seawater with sunlight is clearly a revolution for sustaining human energy consumption. Starting with seawater also pumps more oxygen into the atmosphere, compensating for some trees and sealife we've killed, and some CO2 we've pumped into the air from petrofuels. While leaving the remaining petrofuels for easy production of plastic and other carbon manufacturing. And making more potable water, rather than less.
Petrofuel wars are notorious for creating war and strife. The whole bloody 20th Century was underwritten by wars for access to oil in the Mideast and Russia, while the 21st Century has already been defined by little else. Water wars are coming, and already at base of some intractable conflicts, like Israel's borders.
Then we get "experts" like Boessel, whose g-g-grandfather invented the fuelcell in 1838 Germany, saying
Which doesn't even add up. Not to mention that his 25% is gated through the current 40-50% fuelcell efficiency, rather than the theoretical maximum greater than 85%. And that the current (pun intended
For Boessel, 25% surplus energy isn't enough for a clean, even often renewable resource. For the rest of "out economy" (our civilization), it sure beats the petrofuels which are killing us even before they run out.
Most of the time, Slashdot sucks.
But when it works, it rules!
Since the display is a pair of projectors, each aimed into one eye, why aren't they boasting a stereo display, like a 3D movie?
What I really want to see is tiny cameras on the fronts of the projectors, registering the 3D scene so the projected display can be mapped closely onto it.
Politicians (and the lawyers who love them) mostly don't really get the total difference between mass media, broadcast like TV, and interactive media, returned on request. They try to regulate by brand name, like "email" or "the Web", but those apps have different kinds of media among their subtypes, with different risks.
Spam and other unsolicited email (UCE/commercial and otherwise) looks like a good target for regulating content, but instead only its sending should be regulated to enforce consumer choice to receive or not. Without that kind of requirement, spam is not interactive, but maillists are. It also might look like maillists should be forced to adhere to a self-published description of their scope and kinds of content. Who wants to subscribe to a "trojan horse" list about something innocuous and then get unrelated obscene pitches (requiring actual Trojans)? The Web is exactly the same: all request, and a problem only when the offer generating the request is deceptive, then the reply to the request arrives inappropriate to the offer and the reques.
But the power of individual choice in receiving or not is much more powerful than government regulation. The massively parallel, distributed Net "flasher" industry totally overwhelms any conceited government attempt to stand up to it. But Net consumers are an ever larger, more complex, and more powerful group - or the flashers wouldn't make enough money off us to stay in business. When we can choose never to receive "inappropriate" messages, as we decide for ourselves, we can choke off the entire creepy business.
Spam laws requiring opt-in, or even requiring opt-out force spam to be interactive. An effective version working just within that scope might work (so far, my obscene spam receipts have doubled every 3 months for 5 years or so). But that's as far as government can go without worthlessly spinning its wheels, even inviting contempt by "outlaws" who can't be caught. The government could go further in requiring OS makers (Microsoft, Apple) to include facilities that offer at least hooks to automating opt-out, like addressbook whitelists. Or better yet, develop at government labs (like Mosaic was) or encourage development (by investing some of our $3.5T US or other, foreign, budgets) of whitelist social networks. Maybe put some basic, easily enforceable laws on the books to occasionally make examples of the biggest abusers, inhibiting people from expanding the industry with risky investments. Especially if abusers get actual jailtime, not just fines as a "business expense".
Not too many politicians even use email themselves. They usually have a staffer print out their email. Especially a national mediamonger like John McCain - he can't be seen even thumbing a Blackberry without the mass media (and probably some interactive, too) tagging him as a "nerd", which might get some Slashdot votes, but would turn off the anti-intellectuals needed to win elections in America's "specialist" society. I've seen only a couple of politicians who might really instinctively understand the human dynamics behind the "online obscenity" problem. Howard Dean, who freaked out the national "campaign finance" industry by raising unprecedented money on the Internet from individual small donors. And Al Gore, known for (taking the initiative in) creating the Internet. Funny enough, they're both probably running for president in 2008, too. Haven't heard them trying to censor you yet, though.
I don't think the Antarctic ice bubble would feed us all more than hors d'oeuvres. But maybe a consumme...
Yeah, because there are so many more people with computers than with DVD drives.
That was so easy, that it isn't worth doing again.
You are a jerk. Goodbye.
No, it's just cheaper. Flash is too low density for the dollar to compete with HDs. A parallel controller would cost more, but not sell much more.
You can see that the fast ones do cost significantly more, and really do make a difference (eg. in rapidfire digital cameras), but aren't that popular.
And in fact you can think it through yourself. There's no interaction among data within the chip. Why not just stack several USB Flash drives together, maxxing out the USB bus transfer speed? Then just put them in the same package, and you have a highly parallel single storage device. But multiple USB controllers cost more, and would need special R&D to integrate them. But the existing fast ones don't sell a lot more. So why bother?
When a Flash drive is down to about a dollar per GB or less, or just available in >100GB packages still matchbook sized, then parallel controllers will increase their transfer speed to max the bus on which it's connected. Maye this new tech will bring it. Or just the price/density improvements that has been beating Moore's Law, currently no better than $14:GB and max 16GB, though not in the same product. At the current rate, with max density quadrupling at about 4x per year, and midrange prices quartering, we're probably looking at 256GB in a couple of years, but 64-128GB costing something like $3:GB, or maybe $384 for a 128GB drive. Though HDs will probably cost something like $0.10:GB, with max capacity around 2TB ($200), solid state will beat it in every spec, and be used in the mostly mobile devices we'll think of as "computers".
NASA is planning on testing Europa probes on a pocket of liquid ice buried for centuries (millennia?) within Antarctica's ice. If there is an ecosystem inside, we will contaminate it. This research indicates the possibility of such an isolated ecosystem is higher than purely theoretical.
Or "change for a quarter that leaves a nickel".
Wait, didn't that couple of cardiologists do something impossible?
I have machines that burn DVDs, and do other tedious automated work, for me. Like a 200 disc changer, so I can do other stuff then pick up the finished product.
Get a brain. How many hours are you going to waste with computers you think you have to wind up or something?
The computer is in the networked infosystem. Most humans aren't. Removable discs can connect more people to info than can HDs.
Sarcasm has become an end in itself on Slashdot. Why bother thinking about the post, when you can just shuffle the words around and insert some ellipses?
Sony's Vaio DGP-XL1B.
You're right about tape. But we're talking about "How to Choose Archival CD/DVD Media". Can't play your copy of _The Life Aquatic_ in a tape drive.
People still trade porn on Usenet? There's still a Usenet?
Maybe we should chuck all these archival media strategies, and just hide our data in steganographic low bits of porn, uploaded for eternal trading on whatever media Usenet is still "temporarily" stored.
In the original grandparent post to which you replied, I started out by saying that the point of the DVD changer is to make several copies of the same data, on different DVD sets. So if a DVD gets scratched, or otherwise ages (as detailed in the story which we're tangentially discussing), there's another copy. More expendable DVDs, instead of tougher ones.
I'd say that the 4.7TB that $1K will buy, along with the DVD-R burner jukebox, is more than "little bits of data". I already pointed out how to deal with inevitably damaged DVDs.
A 200 disc book can hold a lot of DVD data. For most people, 4.7TB is more data than they own, including all their movies. Since DVDs can actually hold 17GB when double sided/layered, that's 17TB. If you've got more data than that to store, you can afford $10-20K+ for substantial robotic archival systems.
Your attempt to argue with my economics is contradictory only because you didn't understand its plain point. The jukebox costs about $400 (as little as $300). 1000 DVDs cost $200, but only 200 will fit into the jukebox at once. So that first 800GB on 200 discs costs $400 + 40, or about $450 - the rounding error for shipping, and actual price of the jukebox, makes $450 a charitable statement, when it will probably be less.
I'll even parse the next statement you didn't understand. The point is that larger storage than just the first jukebox load quickly becomes much cheaper than HDs. And more incremental, without having to buy an entire 750GB HD to store the next 500GB. Or by spending that money on much more DVDs. Which also bring the the other benefits, including flexibility, that HDs don't offer. And though you don't get it, the point of a pair of jukeboxes is to transfer an entire 200 discs to "fresh" DVDs that haven't aged like the story we're discussing describes. Again, solution to the "expiring DVDs" problem that just uses more DVDs.
I don't know how long the unspecified DVD jukebox would take to burn a full load. So what? The archive is supposed to last for months, years. If you have more frequent archiving demand, use a different tool.
The point isn't "more neat stuff", but the right tool for the right job. Since the job we're discssing is "coping with expiring DVDs", there is a way to just use more DVDs, as I've detailed. There are arguments for using HDs instead, but not necessarily in all situations, or even in most. But then, since you're not discussing the same thing as am I, we haven't gotten anywhere in the point of this thread.
The $400 I cited is for consumer models like the Sony Vaio version for their home theater PC systems. I don't know how reliable, but I expect they probably are, and under warranty. But I still mentioned buying extras for redundancy.
I don't know whether DVDs are easily recyclable, but I believe that they are more recyclable than are hard drives. Maybe not.
Everything fails. HDs have MTBF, as do jukeboxes, though I don't know whether the consumer ones are either really tested and that spec published, or how high it is.
As far as manually changing loaded sets, I haven't seen a consumer model (<$5000) that offers bulk loads of sets in a holder. Though even the holder would get loaded from the packs of DVDs, unless the "cake boxes" could be loaded directly - never seen that. 200 discs takes about a half-hour mind-numbing un/loading to cycle a full load. A half hour every few years doesn't seem like a big deal, though HDs are better. And it does seem like it could be automated, a robot arm to fill other carriers (like a 200-disc book). I'd love to see a Lego Mindstorms robot combined with one of these cheap jukeboxes, with 1000 DVDs in books stacked on top, handling 5TB for under $1000.
This system isn't for everyone. In fact, my post is in response to the strategy in the story to try to get DVDs to last longer. I say just use more DVDs, with an automated redundancy system.
With the single DVD jukebox, the first 800GB is online at one time, for $450. A 750GB HD costs $350. But the next 800GB in DVD costs only $40 - each 4TB costs $200. And there's no limit to how many $50 TBs you can archive, with a sizeable enough closet. The downside is un/loading the jukebox, 200 at a time. But that's archive, "nearline" storage.
Plus, you get a DVD reader and writer. For dealing with the DVDs (and CDs) that still distribute lots of content as a transfer medium. And for those without distributed endpoints to where they can archive data, or insufficient network bandwidth to archive all their data across the WAN frequently enough, DVDs are good and cheap offsite archive repositories. Plus you can burn DVDs that will play in every consumer player, which can connect your data to lots of people without data processing HW. HDs are a cul de sac for data, trapped within the infosystem.
DVD archiving isn't really competition to online HD storage. It's complementary, in different use cases, different user environments. There's considerable overlap in their related extremes, but there's a lot of difference that makes leaves the DVD solution worthwhile for many scenarios.
BTW, while I'm offering detailed factual analysis of HD vs DVD mass storage, don't throw in your "opinion" that "it's absolutely stupid...". Especially if you're going to offer a disagreement worth considering. Do you want to work together to figure out the real merits in a debate, or do you want to get into an obnoxious pissing contest that few other people will want to wade through? Few people worth teaching will learn anything from such unnecessary conflict. Including ourselves.
You're just masturbating against my image in a Slashdot post. You're not interested in being right, or anything I say.
JMP 0
True. But there's no inherent reason though. Solid state media can deliver to any bitwidth, if their internal busses are so designed. A 32bit transfer should be native, even 64+. While discs are limited by their parallel read/write head count. Optical discs usually have a maximum of two (usually one), while magnetic discs often have just a pair or 2-3, maybe 4 - not even a byte word width.
And while block reads are common to practically every medium, solid state makes access vs transfer speed very close. Without the access latency from repositioning a physical head, or waiting to rotate. The same schematics mean solid state really cleans up, making sparsely distributed data nearly as quickly accessible as blocks, while discs really suffer from fragmentation.
Cheap but adequate DVD-R media costs $200 for 1000 discs, about 4TB capacity. And a cheap DVD-R changer jukebox costs under $500, about 800GB per load.
Why not just burn a few copies of the archive to a bunch of DVD sets? The DVDs will get defects, but shuffling the chunks across the discs just a little will probably ensure that the random distribution of specific defects will not hit every copy of a given bit, against the odds a low defect rate will produce.
How about a pair of those archivers, which fire up every few years just to transfer the aging DVDs to fresh new ones? For another $1000, that's another 5 cycles of DVDs, 800GB per cycle. Another $1000 gets a pair of backup jukeboxes.
For higher capacities than 800GB, there are pricier pro jukeboxes, but with dual drives for the retranscription cycle (and faster restores). But the architecture is the same. Why try to make the media more reliable, when there's cheaper/easier solutions that just accept unreliable media, and move on?
I hope you kept all your receipts, because that post demonstrates that "recognizable symbols" are different from cliches when the word is the closest accurate name for the phenomenon. While triggering the cliche charge for the "I trademarked it before the Bubble" joke.
What words for "paradigm" are tax exempt, anyway?
No, every post you've made has merely insisted on a semantic argument that "hex" cannot be machine language. While I have offered cited references, examples, logical deduction and inference in every post. I have not condescended, except to stoop to slap you back after you've offered nothing but irrelevant, baseless assertions.
You insist on thinking in binary? How about "I'm right, you're wrong". If you had tried to make some decent sense, you might have gotten some agreement to a semantic argument that a hex representation of binary states is a mnemonic. If you had accepted the semantic argument that even "1" and "0" aren't machine language, but numerical symbols we use to represent voltages or other differential electronic states of digital circuits.
But you blew it. You're too dogmatic to find any agreement. Not interested in learning anything, or helping another to learn. You're interested only in demanding that your narrow view rules. Even when you're only tangentially correct. And an obnoxious, self-absorbed projector, to boot.
Stop thinking about my penis, and get off my case.