Hey cheer up Mr. Smith you will be the first man on mars. The bad news is you will die on impact when your capsule crashes into the planet at 40 times the speed of sound. Budgets cuts and all that we can't afford to slow you down, or bring the supplies needed for you to survive and return. Nobody every said making history was going to be easy.
Also we haven't really explored the moon. Frozen water likely exists in craters which are continually in shadow. Water = oxygen & hydrogen.
If Columbus had explored as much as we have explored the moon he would have landed, collected few seashells, walked around on the beech a little bit, took some sketches of the inland areas then returned home and never came back.
No AMD makes Radeon. ATI was acquired. Accept this thing called reality. AMD kept the brand seperate a while (despite ATI not actually existing) because is was worth more as a separate brand. Times change. As AMD gets more and more into hybrid APU it makes less sense to have a separate fake company name on some (but not all) of its video cards.
The line between CPU & GPU will become very blury over the next decade. AMD wants you to know they make it all. Dedicated CPU, dedicated GPU, low power APU, integrated graphics, medium power APU coupled w/ a dedicated GPU, etc. All made by AMD and all play nice together. I am sure you can see how that is more valuable from a branding standpoint. Given ATI has existed as a brand name only for nearly 3 years now it makes sense to retire it.
If your old bank gets acquried by a new bank and eventually the name changes do you still keep calling it by the old name a decade later just to be an ass and confuse people.
"This is a First Union dammit. It was a First Union when I was born, and it will be a First Union when I die. I don't give a damn that the brand name changed 9 years ago."
Open Office is fine for some stuff but when it chokes on VBA most business aren't going to adopt it.
Our company (despite the objections of many) tried and it was a nightmare. Lots of excel docs for reports all had to be redone, sometimes finding a replacement functionality was difficult or time consuming. Later the company realized that many of our partners continued to use MS Office w/ xlsm files. Ooops. We had to start saying "please send it without VBA macros". Some did, most didn't. No way to read those except w/ Office. So the company bought a few licenses. After 18 months of pretending it would work they ended up purchasing new licenses for Office.
Still some people will go "LALALALALA Open Office is just as good". The zealots don't realize that sticker price isn't everything. If it was then there would only be one car in the US and it would be Hyundai Accent ($10,760 retail). The $500 the company "saved" by not purchasing Office likely wasted as much as $5,000 in productivity for some employees. I spent hours getting stuff to work in OO when it already worked fine in MS Office.
There is no free lunch. TCO and productivity is what matters and even with a $0 license OO still has cost.
Anyways now it is a 50/50 split between troll and flamebait.
and it still wouldn't handle complex VBA no matter how many times you install it.
Open Office is a toy. If you want to manually do a spreadsheet for home budget, or send mom a letter sure use Open Office however (so far) open office lacks the necessary functionality to replace MS Office.
I use iDrive. Not sure if there is a better service.
iDrive deletes deleted files from the backup also however it has an option to turn off automatic sync (which I do). When you manually sync it warns you of deleted files and asks what to do.
So if I accidentally delete a file I can restore local copy from the archive rather than delete archive to match local.
Sadly if you turn on auto-sync it won't warn or propt you (working very similar to carbonite except the "grace period" is 30 days).
I don't know if there is a better solution than I drive. It just happened to be what I used and it works for what I need.
Hard drive companies often use term platter ambiguously.
A platter has two sides thus can two surfaces to access data from.
Sometimes they will refer to a disc as 4 platter meaning 4 physical platter and 8 surfaces. Sometimes as 4 platters meaning 4 surfaces and 2 platters.
2.5" drives tend to be 1 or 2 platters (up to 4 surfaces & heads).
3.5" drives tend to be 2 to 4 platters (up to 8 surfaces & heads). 5 platters & 10 heads aren't very common anymore.
Still this drive does appear to have the highest density of any physical disk so far.
3TB = / 8 heads-surfaces = 375GB per surface.
375GB * 8 / 4 square inches on 3.5"* drive = min areal density of 750Gb/in^2.**
* 3.5" drive actually have 3" platter roughly 4 square inches of surface area when you exclude the spindle.
** Areal density is likely higher due to short stroking and manufacture marketing rounding drive size to an expected size. i.e. no selling 3.27GB drives. However at a min it is 75Gb/i2 density.
2.5" drives can hold 3 platters. Most 2.5" drives are 2 or 3 platters.
3.5" drives "CAN" hold up to 5 platters however yields tend to be poor, failure rates higher, and a 5 platter 1TB drive will be outperformed by a 3 platter 1TB drive (higher density). Thus in reality most 3.5" drives contain 2 or 3 platters.
Will society been that worse off missing some MST3K 30 years from now? I doubt it.
However I accept the point. The more esoteric the data the more useful archiving it becomes. If we had sane copyright laws most of that stuff would be in public domain and part of the cloud already (making individual backups even more useless).
Why does a log need to write to a disc more than once per minute. Really?
For 99.9% of uses there is no reason.
There is no reason the log can't simply cache the results to memory and write to the disc once every minute or every couple minutes.
How about when your OS is clever and tries to reduce disk use by only flushing the OS block cache intermittently, and that interval is slightly greater than the park timer?
then change the interval. If the clever OS flushed once per minute it wouldn't be an issue.
The idea that all data needs to be discretely written intermittently with a cycle time of seconds is dubious.
Two options: a) better software b) use drive w/ longer park time and accept higher (wasted) energy use.
Perpendicular recording isn't 3D despite Hitachi lame attempt at buzz.
It simply made the surface area of each bit smaller by aligning the bits perpendicular to the surface.
Each platter is still 2D. There is no volume measurement. If you look at a platter you can "see" each bit they aren't stacked on top of each other (yet).
No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.
To each his own. I find a Tivo hacked w/ 2TB drive to be more than enough storage for content. Old stuff gets deleted. Who CARES?
There have been physical packrats for years. We are just seeing the digital equivelent today.
Oh noes if I don't have every single episode of that TV show that went off the air 3 years ago I will just die. Granted I haven't watched any of them in 2 years but YOU NEVER KNOW maybe someday I might need to watch them and they won't be there.
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs
on
WD Launches 3 Terabyte HD
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Honestly I find that I archive less and less.
Donated all my DVD (almost never watch them again) to charity (nice writeoff).
Quick what % of your DVD have you watched at least 10 times. Hell how many of them have you watched only once or twice?
Storing DVD is of dubious value IMHO. In 20-30 years it will be the digital equivelent of people who stored every single newspaper in case they needed.
With netflix, VOD (both from cable and online), hulu, itunes, redbox, etc the need to store TB of pre-generated content seems quaint.
Take the cost of the DVD + cost (in $ value of your time) of ripping them + cost to archive them divided by number of uses. If it is more than $2 - $3 a view you are paying more than just paying per use.
Now people w/ lots of personal unique content (family photos, video, original composistions, personal files, etc) storage makes sense. One can't simply go to a redbox pay $2 and get a copy of last summer vacation video.
Do you REALLY need to write to the disc 2x a minute every single minute continually for the life of the machine.
Most likely the answer is no. For 99.9% of the people thee is no benefit to writing to the disc continually every 30 seconds as opposed to once a minute or less.
For the 0.01% of people who absolutely must continually write to the disc all the time WD makes a drive series for that. Black series.
Problem solved. Why should WD "fix" the green series drives (optimized for low power consumption) by making them park less thus increasing consumption for a "feature" (to accommodate poorly written software) used by 1% of the population.
Buy the right tool. If you need to write to the disc multiple times per second continually (instead of buffering) for the life of the drive then buy a drive designed to do that.
The issue is most people saying "I got a RAID" ONLY have a raid.
So maybe it is better phrased that ONLY a RAID isn't a backup. The issue is if you only have a single copy of your data no matter how redundant the method of storing that single copy can become corrupt.
Having a drive (or RAID) and a backup RAID provides a high level of fault tolerence and may make sense where cost of tape storage is simply not warranted.
Even better would be: storage RAID backup RAID offsite backup (via cloud)
The problem is many users will take a 2TB drive RAID it and the files stored there are the only copy. That isn't a backup it is merely a more fault tolerant method of primary storage.
I build PC's for people all the time, and usually the cost of windows exceeds the amount I spent building the entire computer. At the very least THAT has to change.
If you mean the entire cost of the PC is less than windows license well that is utterly bogus. If you mean your markup is less than windows license well it really doesn't take any skill to assemble a bunch of components. Your markup (or lack thereof) is directly related to the lack of skill involved.
Windows 7 Premium OEM is $95. Purchased in bulk it is much much much less. 3 pack OEM license is about $60 per PC. Large OEM (dell, HP, etc) get it for about half that.
Simple your father had you. Without you your father would have: a) kept using same box - (marketshare for windows) b) took it to a computer store or god forbid geeks squad to do reinstall - (marketshare for windows) c) found and used "system restore" discs - (marketshare for windows) d) threw it out and bought a new windows which will come w/ windows 7 - (marketshare for windows)
windows is relatively cheap. It is good ENOUGH and cheap ENOUGH. It does the job and most people don't really care about alternatives.
For a business it isn't free to use another OS. It requires training, ensuring applications are supported, dealing w/ incompatibilities (partners & suppliers sending files in excel or god forbid access). When you look at the TCO for a desktop seat (hardware, software, training, repairs, electricity, lost productivity in downtime, etc) in a large company the $30 it costs for a windows license is a rounding error.
w3schools is a niche website (used by developers)
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
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· Score: 1
Mac is 5%. Linux is ~1%. Other is ~3%. Windows is 91%.
It is even more sad if you break it down as: Windows XP ~60% Windows Vista & 7 ~30% Everything else ~10%
It is free as in freedom but not free as in beer.
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
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· Score: 1
Even if the license is $0.00 there is cost. It takes time & resources & knowledge to deploy. None of which are free.
For many people the $30 windows license (HP doesn't pay full retail) is CHEAPER than the cost to learn, patch, and use Linux.
TCO is what matters and TCO of linux on servers relatively low compared to TCO of windows. There is nothing to suggest the TCO for Linux desktop shares that benefit. Even if it does the TCO for a business (which can standardize platform) and TCO of home user is going to differ.
Windows works simply because it is good ENOUGH and cheap ENOUGH. Until Linux is vastly superior in either benefit or total cost that isn't going to change.
China didn't make a concious effort to corner the rare earth market.
Rare earths really should be called cheap ass low value earths. There isn't a lot of profit in it. The US, australia, and few other places mined them because they are needed but they are hardly masively profitable. China got into the biz because it is a cheap biz to get into and doesn't require a lot of skill (like say building jet planes or microprocessors).
As a result of china dirt cheap labor, utter lack of safety or enviromental standards and willingness to manipulate its currency it was able to export rare earths (which once again aren't particularly rare or valuable) for fraction of its competitors. There was no real reason to protect this market because it isn't that valuable so developed nations simply shutdown mines rather than export at a loss.
Your belief that is some "master plan" is misplaced. If we were willing to use slave labor, discard miners when the job killed them without benefits, contimnate ground water with industrial toxins which will be around for couple centuries causing birth defects, and manipulate the dollar downward to destroy any standard of living for our citizens we too could be king of the shit pile. All that for a market which grosses less revenue globally than video games do.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey cheer up Mr. Smith you will be the first man on mars. The bad news is you will die on impact when your capsule crashes into the planet at 40 times the speed of sound. Budgets cuts and all that we can't afford to slow you down, or bring the supplies needed for you to survive and return. Nobody every said making history was going to be easy.
Also we haven't really explored the moon. Frozen water likely exists in craters which are continually in shadow. Water = oxygen & hydrogen.
If Columbus had explored as much as we have explored the moon he would have landed, collected few seashells, walked around on the beech a little bit, took some sketches of the inland areas then returned home and never came back.
No AMD makes Radeon. ATI was acquired. Accept this thing called reality. AMD kept the brand seperate a while (despite ATI not actually existing) because is was worth more as a separate brand. Times change. As AMD gets more and more into hybrid APU it makes less sense to have a separate fake company name on some (but not all) of its video cards.
The line between CPU & GPU will become very blury over the next decade. AMD wants you to know they make it all. Dedicated CPU, dedicated GPU, low power APU, integrated graphics, medium power APU coupled w/ a dedicated GPU, etc. All made by AMD and all play nice together. I am sure you can see how that is more valuable from a branding standpoint. Given ATI has existed as a brand name only for nearly 3 years now it makes sense to retire it.
If your old bank gets acquried by a new bank and eventually the name changes do you still keep calling it by the old name a decade later just to be an ass and confuse people.
"This is a First Union dammit. It was a First Union when I was born, and it will be a First Union when I die. I don't give a damn that the brand name changed 9 years ago."
Yeah I don't get it.
Open Office is fine for some stuff but when it chokes on VBA most business aren't going to adopt it.
Our company (despite the objections of many) tried and it was a nightmare. Lots of excel docs for reports all had to be redone, sometimes finding a replacement functionality was difficult or time consuming. Later the company realized that many of our partners continued to use MS Office w/ xlsm files. Ooops. We had to start saying "please send it without VBA macros". Some did, most didn't. No way to read those except w/ Office. So the company bought a few licenses. After 18 months of pretending it would work they ended up purchasing new licenses for Office.
Still some people will go "LALALALALA Open Office is just as good". The zealots don't realize that sticker price isn't everything. If it was then there would only be one car in the US and it would be Hyundai Accent ($10,760 retail). The $500 the company "saved" by not purchasing Office likely wasted as much as $5,000 in productivity for some employees. I spent hours getting stuff to work in OO when it already worked fine in MS Office.
There is no free lunch. TCO and productivity is what matters and even with a $0 license OO still has cost.
Anyways now it is a 50/50 split between troll and flamebait.
and it still wouldn't handle complex VBA no matter how many times you install it.
Open Office is a toy. If you want to manually do a spreadsheet for home budget, or send mom a letter sure use Open Office however (so far) open office lacks the necessary functionality to replace MS Office.
When one consider that Office is $400 - $500 per license it is "half off".
Also I think it is more aimed at small business.
Fortune 500 can drop $500 a license per user no big deal.
A startup could preserve capital by paying $72 per year.
I use iDrive. Not sure if there is a better service.
iDrive deletes deleted files from the backup also however it has an option to turn off automatic sync (which I do). When you manually sync it warns you of deleted files and asks what to do.
So if I accidentally delete a file I can restore local copy from the archive rather than delete archive to match local.
Sadly if you turn on auto-sync it won't warn or propt you (working very similar to carbonite except the "grace period" is 30 days).
I don't know if there is a better solution than I drive. It just happened to be what I used and it works for what I need.
I fail. I will fix my own mistake.
Hard drive companies often use term platter ambiguously.
A platter has two sides thus can two surfaces to access data from.
Sometimes they will refer to a disc as 4 platter meaning 4 physical platter and 8 surfaces. Sometimes as 4 platters meaning 4 surfaces and 2 platters.
2.5" drives tend to be 1 or 2 platters (up to 4 surfaces & heads).
3.5" drives tend to be 2 to 4 platters (up to 8 surfaces & heads). 5 platters & 10 heads aren't very common anymore.
Still this drive does appear to have the highest density of any physical disk so far.
3TB = / 8 heads-surfaces = 375GB per surface.
375GB * 8 / 4 square inches on 3.5"* drive = min areal density of 750Gb/in^2.**
* 3.5" drive actually have 3" platter roughly 4 square inches of surface area when you exclude the spindle.
** Areal density is likely higher due to short stroking and manufacture marketing rounding drive size to an expected size. i.e. no selling 3.27GB drives. However at a min it is 75Gb/i2 density.
In theory but not so much practice.
2.5" drives can hold 3 platters. Most 2.5" drives are 2 or 3 platters.
3.5" drives "CAN" hold up to 5 platters however yields tend to be poor, failure rates higher, and a 5 platter 1TB drive will be outperformed by a 3 platter 1TB drive (higher density). Thus in reality most 3.5" drives contain 2 or 3 platters.
Will society been that worse off missing some MST3K 30 years from now? I doubt it.
However I accept the point. The more esoteric the data the more useful archiving it becomes. If we had sane copyright laws most of that stuff would be in public domain and part of the cloud already (making individual backups even more useless).
Why does a log need to write to a disc more than once per minute. Really?
For 99.9% of uses there is no reason.
There is no reason the log can't simply cache the results to memory and write to the disc once every minute or every couple minutes.
How about when your OS is clever and tries to reduce disk use by only flushing the OS block cache intermittently, and that interval is slightly greater than the park timer?
then change the interval. If the clever OS flushed once per minute it wouldn't be an issue.
The idea that all data needs to be discretely written intermittently with a cycle time of seconds is dubious.
Two options:
a) better software
b) use drive w/ longer park time and accept higher (wasted) energy use.
Perpendicular recording isn't 3D despite Hitachi lame attempt at buzz.
It simply made the surface area of each bit smaller by aligning the bits perpendicular to the surface.
Each platter is still 2D. There is no volume measurement. If you look at a platter you can "see" each bit they aren't stacked on top of each other (yet).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording
No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.
To each his own. I find a Tivo hacked w/ 2TB drive to be more than enough storage for content. Old stuff gets deleted. Who CARES?
There have been physical packrats for years. We are just seeing the digital equivelent today.
Oh noes if I don't have every single episode of that TV show that went off the air 3 years ago I will just die. Granted I haven't watched any of them in 2 years but YOU NEVER KNOW maybe someday I might need to watch them and they won't be there.
Honestly I find that I archive less and less.
Donated all my DVD (almost never watch them again) to charity (nice writeoff).
Quick what % of your DVD have you watched at least 10 times. Hell how many of them have you watched only once or twice?
Storing DVD is of dubious value IMHO. In 20-30 years it will be the digital equivelent of people who stored every single newspaper in case they needed.
With netflix, VOD (both from cable and online), hulu, itunes, redbox, etc the need to store TB of pre-generated content seems quaint.
Take the cost of the DVD + cost (in $ value of your time) of ripping them + cost to archive them divided by number of uses. If it is more than $2 - $3 a view you are paying more than just paying per use.
Now people w/ lots of personal unique content (family photos, video, original composistions, personal files, etc) storage makes sense. One can't simply go to a redbox pay $2 and get a copy of last summer vacation video.
However that limitation is dubious at this point.
Windows 7 32 & 64 bit is supported (as is Vista 32 & 64)
Boot drive requires
compatible HBA
UEFI (instead of BIOS)
64 bit OS and compatible storage drivers
There are almost no UEFI compatible motherboards so booting from this disc is most systems is impossible.
Both 32 & 64 bit versions of 7 & Vista support this drive as secondary (non boot) drive.
Do you REALLY need to write to the disc 2x a minute every single minute continually for the life of the machine.
Most likely the answer is no. For 99.9% of the people thee is no benefit to writing to the disc continually every 30 seconds as opposed to once a minute or less.
For the 0.01% of people who absolutely must continually write to the disc all the time WD makes a drive series for that. Black series.
Problem solved. Why should WD "fix" the green series drives (optimized for low power consumption) by making them park less thus increasing consumption for a "feature" (to accommodate poorly written software) used by 1% of the population.
Buy the right tool. If you need to write to the disc multiple times per second continually (instead of buffering) for the life of the drive then buy a drive designed to do that.
Not much confidence in a sample size of 2. Buy 20,000 drives and let us know.
For the record I have owned 5 WD over the years (2 currently) and none have died.
Still our combined sample size of 7 isn't really meaningful.
Your only option is an autoloader which isn't cheap.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16840119028
Single LTO 3 drive plus 8 tape magazine. 3.2TB capacity (6.4TB w/ compression YMMV)
The issue is most people saying "I got a RAID" ONLY have a raid.
So maybe it is better phrased that ONLY a RAID isn't a backup. The issue is if you only have a single copy of your data no matter how redundant the method of storing that single copy can become corrupt.
Having a drive (or RAID) and a backup RAID provides a high level of fault tolerence and may make sense where cost of tape storage is simply not warranted.
Even better would be:
storage RAID
backup RAID
offsite backup (via cloud)
The problem is many users will take a 2TB drive RAID it and the files stored there are the only copy. That isn't a backup it is merely a more fault tolerant method of primary storage.
volume is kinda meaningless given data is stored on flat platters. Only the surface area on platters are used.
A 2.5" platter has about 40% of the surface area compared to 3.5" platter.
If data was stored 3 dimensionally then maybe volume would matter.
I build PC's for people all the time, and usually the cost of windows exceeds the amount I spent building the entire computer. At the very least THAT has to change.
If you mean the entire cost of the PC is less than windows license well that is utterly bogus.
If you mean your markup is less than windows license well it really doesn't take any skill to assemble a bunch of components.
Your markup (or lack thereof) is directly related to the lack of skill involved.
Windows 7 Premium OEM is $95. Purchased in bulk it is much much much less. 3 pack OEM license is about $60 per PC. Large OEM (dell, HP, etc) get it for about half that.
Simple your father had you. Without you your father would have:
a) kept using same box - (marketshare for windows)
b) took it to a computer store or god forbid geeks squad to do reinstall - (marketshare for windows)
c) found and used "system restore" discs - (marketshare for windows)
d) threw it out and bought a new windows which will come w/ windows 7 - (marketshare for windows)
windows is relatively cheap. It is good ENOUGH and cheap ENOUGH. It does the job and most people don't really care about alternatives.
For a business it isn't free to use another OS. It requires training, ensuring applications are supported, dealing w/ incompatibilities (partners & suppliers sending files in excel or god forbid access). When you look at the TCO for a desktop seat (hardware, software, training, repairs, electricity, lost productivity in downtime, etc) in a large company the $30 it costs for a windows license is a rounding error.
It is hardly indicative of the internet at large.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=117&qpnp=25
Mac is 5%. Linux is ~1%. Other is ~3%. Windows is 91%.
It is even more sad if you break it down as:
Windows XP ~60%
Windows Vista & 7 ~30%
Everything else ~10%
Even if the license is $0.00 there is cost. It takes time & resources & knowledge to deploy. None of which are free.
For many people the $30 windows license (HP doesn't pay full retail) is CHEAPER than the cost to learn, patch, and use Linux.
TCO is what matters and TCO of linux on servers relatively low compared to TCO of windows. There is nothing to suggest the TCO for Linux desktop shares that benefit. Even if it does the TCO for a business (which can standardize platform) and TCO of home user is going to differ.
Windows works simply because it is good ENOUGH and cheap ENOUGH. Until Linux is vastly superior in either benefit or total cost that isn't going to change.
China didn't make a concious effort to corner the rare earth market.
Rare earths really should be called cheap ass low value earths. There isn't a lot of profit in it. The US, australia, and few other places mined them because they are needed but they are hardly masively profitable. China got into the biz because it is a cheap biz to get into and doesn't require a lot of skill (like say building jet planes or microprocessors).
As a result of china dirt cheap labor, utter lack of safety or enviromental standards and willingness to manipulate its currency it was able to export rare earths (which once again aren't particularly rare or valuable) for fraction of its competitors. There was no real reason to protect this market because it isn't that valuable so developed nations simply shutdown mines rather than export at a loss.
Your belief that is some "master plan" is misplaced. If we were willing to use slave labor, discard miners when the job killed them without benefits, contimnate ground water with industrial toxins which will be around for couple centuries causing birth defects, and manipulate the dollar downward to destroy any standard of living for our citizens we too could be king of the shit pile. All that for a market which grosses less revenue globally than video games do.