I was actually thinking that if they had more understanding of the hardware, they'd have a better idea what the layers actually are, and they'd end up with more portable code not less portable code as you seem to imply. Knowing about how hardware works helps to be more hardware agnostic, because if you're using intermediate layers with no idea of the hardware and OS coupling that it creates then you'll do it more often.
Yea, I see what you are saying, but remember they are stamping out CS degrees with little more than Java and Database Skills. The whole point of Java was to let you ignore all that hardware stuff though abstraction layers any way. Most of them don't need to know how to dig though all those layers to do what they need and with Object Oriented concepts, hardware is becoming trivia to them.
But I agree, a bit of understanding of hardware is a good thing, especially when you start talking recursion and how pointers/references are actually working. I've always been amused at the BSCS holders who didn't understand what the call stack was or how they where killing performance with all the objects going in and out of scope, or why the math was being in done using integers when they wanted floating point (or vice versa). I just don't know if they have the scope in an undergraduate CS curriculum to throw that stuff in. Many won't need it, use it or remember it anyway.
What part of "require multiple resellers" did you not get? He who owns the physical distribution infrastructure must offer wholesale services to retail providers and may not do retail.
Well Comcast was offering cable Internet which maxes out at 200Mbs and is typically 20-100 Mbs but it costs more for higher speeds. Fiber on the other hand can get up to 1Gbs. The main advantage of cable in most markets only exists if is already in place. If some area is building new lines, then fiber is cheaper to maintain over time and has clear advantages.
Cable internet is anything they wish it to be. Current speed limits are well above 200Mbs with the right hardware, which requires gigabit connections to carry anyway. Most folks won't use 200Mbps fully anyway as most of us are wireless (limited to WiFi speeds) or Fast Ethernet (100Base-T) if wired.
Really, when you get above 100Mbps, it's kind of a "who cares" situation anyway... Most of us don't have routers and network infrastructure speeds to make use of it anyway. It may lower your latency a bit, which matters to gamers I'm told, but unless you have gigabit switching and wired connections good luck getting all of that 200Mbps you pay for.
Fiber is able to offer higher speeds, but they too require the right hardware to be on premises to handle these speeds and most residential customers simply don't use the bandwidth they buy anyway for the same reasons outlined above.
The place where Cable really suffers is that the bandwidth you have is "shared" with your neighborhood. So that 200Mbps hardware limit really sucks when all 20 of your neighbors are streaming Netflix in HD at the same time. Fiber has similar limits, but they are not in that last mile infrastructure, in that case you share the same trunk connection with 10k of your nearest friends, but we generally don't complain about that kind of thing.
Do you really live somewhere where your city water supply keeps having outages every few days, but your Internet is rock solid?
Nope, but setting up utility service or dealing with the city is wholly inefficient and difficult. I literally had to take a day off work to get my account setup and the billing straightened out. But that's where I live now. I lived in another city where the Electricity was part of their utility services. It was a HUGE boondoggle for them, difficult to get the account set up and working right, rife with billing errors, hard to pay the bills AND cost the city scads of money to maintain because they really didn't know what they where doing very well and past administrations had neglected the power systems maintenance to keep the budget under control. It took a decade, but eventually reliability started to suffer, prices where high and everybody in town hated it. What did they do? They "sold" the system to the local electric distribution company, or more to the truth PAID them to take it. Things have been much better since.
My point is that managing a water supply and sewage treatment facilities isn't at all like managing an ISP. The skills needed are totally different as are the normal office hours required for customer support. Also, the customer interface is wholly different. Your water supply interface is pretty standard, it exits the water meter and it's your responsibility. Same with sewer, the customer premises interface isn't all that complex, just pour what you don't want into this here pipe and it flows away. Internet connections are a whole bunch more difficult and hard to manage.
In a fiber network you need an ONT at each end point (i.e. at each residence). ONT's are expensive and complex devices compared to a water meter and they fail a LOT more often. I've had three ONT's and only 1 water meter in 15 years. ONT's are a whole lot more difficult to provision and manage than a water meter too.
There is more to maintaining a network than keeping the cables together... A LOT more.
When the natural gas line is spewing flames, it's pretty obvious what needs to be done and in what order. It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or network engineer) to figure this out. When your network is down because your main router took a dump at 5:01 PM on Friday, who's going to get the call? Say it's some hardware failure, you going to wait until City Hall opens on Monday to get somebody in to look at it?
My point is that small governments don't have the expertise or staff to do this kind of thing and their working hours are even worse for customer service than the post office. Sure, small cities can hire folks to do this work, but at what cost? Sure, they CAN pass that cost on to their customers, but we've got to be honest and realize that this will drive their operating costs way up and make in necessary to charge a lot for spotty service.
Both Comcast and the City end up costing a lot and give you spotty service... So I'm left conflicted...
Municipal water and sewage systems are in fact quite complicated. Systems don't have to be comprised of racks of components with blinking lights to be complex.
LOL.. Keeping water pressure up by keeping the tower full in a small town is complex? Keeping the sewage flowing down hill is difficult to manage? The complexity of these systems is in the engineering needed to set them up and build them. Management of the day to day, isn't all that complex.
I don't mean to slight you waste water treatment plant operators or the civil engineers who design all this, but it's not the same kind of infrastructure.
Building an fiber based ISP infrastructure for a town and managing it is not the same kind of thing as reading the water meter and dealing with customer service issues not nearly as straight forward as getting the sewage flowing again. Yea, you can hire the folks you need, but a city where 1.4 million will build a system for their residents isn't that big and having a full time ISP support staff, even during normal office hours, is a huge ongoing expense for their budget. Qualified folks don't come cheap and ones that actually can manage such a system are unlikely to be interested or wiling to take customer support calls on a 24/7 support basis or even for 40 hours a week.
I'm saying that they are too SMALL and cannot afford even a skeleton staff and if they pass this cost on to their customers and make this ISP thing break even the cost will be really high for bad service.
Which sounds all the world like Comcast's problems.. Bad service, high costs...
I'm surprised that two out of the five actually did delete the data.
I wonder how much of this is "Quick Format" and "Hey we found old data here!" kind of things?
But I think we buried the lead here. What really concerns me is that the documentation about the searches and why they where conducted is woefully lacking (see page 6 of the PDF). Seems that this process is ripe for abuse and that the controls in place for keeping this on the up and up are being ignored.
Think of it this way.. IF nobody is documenting why and when this is being done, there is no real proof and no real way to get it to stop if it really is out of hand.
So you are fine with having to run to City Hall to set up service between 9AM and 5PM and having zero chance of technical support on the weekends?
If the city is so small that they can build out a system for 1.4 Million, they are too small for 24/7 technical support and the staff to support this new infrastructure. Cities are pretty lame IT infrastructure managers, even the large ones.
I'm saying the level and quality of service may be about the same as COMCAST and there may not really be any cost advantage either...
No, I actually think we CAN foster competition here if we are careful.
How? By providing a regulatory environment that fosters more than one commercial provider. You want to provide service? Fine, as long as there is only one physical provider, you cannot directly market to residents, but must wholesale your network access to retail providers. While offering non-incumbent providers incentives to build separate infrastructure and requiring them to share too.
You need better local government. While my local muni can't seem to keep their website up for crap, they are exceedingly efficient at providing water/sewage/trash pickup, and at a cheaper price than the private county competitors. If you don't like the way your munis are running, go to a city council meeting and get the ball rolling on fixing them. You are your muni's shareholder, use your power.
Water, waste and sewage are not efficiently run in my city, or any city I've lived in. However, the infrastructure is pretty hard for anybody but the city to manage, given it's cost and locations. But let's be real here, keeping a water system working isn't rocket science, nor is keeping the sewage flowing in the right direction. Picking up trash isn't that difficult to do either.
Remember, we are talking about internet services. It's totally different kettle of fish than digging up the street to fix the water line because the water is squirting out of the cracks in the pavement. We are talking about maintaining network infrastructure, wiring, fiber, power plus managing accounts and billing for service, customer equipment, shutting off those who don't pay and setting up new service for customers as they move in. Then heaven forbid if something is broken and you need to call customer service for help. I just don't see the guy who reads the water meters being very helpful.
Small cities just don't have the staff or the ability to run 24/7 services like this. You want technical support? Wait until 9 am Monday, oh and you better call before 5 PM because we lock the doors of city hall then and send the phone to voice mail. Don't bother us on the weekends or government holidays either.
Comcast isn't all that much better, but they DO have at least SOME corporate experience with providing this kind of service, even if their execution is far from perfect.
I've had "city" supplied utilities before and I can attest that if you want some infrastructure really messed up, get government to do it. It will cost too much, be mismanaged and end up a total mess... My experience was less than acceptable with city supplied utilities.
Then there is Comcast.....
So what evil do you pick? I don't know... None of the above? How about we foster competition and draw in multiple commercial providers? Or is the town just too small to make this happen?
Comcast may work just fine in some places and not in others, work for some folks and not others. To each their own.
Personally, I'm LUCKY. We actually have two totally different infrastructures to get internet service from where I live. We have the old Cable TV, coax in the street to the house and a totally fiber to the house. I've had both at various times over the last 15 years since they put in the fiber. However, in my experience, the fiber system is way more stable than the coax based one. I suppose it's because the fiber is about 15 years younger, but they both work acceptably for the most part.
I've had outages that lasted weeks on both systems, been driven to distraction trying to discuss it with customer service and technical support AND I've had trouble free service for years too. Fiber is better, generally is less subject to operational hiccups and having to manually restart stuff, but your mileage may vary.
The more you use an SSD, the faster it goes bad.
So it's not an ideal thing to do.
There's power on and read/write cycles. Usually it's write that "uses up" a SSD, not power on time or read cycles.
However, given the number of write cycles is huge per cell, unless you are putting an SSD into a high data rate service situation, using it up is hardly a problem as the rest of the system will go defunct before the SSD runs out of write cycles. Also 12 hours is hardly enough time to appreciably dent an SSD's number of cycles, when their expected life span is a decade or more.
BUT... If you are worried about it, you don't have to write to the drive all that time. I'm really only "power on" burn in guy. I'm not "hit the hardware with a performance bench mark" burn in guy. For the most part, I just want to thermal cycle stuff, so I may do a performance run or two, but only to drive heat and cold cycles. I don't think it's a problem...
Has your burn in ever found something that worked fine at first power on, and was dead after 24hrs?
The idea seems good, but I'm skeptical. I'd think that that anything leaving a factory after their testing, wouldn't benefit from anything more than a smoke test.
I've found some things, but rarely any of the major components actually suffered from infant mortality on my watch. However, I've done this professionally a bit too, where we needed to verify MilSpec operation. In these tests, you verify both the operating and storage temperature ranges to certify a product. We had environmental chambers that could heat, cool and shake systems both running and not. Even under those grueling conditions the failure rates wasn't that high, though it was higher than you'd expect for less extreme temperature and vibration ranges.
I personally consider it good practice to burn in stuff for a number of reasons. Infant mortality is but one. I also know that electrolytic capacitors like to drift up in value as they are powered on and after sitting idle may degrade over long periods. So the burn in is actually conditioning them over the few hours they are powered on, extending their lives a bit. It's not so much a thing anymore, but for large value filter capacitors or those under higher voltages (such as in vacuum tube power supplies) it can show significant differences in operations. These days though, the time from manufacture to my integration is pretty low so derogation of electrolytic capacitors may not be a huge issue anymore.
These days, I don't know if burn in matters all that much, but I do it. It makes me feel better if nothing else.
Well, I do think it's natural for CS majors to be a bit farther away from hardware. Let's face it, much of their work these days doesn't really care what operating system they run on much less the hardware it's actually running on. I don't blame them, really the state of programming has evolved away from hardware dependence, and that's a good thing..
Where I understand hardware details of what's happening behind the programing model seen by the CS guys and gals, and I believe that I have a different perspective when doing software development, I'm not sure they would benefit all that much. Programming Java is pretty hardware agnostic anyway, C/C++ a bit more specific (assuming you have the libs and compiler), but still largely portable unless you are handling actual hardware or kernel level stuff. My hardware knowledge really only serves to make me more aware of performance implications of my choices perhaps, but the CS folks do just fine with most higher level languages.
So I don't agree, CS folks really don't need to know all the same stuff I do to program. It used to be true, it used to be valuable to understand what the hardware had to go though, both to be able to optimize your code for performance and size and get it to do what you wanted. However, with the advent of the higher level languages, most CS folks don't interact with the hardware anyway, but abstract programming models like the JREs which for all the world look identical regardless of the hardware being used.
Which is why "burn in" operation, where you run the item though some thermal cycles is often done. We are trying to find the stuff that's going to initially fail.
I usually do 24 hour burn in of all hardware I build, 12 hours on, then 2 hour cycles on off. Or, (sarc on) just load windows and run all the updates. (sarc off) It's almost the same thing anyway..:)
Wow, that PCB substation trick became very hit/miss a long time ago.
Now days, there is a whole bunch of operational parameters which need to be set properly to get data on/off a drive. I understand that Some of these "configuration" items are now stored in non-volatile memory on that PCB and set during the manufacturing process. Similar serial numbers may help, but it's still very hit or miss.
No offense to CS majors, but this EE major tends to understand "How a computer works" at a lower level than most of you programmer types. While not universally true, in my experience a Computer Science major generally get's outside their comfort zone with hardware once you get past "Plug it in and turn it on." I don't blame them, there is a lot of stuff happening at lower levels than a CS major needs to know to do their job.
That some CS major is concerned about how SSD's fail because he doesn't understand their failure modes is fine. We tend to fear what we don't understand and let's face it, there is a LOT of stuff going on inside a computer that high level users simply don't need to know. Heck, even I don't need to know some of that stuff and I've designed computing systems in the past. Fear not, if it works, it works, if it doesn't you just replace it anyway.
So you're saying there's some distinction between "leaving the solar system" and "leaving the neighborhood of objects which orbit the sun"?
Yes.. Interstellar space is defined as being beyond the Solar Wind's reach; Where the particles ejected by the Sun reach equal pressure with Interstellar space. Gravity influences objects at much greater distances. So you can orbit the Sun in Interstellar space.
Technology has improved so much since then. We should send something new up for the next generation.
Why? Is there anything of use to look at way out there?
It's not like we are going to go any faster. Delta-V (speed) is produced the old fashioned way still. You burn rocket fuel and/or slingshot around a planet to get moving. I'm thinking that there are better uses for our exploration dollars than heading into interstellar space. I'd like to see some more exploration of Saturn's moons myself, more poking around Mars, or even heading inward toward Venus and Mercury might be interesting too.
Slashdot Mirror
I did say I was Lucky.. :)
I was actually thinking that if they had more understanding of the hardware, they'd have a better idea what the layers actually are, and they'd end up with more portable code not less portable code as you seem to imply. Knowing about how hardware works helps to be more hardware agnostic, because if you're using intermediate layers with no idea of the hardware and OS coupling that it creates then you'll do it more often.
Yea, I see what you are saying, but remember they are stamping out CS degrees with little more than Java and Database Skills. The whole point of Java was to let you ignore all that hardware stuff though abstraction layers any way. Most of them don't need to know how to dig though all those layers to do what they need and with Object Oriented concepts, hardware is becoming trivia to them.
But I agree, a bit of understanding of hardware is a good thing, especially when you start talking recursion and how pointers/references are actually working. I've always been amused at the BSCS holders who didn't understand what the call stack was or how they where killing performance with all the objects going in and out of scope, or why the math was being in done using integers when they wanted floating point (or vice versa). I just don't know if they have the scope in an undergraduate CS curriculum to throw that stuff in. Many won't need it, use it or remember it anyway.
What part of "require multiple resellers" did you not get? He who owns the physical distribution infrastructure must offer wholesale services to retail providers and may not do retail.
Well Comcast was offering cable Internet which maxes out at 200Mbs and is typically 20-100 Mbs but it costs more for higher speeds. Fiber on the other hand can get up to 1Gbs. The main advantage of cable in most markets only exists if is already in place. If some area is building new lines, then fiber is cheaper to maintain over time and has clear advantages.
Cable internet is anything they wish it to be. Current speed limits are well above 200Mbs with the right hardware, which requires gigabit connections to carry anyway. Most folks won't use 200Mbps fully anyway as most of us are wireless (limited to WiFi speeds) or Fast Ethernet (100Base-T) if wired.
Really, when you get above 100Mbps, it's kind of a "who cares" situation anyway... Most of us don't have routers and network infrastructure speeds to make use of it anyway. It may lower your latency a bit, which matters to gamers I'm told, but unless you have gigabit switching and wired connections good luck getting all of that 200Mbps you pay for.
Fiber is able to offer higher speeds, but they too require the right hardware to be on premises to handle these speeds and most residential customers simply don't use the bandwidth they buy anyway for the same reasons outlined above.
The place where Cable really suffers is that the bandwidth you have is "shared" with your neighborhood. So that 200Mbps hardware limit really sucks when all 20 of your neighbors are streaming Netflix in HD at the same time. Fiber has similar limits, but they are not in that last mile infrastructure, in that case you share the same trunk connection with 10k of your nearest friends, but we generally don't complain about that kind of thing.
Do you really live somewhere where your city water supply keeps having outages every few days, but your Internet is rock solid?
Nope, but setting up utility service or dealing with the city is wholly inefficient and difficult. I literally had to take a day off work to get my account setup and the billing straightened out. But that's where I live now. I lived in another city where the Electricity was part of their utility services. It was a HUGE boondoggle for them, difficult to get the account set up and working right, rife with billing errors, hard to pay the bills AND cost the city scads of money to maintain because they really didn't know what they where doing very well and past administrations had neglected the power systems maintenance to keep the budget under control. It took a decade, but eventually reliability started to suffer, prices where high and everybody in town hated it. What did they do? They "sold" the system to the local electric distribution company, or more to the truth PAID them to take it. Things have been much better since.
My point is that managing a water supply and sewage treatment facilities isn't at all like managing an ISP. The skills needed are totally different as are the normal office hours required for customer support. Also, the customer interface is wholly different. Your water supply interface is pretty standard, it exits the water meter and it's your responsibility. Same with sewer, the customer premises interface isn't all that complex, just pour what you don't want into this here pipe and it flows away. Internet connections are a whole bunch more difficult and hard to manage.
In a fiber network you need an ONT at each end point (i.e. at each residence). ONT's are expensive and complex devices compared to a water meter and they fail a LOT more often. I've had three ONT's and only 1 water meter in 15 years. ONT's are a whole lot more difficult to provision and manage than a water meter too.
Get what I'm saying yet?
There is more to maintaining a network than keeping the cables together... A LOT more.
When the natural gas line is spewing flames, it's pretty obvious what needs to be done and in what order. It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or network engineer) to figure this out. When your network is down because your main router took a dump at 5:01 PM on Friday, who's going to get the call? Say it's some hardware failure, you going to wait until City Hall opens on Monday to get somebody in to look at it?
My point is that small governments don't have the expertise or staff to do this kind of thing and their working hours are even worse for customer service than the post office. Sure, small cities can hire folks to do this work, but at what cost? Sure, they CAN pass that cost on to their customers, but we've got to be honest and realize that this will drive their operating costs way up and make in necessary to charge a lot for spotty service.
Both Comcast and the City end up costing a lot and give you spotty service... So I'm left conflicted...
Municipal water and sewage systems are in fact quite complicated. Systems don't have to be comprised of racks of components with blinking lights to be complex.
LOL.. Keeping water pressure up by keeping the tower full in a small town is complex? Keeping the sewage flowing down hill is difficult to manage? The complexity of these systems is in the engineering needed to set them up and build them. Management of the day to day, isn't all that complex.
I don't mean to slight you waste water treatment plant operators or the civil engineers who design all this, but it's not the same kind of infrastructure.
Building an fiber based ISP infrastructure for a town and managing it is not the same kind of thing as reading the water meter and dealing with customer service issues not nearly as straight forward as getting the sewage flowing again. Yea, you can hire the folks you need, but a city where 1.4 million will build a system for their residents isn't that big and having a full time ISP support staff, even during normal office hours, is a huge ongoing expense for their budget. Qualified folks don't come cheap and ones that actually can manage such a system are unlikely to be interested or wiling to take customer support calls on a 24/7 support basis or even for 40 hours a week.
I'm saying that they are too SMALL and cannot afford even a skeleton staff and if they pass this cost on to their customers and make this ISP thing break even the cost will be really high for bad service.
Which sounds all the world like Comcast's problems.. Bad service, high costs...
I'm surprised that two out of the five actually did delete the data.
I wonder how much of this is "Quick Format" and "Hey we found old data here!" kind of things?
But I think we buried the lead here. What really concerns me is that the documentation about the searches and why they where conducted is woefully lacking (see page 6 of the PDF). Seems that this process is ripe for abuse and that the controls in place for keeping this on the up and up are being ignored.
Think of it this way.. IF nobody is documenting why and when this is being done, there is no real proof and no real way to get it to stop if it really is out of hand.
So you are fine with having to run to City Hall to set up service between 9AM and 5PM and having zero chance of technical support on the weekends?
If the city is so small that they can build out a system for 1.4 Million, they are too small for 24/7 technical support and the staff to support this new infrastructure. Cities are pretty lame IT infrastructure managers, even the large ones.
I'm saying the level and quality of service may be about the same as COMCAST and there may not really be any cost advantage either...
No, I actually think we CAN foster competition here if we are careful.
How? By providing a regulatory environment that fosters more than one commercial provider. You want to provide service? Fine, as long as there is only one physical provider, you cannot directly market to residents, but must wholesale your network access to retail providers. While offering non-incumbent providers incentives to build separate infrastructure and requiring them to share too.
You need better local government. While my local muni can't seem to keep their website up for crap, they are exceedingly efficient at providing water/sewage/trash pickup, and at a cheaper price than the private county competitors. If you don't like the way your munis are running, go to a city council meeting and get the ball rolling on fixing them. You are your muni's shareholder, use your power.
Water, waste and sewage are not efficiently run in my city, or any city I've lived in. However, the infrastructure is pretty hard for anybody but the city to manage, given it's cost and locations. But let's be real here, keeping a water system working isn't rocket science, nor is keeping the sewage flowing in the right direction. Picking up trash isn't that difficult to do either.
Remember, we are talking about internet services. It's totally different kettle of fish than digging up the street to fix the water line because the water is squirting out of the cracks in the pavement. We are talking about maintaining network infrastructure, wiring, fiber, power plus managing accounts and billing for service, customer equipment, shutting off those who don't pay and setting up new service for customers as they move in. Then heaven forbid if something is broken and you need to call customer service for help. I just don't see the guy who reads the water meters being very helpful.
Small cities just don't have the staff or the ability to run 24/7 services like this. You want technical support? Wait until 9 am Monday, oh and you better call before 5 PM because we lock the doors of city hall then and send the phone to voice mail. Don't bother us on the weekends or government holidays either.
Comcast isn't all that much better, but they DO have at least SOME corporate experience with providing this kind of service, even if their execution is far from perfect.
I'm still conflicted.. Sorry.
I'm seriously conflicted here.
I've had "city" supplied utilities before and I can attest that if you want some infrastructure really messed up, get government to do it. It will cost too much, be mismanaged and end up a total mess... My experience was less than acceptable with city supplied utilities.
Then there is Comcast.....
So what evil do you pick? I don't know... None of the above? How about we foster competition and draw in multiple commercial providers? Or is the town just too small to make this happen?
Location, location, location..
Comcast may work just fine in some places and not in others, work for some folks and not others. To each their own.
Personally, I'm LUCKY. We actually have two totally different infrastructures to get internet service from where I live. We have the old Cable TV, coax in the street to the house and a totally fiber to the house. I've had both at various times over the last 15 years since they put in the fiber. However, in my experience, the fiber system is way more stable than the coax based one. I suppose it's because the fiber is about 15 years younger, but they both work acceptably for the most part.
I've had outages that lasted weeks on both systems, been driven to distraction trying to discuss it with customer service and technical support AND I've had trouble free service for years too. Fiber is better, generally is less subject to operational hiccups and having to manually restart stuff, but your mileage may vary.
Yea, with water, I see a reduction in resistance too... :)
The more you use an SSD, the faster it goes bad. So it's not an ideal thing to do.
There's power on and read/write cycles. Usually it's write that "uses up" a SSD, not power on time or read cycles.
However, given the number of write cycles is huge per cell, unless you are putting an SSD into a high data rate service situation, using it up is hardly a problem as the rest of the system will go defunct before the SSD runs out of write cycles. Also 12 hours is hardly enough time to appreciably dent an SSD's number of cycles, when their expected life span is a decade or more.
BUT... If you are worried about it, you don't have to write to the drive all that time. I'm really only "power on" burn in guy. I'm not "hit the hardware with a performance bench mark" burn in guy. For the most part, I just want to thermal cycle stuff, so I may do a performance run or two, but only to drive heat and cold cycles. I don't think it's a problem...
Has your burn in ever found something that worked fine at first power on, and was dead after 24hrs?
The idea seems good, but I'm skeptical. I'd think that that anything leaving a factory after their testing, wouldn't benefit from anything more than a smoke test.
I've found some things, but rarely any of the major components actually suffered from infant mortality on my watch. However, I've done this professionally a bit too, where we needed to verify MilSpec operation. In these tests, you verify both the operating and storage temperature ranges to certify a product. We had environmental chambers that could heat, cool and shake systems both running and not. Even under those grueling conditions the failure rates wasn't that high, though it was higher than you'd expect for less extreme temperature and vibration ranges.
I personally consider it good practice to burn in stuff for a number of reasons. Infant mortality is but one. I also know that electrolytic capacitors like to drift up in value as they are powered on and after sitting idle may degrade over long periods. So the burn in is actually conditioning them over the few hours they are powered on, extending their lives a bit. It's not so much a thing anymore, but for large value filter capacitors or those under higher voltages (such as in vacuum tube power supplies) it can show significant differences in operations. These days though, the time from manufacture to my integration is pretty low so derogation of electrolytic capacitors may not be a huge issue anymore.
These days, I don't know if burn in matters all that much, but I do it. It makes me feel better if nothing else.
Well, I do think it's natural for CS majors to be a bit farther away from hardware. Let's face it, much of their work these days doesn't really care what operating system they run on much less the hardware it's actually running on. I don't blame them, really the state of programming has evolved away from hardware dependence, and that's a good thing..
Where I understand hardware details of what's happening behind the programing model seen by the CS guys and gals, and I believe that I have a different perspective when doing software development, I'm not sure they would benefit all that much. Programming Java is pretty hardware agnostic anyway, C/C++ a bit more specific (assuming you have the libs and compiler), but still largely portable unless you are handling actual hardware or kernel level stuff. My hardware knowledge really only serves to make me more aware of performance implications of my choices perhaps, but the CS folks do just fine with most higher level languages.
So I don't agree, CS folks really don't need to know all the same stuff I do to program. It used to be true, it used to be valuable to understand what the hardware had to go though, both to be able to optimize your code for performance and size and get it to do what you wanted. However, with the advent of the higher level languages, most CS folks don't interact with the hardware anyway, but abstract programming models like the JREs which for all the world look identical regardless of the hardware being used.
Which is why "burn in" operation, where you run the item though some thermal cycles is often done. We are trying to find the stuff that's going to initially fail.
I usually do 24 hour burn in of all hardware I build, 12 hours on, then 2 hour cycles on off. Or, (sarc on) just load windows and run all the updates. (sarc off) It's almost the same thing anyway.. :)
Wow, that PCB substation trick became very hit/miss a long time ago.
Now days, there is a whole bunch of operational parameters which need to be set properly to get data on/off a drive. I understand that Some of these "configuration" items are now stored in non-volatile memory on that PCB and set during the manufacturing process. Similar serial numbers may help, but it's still very hit or miss.
Waterboarding?
Well... Funny, but water mixed with electronics tends to produce situations where little communication takes place....
Doesn't know how SSD's work.
No offense to CS majors, but this EE major tends to understand "How a computer works" at a lower level than most of you programmer types. While not universally true, in my experience a Computer Science major generally get's outside their comfort zone with hardware once you get past "Plug it in and turn it on." I don't blame them, there is a lot of stuff happening at lower levels than a CS major needs to know to do their job.
That some CS major is concerned about how SSD's fail because he doesn't understand their failure modes is fine. We tend to fear what we don't understand and let's face it, there is a LOT of stuff going on inside a computer that high level users simply don't need to know. Heck, even I don't need to know some of that stuff and I've designed computing systems in the past. Fear not, if it works, it works, if it doesn't you just replace it anyway.
So you're saying there's some distinction between "leaving the solar system" and "leaving the neighborhood of objects which orbit the sun"?
Yes.. Interstellar space is defined as being beyond the Solar Wind's reach; Where the particles ejected by the Sun reach equal pressure with Interstellar space. Gravity influences objects at much greater distances. So you can orbit the Sun in Interstellar space.
And don't come back!
Old movies aside, I don't think we are in any danger of that.
Technology has improved so much since then. We should send something new up for the next generation.
Why? Is there anything of use to look at way out there?
It's not like we are going to go any faster. Delta-V (speed) is produced the old fashioned way still. You burn rocket fuel and/or slingshot around a planet to get moving. I'm thinking that there are better uses for our exploration dollars than heading into interstellar space. I'd like to see some more exploration of Saturn's moons myself, more poking around Mars, or even heading inward toward Venus and Mercury might be interesting too.
To be fair, your characterization of most of his clients easily describes most Uber drivers.
Perhaps. But I wouldn't know. I neither use or drive for Uber or any other "ride share" company.