I've still got a 386SLC laptop around somewhere which is destined to be an NTP wallclock.
But meh. Until the "IoT" stops having compatibility issues, it's no good. It needs to be at least as reliable as MIDI and DMX between brands, instead of the cacophony of not-standards that manufacturers present today.
Do I want a house full of connected lightbulbs? Yes -- yes, I do! Not so much so that they can light up only the rooms that I am in (dumb LEDs are already crazy-efficient-enough that turning off lights barely matters), but so I can make them red to keep my eyes from adjusting when working on the car outside at night, and modify the color temperature during the day.
Do I want them to all be forcibly of the same brand? Absolutely not.
I'm imagining a typical VPN host (eg airvpn). I'm assuming that an attacker is able to monitor both my encrypted and unencrypted traffic, or at least the metadata therein (which isn't particularly unlikely), at the point where the OpenVPN server connects to the Internet. There's a lot going on with one of these systems.
Suppose I'm sending a bunch of stuff to Wikileaks over this connection using HTTP[S], and it's a pretty steady stream of ~1500 byte TCP packets coming in and going out. Easy enough to correlate who is doing this, even though it's a very busy system.
Now suppose instead that some packets are 234 bytes, some are 1293 bytes, and some are 1023 bytes [...], selected randomly, as encrypted on the VPN. Let us further assume that we're willing to allow some overhead for additional padding, so we'll randomly add between 0 and 500 bytes of random to each of these packets, with random weighting over random time intervals to favor more or less padding.
Now, neither the packet sizes coming in over VPN nor the total transfer-over-time directly correlate any longer with the stuff going unencrypted out of the VPN box.
Efficiency took a dive, to be sure, but it's survivable.
It can still presumptively be figured out, but your "leaky bucket" approach does take care of that neatly enough (even though I don't think that's the correct use of that term), and can be accomplished by also using the encrypted tunnel for other forms of communication at the same time (everyone seeds Linux ISOs, right?) for those who are particularly paranoid -- or who simply do multiple things at one time with a tunnel, perhaps by serving multiple users.
Or, you know, random isolated noise packets sent to the VPN server to be discarded, but that seems dumb (unless it isn't: A lot can be hidden in an unending and constant stream of noise, and this would also mitigate timing-based attacks.)
As I see it, we've made the two streams very difficult or impossible to correlate by comparison of packet sizes at this point. Efficiency is nowhere what it used to be, but anonymity has improved markedly....*especially* if everyone else is doing it, too.
And, AFAICT, we haven't even broken TCP for the unencrypted half of the conversation (yet).
(I used a VPN in this example, but this could be re-written with TOR and an exit node, or just TOR in and of itself in mind just as well.)
There is something to be said for directional cables, though they're not common: In some situations, using a shielded twisted pair between RCA jacks with the shield grounded at only one end can improve noise immunity.
Never had noise on an audio system? Well, good. If you had, you'd be looking for solutions.
That said, I've got a $8k CD player plugged into a $4k receiver in my living room. Does this mean that I listen to the equipment instead of the music? Naaah, it just means that I got some good deals on some expensive gear and that I couldn't be bothered with selling it (even though, financially, it would make perfect sense to do so).
Maybe for TOR, and certainly for VPN (as-implemented), is a specific vulnerability for packet sizes.
If 208.230.30.20 sends packets of 9098, 3039, and 3030 bytes, and I receive similar packets of the same size (plus or minus VPN headers), then I am already identifiable.
I blame a lot of my particular anomoly on writing all of these discs with a Plextor PR-820, which is still a thing that is somewhat revered in pro audio circles.
It was not at all inexpensive at the time.
At the time, there were lots of other drives that were just junk, with lots of folks experiencing incompatibility between burners, media, and various playback devices.
I never experienced any of that with the Plextor: Stuff just worked. Always. I tried hard to find combinations that didn't work, and failed.
I didn't have another optical drive to test with until the DVD-R became a thing, which is a whole different set of tradeoffs. Maybe the results would have been different. Impossible to repeat now.
I might opine that my burns were simply of better quality from the beginning. But I never tried to conduct such an experiment.
First, things in cars do suffer from effects of UV, although the glass does slow this down. My current 21-year-old daily driver has plenty of plastics that are somewhat bleached from the sun, including the once-black carpet on the rear deck. (This, incidentally, is the same manufacturing year as the car that I tested with.)
Second, CD-R media back then was designed to be reactive principally with infrared light (because CDs themselves use IR), of which there was plenty. (I suspect that the dye formulations have shifted with the transition to the shorter red wavelength used by modern optical drives.)
Third, it is plain that IR was plentiful in this environment.
Fourth, it is plain that by your standard, almost zero optical media ever sees significant exposure to direct sunlight.
I don't have a dog in this race. It was simply a curiosity at the time: I'd heard that CD-R media hae a limited lifespan, so I subjected it to the most extreme environment I had at my disposal.
Media included Kodak archival with a gold reflective surface and an extra protective layer over the laquer, TDK Certified+ with a silver reflective surface, and a couple of varieties of store-branded media with the common aluminum surface.
Environment went from crazy-dry and bitter cold, to ridiculous hot and humid, with occasional condensation due to weather changes, and random chemicals and surfactants (from cleaning the window).
I also had a control group of the same data on the same media, stored properly indoors in jewel cases. These, unsurprisingly, also worked fine.
But yeah, I'm sure that it was luck. Or maybe that I made it all up, as if anyone gives a shit about a 650MB optical disk these days.
Upon further thought, maybe they did have a plan for charging people money -- if they weren't getting monetary kickbacks from the phone company for a particular user.
Or maybe the plans really were 30 days. It's been a long, long time. It was a strange place and I sometimes saw discussions over what they were doing was legal or not.
I was an IO customer for probably 3 or 4 years, ending somewhere around 2000.
No. I think September is done: The only singular group of unwitting, unwashed masses who have yet to ruin it for everyone are the North Koreans. And nobody's going to turn them all loose at once, so that won't spawn a new September.
We just haven't managed to re-group since it ended.
One of my grandfathers worked for The Power Company (back when that meant something), and his job involved rural electrification. He was a high-tech guy for his time and even owned a (probably ludicrously-expensive) wire recorder when my dad was young. I (and my kinfolk) still have archives of the only known, existing recording produced by that machine, which were first professionally transferred to cassette by a (now) friend of mine when I was young, and then moved to CD by me a decade and a half ago.
My other grandfather was a businessman who bought the first (also ludicrously-expensive) TRS-80 sold in town, because he could see -- early on -- that having computers around was going to make him more money than without. He owned an *early*, drum-scanner fax machine. He went on to sell computers as part of his various business dealings, and had a licensed VHF radio repeater and car-mounted 2-way radios, to keep track of his employees decades before "cell phones" were a thing at all.
Both people went their own ways with tech, but neither of them struggled particularly to keep up. Had Grandfather #1 seen any merit to himself in computers, he would have learned them, learned them well, and been able to explain them as simply as he explained everything else that he knew.
If I had a digital or electronic communications question, it want to Gandpa #2. If I had an electrical question, whether on the basis of a transformer's operation or an explanation of how an inductive motor works, or how to maintain a machine (he grew up on a farm) it went to Grandpa #1.
Neither of them grokked the Internet much, but by then (middle-1990s) they were just happy to see their grandkids and great grandkids and didn't need to learn more tech because it wasn't going to further their happiness.
My own dad, on the other hand? He's one of the most intelligent people I've ever met, but refuses to learn anything digital. I'd call him a luddite, but getting a wire pulled from a basement breaker box to a room on the second floor, or a black iron gas line run for a kitchen, with absolutely minimal destruction? He can do this in his sleep. And instead of learning new tech, he's used his brain to study history and multiple foreign languages. (He used to teach American-born Chinese kids how to read and write their parents' language, and now he's teaching Spanish-speaking immigrants how to coexist in an English-speaking America.)
If there's any point to this rant, it is that people learn different things that are useful to them.
Mom, meanwhile: I had to rescue her from her brazen attempt to replace one of the fans in an aging Asus laptop just yesterday, but that's mostly Asus's fault for making the flex leads so short that it's impossible to fold anything out flat for easy assembly: If it weren't for needing to suspend a board with one hand, while fucking with ZIF connectors with the other, with the workspace (and light) getting less and less each time a new wire was connected, she'd have had it nailed.
Kids, these days, where things "just work" (and then you sign up for another 2-year contract for today's hotness when it fails to "just work")? No, just no.
I remember it being cyberspace.org, not.com. I also recall that it wasn't a trial at all, but that it survived on kick-backs from the local telco for connection fees from long-distance callers. The phone bills - those are things my parents will never forget. Likewise on the MS-DOS based SLIP connections: It sure seemed like it ought to be better, but packetization delays with TCP/IP over a 14.4k modem made it fairly hellish compared to just using a Telemate for a terminal emulator.
Around the same time I was also using a borrowed, freebie alumni account on the local University's VAX, with almost no storage quota. It was nice, but their modems were only 9600bps, backed by a 56k leased line to Sprint.
Later on, I discovered io.com and their 10 megabyte disk quota (with lots more, temporarily, for free if you asked nice) seemed dreamy in comparison. This lead to IRC and a decent Usenet feed, which lead to a lost childhood. 9600 became kind of slow for this use, but Delphi provided just enough Unix-y stuff to get to an io.com shell reliably at somewhat higher speeds. (I still hate web-based forums and long for the simplicity of tin, even though tin itself was considered ridiculously featureful at the time.)
Security was lax, but people (everywhere) made the Internet a much friendlier and trusting place than it is in today's secure-by-default, impossible-to-share-anything mentality (which isn't really any better). It wasn't long after I discovered that/home/* wasn't locked down at all, that I also discovered how to keep some of my own files to myself.
I also liked io.com's announcements, where jrcloose and company would rant, often in some depth, about whatever nefarious technical struggle they were solving today, and Steve Jackson himself would sometimes write about...whatever the fuck Steve wanted to write about. I learned a lot from those pages (though I can't call them blogs, because blogs weren't a thing yet).
Muscle memory still requires me to type "ping io.com" when checking a system for DNS and IP connectivity.
Ah, the freewheeling days of yore, where building a mail server just meant setting up Sendmail, some manner of POP3 and IMAP access, sorting out the MX record, and just leaving port 25 open for all and sundry to use -- because there was just no need to do anything more restrictive at the time.
Oh. Right: Back on topic, I was a kid then. Getting this shit working in useful (and/or interesting) ways required problem-solving skills, which are processes that are now indelibly burned into my brain's wiring.
These days, I can troubleshoot just about anything.
So, to synopsize: Yep, things are the same -- mechanically. Therefore, they'll probably wear out at the same rate, whether "Enterprise" or "Consumer."
I'll accept that enterprise drives are faster. I'll also accept that they're more demanding on their requisite (internal and external) power supplies, to keep the heat actuator moving as fast as is possible.
And I'd like to suggest that the main difference there is indeed firmware: Seagate, at one point (around a decade ago, it seems), stopped allowing end-users to modify the acoustics of their drives. This used to be a common thing amongst the tweaker crowd: The silent PC folks would dial down the acceleration of the head stack, and the performance folks would go for full-loud.
These used to be user-adjustable parameters inside Seagate hard drives.
Obviously, with feedback, the more-silent settings draw less power and offer less performance. And the louder settings used more power, and offered greater performance. (Negative feedback is obviously at play here on all sides, as it is in any assembly involving an amplifier, a voice coil actuator, and a head which must be quickly and precisely positioned.)
I also remember when there was a time when that "Enterprise" drives and "Consumer" drives were manufactured very differently. I think I still have some 4.5GB and 9GB IBM 9ES 7200RPM SCSI drives in a drawer, which I once paid dearly for, and toward which I'd bet a vacation on them still working fine.
They're almost 20 years old, but things aren't expensive like those were at the time and perhaps it shows.
I'm lead to wonder, then: Was the time that Seagate got rid of (or started ignoring) the acoustic adjustment parameters coincident with the same time when their drives became mechanically-identical?
And therefore, can this not all be extrapolated to mean that there was a time when high-dollar spinning rust was actually generally more reliable than lower-dollar spinning rust? And can we assume that this time -- if it existed -- is past?
What I've learned from reading the comments here is that people are just as clueless when it comes to storage reliability as they ever were, and are just as capable of throwing the baby out with the bathwater as at any other time.
Is there a real mechanical difference between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives, these days, at the bleeding edge of the storage-per-unit curve?
Mostly I see differences in firmware, which (IMHO) ought to be end-user selectable anyway.
(Before anyone replies, I chose those words carefully to avoid outliers like Raptor little-drive-in-a-big-heatsink configurations, or any other stuff that puts any metric other than capacity-per-dollar as a primary criteria.)
The law in question has nothing to do with whether the dish is visible or not.
It just has to be on property that you're renting, that would reasonably considered to be for your own use. A private patio or deck is a good example. It can't go on common property -- eg, on the porch of a shared entryway.
This can be problematic on shared apartment buildings, as not every apartment has a suitably private spot. It's a no-brainer for things like rental houses and just about any duplex, however.
And it's not just satellite dishes. It goes for any sort of antenna intended to receive broadcast signals, including OTA aerials.
But on a car like a Prius, cruise control consists of several switches, a few resistors, and one wire.
The rest of the hardware is already an integral part of the car, and the software is almost certainly already set up as well (it certainly is for mid-size GM trucks).
It's not about excess, or need. But rather: it might actually be more economical to include it on all Priuses, than to charge extra to install them on some of them...
But, you know: With any less-than-5-year-old machine that wasn't junk to begin with, a few gigabytes of cheap RAM, and any sort of proper SSD, every OS seems to boot like a rocketship (driver loading timeouts and specific waitstats notwithstanding).
I mean, the laptop I spoke of before is a stout Dell Precision kit I got for about $200, used, about a year ago. It boots PC-BSD with ZFS in a bunch of seconds that I can't be bothered with trying to clock with a recent mSATA SSD.
For all of the arguments for/against systemd, boot speed is about the most specious I can think of: At home and on the road, I almost never boot a computer, but I do suspend them to disk all the time. My work laptop can go months between reboots, even with mostly-daily use.
And so can my desktop.
Boot speed? FehL That's more about compressing/decompressing an image of RAM with good time-efficiency, than any other particular metric.
Repairing computers stopped being economical when the cost to repair, including labor, came close to or exceeded the price of a new box from Wal-Mart. Simple fucking economics.
I do admire your ability to present nonsense as fact, though: "Even spinning hard drives only have a 1% failure rate over their life spans" carries about as much truthiness as "HOLDS UP TO 50 POUNDS, OR MORE!"
Slashdot Mirror
I've still got a 386SLC laptop around somewhere which is destined to be an NTP wallclock.
But meh. Until the "IoT" stops having compatibility issues, it's no good. It needs to be at least as reliable as MIDI and DMX between brands, instead of the cacophony of not-standards that manufacturers present today.
Do I want a house full of connected lightbulbs? Yes -- yes, I do! Not so much so that they can light up only the rooms that I am in (dumb LEDs are already crazy-efficient-enough that turning off lights barely matters), but so I can make them red to keep my eyes from adjusting when working on the car outside at night, and modify the color temperature during the day.
Do I want them to all be forcibly of the same brand? Absolutely not.
I'm imagining a typical VPN host (eg airvpn). I'm assuming that an attacker is able to monitor both my encrypted and unencrypted traffic, or at least the metadata therein (which isn't particularly unlikely), at the point where the OpenVPN server connects to the Internet. There's a lot going on with one of these systems.
Suppose I'm sending a bunch of stuff to Wikileaks over this connection using HTTP[S], and it's a pretty steady stream of ~1500 byte TCP packets coming in and going out. Easy enough to correlate who is doing this, even though it's a very busy system.
Now suppose instead that some packets are 234 bytes, some are 1293 bytes, and some are 1023 bytes [...], selected randomly, as encrypted on the VPN. Let us further assume that we're willing to allow some overhead for additional padding, so we'll randomly add between 0 and 500 bytes of random to each of these packets, with random weighting over random time intervals to favor more or less padding.
Now, neither the packet sizes coming in over VPN nor the total transfer-over-time directly correlate any longer with the stuff going unencrypted out of the VPN box.
Efficiency took a dive, to be sure, but it's survivable.
It can still presumptively be figured out, but your "leaky bucket" approach does take care of that neatly enough (even though I don't think that's the correct use of that term), and can be accomplished by also using the encrypted tunnel for other forms of communication at the same time (everyone seeds Linux ISOs, right?) for those who are particularly paranoid -- or who simply do multiple things at one time with a tunnel, perhaps by serving multiple users.
Or, you know, random isolated noise packets sent to the VPN server to be discarded, but that seems dumb (unless it isn't: A lot can be hidden in an unending and constant stream of noise, and this would also mitigate timing-based attacks.)
As I see it, we've made the two streams very difficult or impossible to correlate by comparison of packet sizes at this point. Efficiency is nowhere what it used to be, but anonymity has improved markedly....*especially* if everyone else is doing it, too.
And, AFAICT, we haven't even broken TCP for the unencrypted half of the conversation (yet).
(I used a VPN in this example, but this could be re-written with TOR and an exit node, or just TOR in and of itself in mind just as well.)
Ah, boy. It never ends, here.
There is something to be said for directional cables, though they're not common: In some situations, using a shielded twisted pair between RCA jacks with the shield grounded at only one end can improve noise immunity.
Never had noise on an audio system? Well, good. If you had, you'd be looking for solutions.
That said, I've got a $8k CD player plugged into a $4k receiver in my living room. Does this mean that I listen to the equipment instead of the music? Naaah, it just means that I got some good deals on some expensive gear and that I couldn't be bothered with selling it (even though, financially, it would make perfect sense to do so).
They could, but they don't.
Maybe for TOR, and certainly for VPN (as-implemented), is a specific vulnerability for packet sizes.
If 208.230.30.20 sends packets of 9098, 3039, and 3030 bytes, and I receive similar packets of the same size (plus or minus VPN headers), then I am already identifiable.
Is this different for Tor?
I blame a lot of my particular anomoly on writing all of these discs with a Plextor PR-820, which is still a thing that is somewhat revered in pro audio circles.
It was not at all inexpensive at the time.
At the time, there were lots of other drives that were just junk, with lots of folks experiencing incompatibility between burners, media, and various playback devices.
I never experienced any of that with the Plextor: Stuff just worked. Always. I tried hard to find combinations that didn't work, and failed.
I didn't have another optical drive to test with until the DVD-R became a thing, which is a whole different set of tradeoffs. Maybe the results would have been different. Impossible to repeat now.
I might opine that my burns were simply of better quality from the beginning. But I never tried to conduct such an experiment.
First, things in cars do suffer from effects of UV, although the glass does slow this down. My current 21-year-old daily driver has plenty of plastics that are somewhat bleached from the sun, including the once-black carpet on the rear deck. (This, incidentally, is the same manufacturing year as the car that I tested with.)
Second, CD-R media back then was designed to be reactive principally with infrared light (because CDs themselves use IR), of which there was plenty. (I suspect that the dye formulations have shifted with the transition to the shorter red wavelength used by modern optical drives.)
Third, it is plain that IR was plentiful in this environment.
Fourth, it is plain that by your standard, almost zero optical media ever sees significant exposure to direct sunlight.
I don't have a dog in this race. It was simply a curiosity at the time: I'd heard that CD-R media hae a limited lifespan, so I subjected it to the most extreme environment I had at my disposal.
Media included Kodak archival with a gold reflective surface and an extra protective layer over the laquer, TDK Certified+ with a silver reflective surface, and a couple of varieties of store-branded media with the common aluminum surface.
Environment went from crazy-dry and bitter cold, to ridiculous hot and humid, with occasional condensation due to weather changes, and random chemicals and surfactants (from cleaning the window).
I also had a control group of the same data on the same media, stored properly indoors in jewel cases. These, unsurprisingly, also worked fine.
But yeah, I'm sure that it was luck. Or maybe that I made it all up, as if anyone gives a shit about a 650MB optical disk these days.
As an informal study a million years ago, I tested a variety of CD-R media.
I put a bunch of them on the rear deck of my car, and left yhem there for a couple of Ohio years.
They worked fine.
Upon further thought, maybe they did have a plan for charging people money -- if they weren't getting monetary kickbacks from the phone company for a particular user.
Or maybe the plans really were 30 days. It's been a long, long time. It was a strange place and I sometimes saw discussions over what they were doing was legal or not.
I was an IO customer for probably 3 or 4 years, ending somewhere around 2000.
No. I think September is done: The only singular group of unwitting, unwashed masses who have yet to ruin it for everyone are the North Koreans. And nobody's going to turn them all loose at once, so that won't spawn a new September.
We just haven't managed to re-group since it ended.
I think technology skips generations, sometimes.
One of my grandfathers worked for The Power Company (back when that meant something), and his job involved rural electrification. He was a high-tech guy for his time and even owned a (probably ludicrously-expensive) wire recorder when my dad was young. I (and my kinfolk) still have archives of the only known, existing recording produced by that machine, which were first professionally transferred to cassette by a (now) friend of mine when I was young, and then moved to CD by me a decade and a half ago.
My other grandfather was a businessman who bought the first (also ludicrously-expensive) TRS-80 sold in town, because he could see -- early on -- that having computers around was going to make him more money than without. He owned an *early*, drum-scanner fax machine. He went on to sell computers as part of his various business dealings, and had a licensed VHF radio repeater and car-mounted 2-way radios, to keep track of his employees decades before "cell phones" were a thing at all.
Both people went their own ways with tech, but neither of them struggled particularly to keep up. Had Grandfather #1 seen any merit to himself in computers, he would have learned them, learned them well, and been able to explain them as simply as he explained everything else that he knew.
If I had a digital or electronic communications question, it want to Gandpa #2. If I had an electrical question, whether on the basis of a transformer's operation or an explanation of how an inductive motor works, or how to maintain a machine (he grew up on a farm) it went to Grandpa #1.
Neither of them grokked the Internet much, but by then (middle-1990s) they were just happy to see their grandkids and great grandkids and didn't need to learn more tech because it wasn't going to further their happiness.
My own dad, on the other hand? He's one of the most intelligent people I've ever met, but refuses to learn anything digital. I'd call him a luddite, but getting a wire pulled from a basement breaker box to a room on the second floor, or a black iron gas line run for a kitchen, with absolutely minimal destruction? He can do this in his sleep. And instead of learning new tech, he's used his brain to study history and multiple foreign languages. (He used to teach American-born Chinese kids how to read and write their parents' language, and now he's teaching Spanish-speaking immigrants how to coexist in an English-speaking America.)
If there's any point to this rant, it is that people learn different things that are useful to them.
Mom, meanwhile: I had to rescue her from her brazen attempt to replace one of the fans in an aging Asus laptop just yesterday, but that's mostly Asus's fault for making the flex leads so short that it's impossible to fold anything out flat for easy assembly: If it weren't for needing to suspend a board with one hand, while fucking with ZIF connectors with the other, with the workspace (and light) getting less and less each time a new wire was connected, she'd have had it nailed.
Kids, these days, where things "just work" (and then you sign up for another 2-year contract for today's hotness when it fails to "just work")? No, just no.
Are you me?
I remember it being cyberspace.org, not .com. I also recall that it wasn't a trial at all, but that it survived on kick-backs from the local telco for connection fees from long-distance callers. The phone bills - those are things my parents will never forget. Likewise on the MS-DOS based SLIP connections: It sure seemed like it ought to be better, but packetization delays with TCP/IP over a 14.4k modem made it fairly hellish compared to just using a Telemate for a terminal emulator.
Around the same time I was also using a borrowed, freebie alumni account on the local University's VAX, with almost no storage quota. It was nice, but their modems were only 9600bps, backed by a 56k leased line to Sprint.
Later on, I discovered io.com and their 10 megabyte disk quota (with lots more, temporarily, for free if you asked nice) seemed dreamy in comparison. This lead to IRC and a decent Usenet feed, which lead to a lost childhood. 9600 became kind of slow for this use, but Delphi provided just enough Unix-y stuff to get to an io.com shell reliably at somewhat higher speeds. (I still hate web-based forums and long for the simplicity of tin, even though tin itself was considered ridiculously featureful at the time.)
Security was lax, but people (everywhere) made the Internet a much friendlier and trusting place than it is in today's secure-by-default, impossible-to-share-anything mentality (which isn't really any better). It wasn't long after I discovered that /home/* wasn't locked down at all, that I also discovered how to keep some of my own files to myself.
I also liked io.com's announcements, where jrcloose and company would rant, often in some depth, about whatever nefarious technical struggle they were solving today, and Steve Jackson himself would sometimes write about...whatever the fuck Steve wanted to write about. I learned a lot from those pages (though I can't call them blogs, because blogs weren't a thing yet).
Muscle memory still requires me to type "ping io.com" when checking a system for DNS and IP connectivity.
Ah, the freewheeling days of yore, where building a mail server just meant setting up Sendmail, some manner of POP3 and IMAP access, sorting out the MX record, and just leaving port 25 open for all and sundry to use -- because there was just no need to do anything more restrictive at the time.
And the Corel NetWinder, where everyone was sure that ARM was the future -- 18 years ago. http://www.netwinder.org/about...
Are we there yet?
Oh. Right: Back on topic, I was a kid then. Getting this shit working in useful (and/or interesting) ways required problem-solving skills, which are processes that are now indelibly burned into my brain's wiring.
These days, I can troubleshoot just about anything.
I find it a bit labor intensive to pay for Usenet.
It's not even September anymore, FFS.
...and? If there's made by LEGO in China, then they're still Lego.
So, to synopsize: Yep, things are the same -- mechanically. Therefore, they'll probably wear out at the same rate, whether "Enterprise" or "Consumer."
I'll accept that enterprise drives are faster. I'll also accept that they're more demanding on their requisite (internal and external) power supplies, to keep the heat actuator moving as fast as is possible.
And I'd like to suggest that the main difference there is indeed firmware: Seagate, at one point (around a decade ago, it seems), stopped allowing end-users to modify the acoustics of their drives. This used to be a common thing amongst the tweaker crowd: The silent PC folks would dial down the acceleration of the head stack, and the performance folks would go for full-loud.
These used to be user-adjustable parameters inside Seagate hard drives.
Obviously, with feedback, the more-silent settings draw less power and offer less performance. And the louder settings used more power, and offered greater performance. (Negative feedback is obviously at play here on all sides, as it is in any assembly involving an amplifier, a voice coil actuator, and a head which must be quickly and precisely positioned.)
I also remember when there was a time when that "Enterprise" drives and "Consumer" drives were manufactured very differently. I think I still have some 4.5GB and 9GB IBM 9ES 7200RPM SCSI drives in a drawer, which I once paid dearly for, and toward which I'd bet a vacation on them still working fine.
They're almost 20 years old, but things aren't expensive like those were at the time and perhaps it shows.
I'm lead to wonder, then: Was the time that Seagate got rid of (or started ignoring) the acoustic adjustment parameters coincident with the same time when their drives became mechanically-identical?
And therefore, can this not all be extrapolated to mean that there was a time when high-dollar spinning rust was actually generally more reliable than lower-dollar spinning rust? And can we assume that this time -- if it existed -- is past?
What I've learned from reading the comments here is that people are just as clueless when it comes to storage reliability as they ever were, and are just as capable of throwing the baby out with the bathwater as at any other time.
Dear Slashdot: Never change.
Don't you mean "damping"?
And isn't the spindle motor still affixed firmly to the chassis, which is affixed to the enclosure?
At the cost of these drives, isn't it just cheaper to rack the arrays on wheels, and shove them out the back door into the recycling trailer?
Is there a real mechanical difference between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives, these days, at the bleeding edge of the storage-per-unit curve?
Mostly I see differences in firmware, which (IMHO) ought to be end-user selectable anyway.
(Before anyone replies, I chose those words carefully to avoid outliers like Raptor little-drive-in-a-big-heatsink configurations, or any other stuff that puts any metric other than capacity-per-dollar as a primary criteria.)
And to add to the confusion, I recently used some nice wall-mount brackets for iPads.
These were not injection molded, per se. And they weren't 3D printed.
These were milled from thick, injection-molded plastic. The tool marks were obvious on the hidden side of the thing.
So now, we've got one more method to produce low volume parts to consider.
Discuss.
Upgrade it and activate it. You'll get a free license that will stick to that hardware.
And then roll it back. If you decide to go to 10 some day, it'll still be free.
The law in question has nothing to do with whether the dish is visible or not.
It just has to be on property that you're renting, that would reasonably considered to be for your own use. A private patio or deck is a good example. It can't go on common property -- eg, on the porch of a shared entryway.
This can be problematic on shared apartment buildings, as not every apartment has a suitably private spot. It's a no-brainer for things like rental houses and just about any duplex, however.
And it's not just satellite dishes. It goes for any sort of antenna intended to receive broadcast signals, including OTA aerials.
But on a car like a Prius, cruise control consists of several switches, a few resistors, and one wire.
The rest of the hardware is already an integral part of the car, and the software is almost certainly already set up as well (it certainly is for mid-size GM trucks).
It's not about excess, or need. But rather: it might actually be more economical to include it on all Priuses, than to charge extra to install them on some of them...
But, you know: With any less-than-5-year-old machine that wasn't junk to begin with, a few gigabytes of cheap RAM, and any sort of proper SSD, every OS seems to boot like a rocketship (driver loading timeouts and specific waitstats notwithstanding).
I mean, the laptop I spoke of before is a stout Dell Precision kit I got for about $200, used, about a year ago. It boots PC-BSD with ZFS in a bunch of seconds that I can't be bothered with trying to clock with a recent mSATA SSD.
For all of the arguments for/against systemd, boot speed is about the most specious I can think of: At home and on the road, I almost never boot a computer, but I do suspend them to disk all the time. My work laptop can go months between reboots, even with mostly-daily use.
And so can my desktop.
Boot speed? FehL That's more about compressing/decompressing an image of RAM with good time-efficiency, than any other particular metric.
Repairing computers stopped being economical when the cost to repair, including labor, came close to or exceeded the price of a new box from Wal-Mart. Simple fucking economics.
I do admire your ability to present nonsense as fact, though: "Even spinning hard drives only have a 1% failure rate over their life spans" carries about as much truthiness as "HOLDS UP TO 50 POUNDS, OR MORE! "