That "long term risk" is the more severe form of chicken pox - "shingles" - people who catch chickenpox as adults tend to get the shingles form.
HOWEVER. Anyone who's had chicken pox as a kid is likely to develop shingles as an adult anyway. It happens when the virus periodically reactivates.
I caught chicken pox aged 7, before a vaccine existed. I've had a number of shingles breakouts since i was 35.
If you've had chicken pox the chances of having at least one shingles breakout in later life is extremely high (although admittedly it usually happens in the over 60s - but the older you get the worse the effects)
The drugs to control a shingles breakout (aclovir family) cost about $200-400 for a WEEK - and they don't prevent future breakouts. Once you have herpes zoster in your system it can never be eliminated.
Properly done vaccinations (ie, with an adult booster) pretty much eliminate the risk and they're a lot cheaper than aclovir.
"Because the command line structure is an industry-standard software API/human interface to well-understood network device behaviors."
IOS command line structure was quite different to the old Bay and other equipment I cut my teeth on in the early 90s, but it's now ubiquitious - mainly because it's not byzantine.
Nonetheless, cisco HAVE sued competitors over similar command structures, which is one of the reasons that there are a few online translation pages between Huawei/cisco/hp commands which do identical things but are called different names.
Cisco's business model isn't centred on overpriced hardware - they'll drop to match everyone else if prodded about it. Noone ever pays list pricing and 90% discounts aren't unheard of.
Their model is in overpriced support contracts(which aren't discounted - ever), overpriced training courses, "noone ever got fired for buying Cisco" and extensive FUD campaigns, including invoking "the yellow peril" to management on one visit to my site when it became clear they were likely to lose out on a large (7 figure) sale.
Bearing in mind that they followed the microsoft model of taking over the market(*) it's no wonder that they're running scared of a whole crop of low priced makers using Broadcom or other commodity silicon - especially when scratching below the surface reveals that Cisco is using the exact same silicon in a bunch of products and charging 3-5 times as much.
(*) Don't be perfect, just be good enough, and cheaper with no addon charges, then when you have dominance by taking market share away from the big players, buy out the small ones and shut them down, then jack the pricing up and introduce differential licensing
I've lived in a number of places around the world. If there's any difference it's smaller than the margin of error for tests.
Cultural and religious differences have far greater effects (people put up with bad shit because they're brainwashed into believing they're inferior/deserve it/will have a better life next time round), as does access to education.
Bump up the windowing count. A lot of the internet was run through international satellite links just fine in the late 80s through to mid-90s
Non-interactive stuff (http, ftp, audio/video streaming) isn't an issue, but even telnet works over a geosynchronous satellite link (I used to do that a lot up to about 1997 or so).
The problems start if you're trying to do phone/video calling or play fragfest-style online games.
OTOH given the sparseness of the area and the lack of population, you don't really need to trench fibre. Overhead poles work just as well and distribution can be fairly cheap (you don't need dedicated fibre from the central office to each site, just use CWDM or similar principles to tap each user into the line - and this gives the inhabitants of the area an incentive to keep an eye out for nefarious activities too (any interference by anyone means that everyone loses their signal)
"Actual single-mode fiber cable isn't very expensive when new and really isn't worth much when used, so attempting to scrap it out wouldn't be worthwhile."
Your average cable thief will steal it first and curse you for not having copper in the cable later.
The thieves around here are known to take active railway feeders and to break into substations and throw chains over 100kV feeders to try and get at copper. This backfires spectacularly in most cases because the standard grid level response to a feeder short is to try and burn it out by using rebreakers to reconnect the circuit, not cut off the juice. Burning human smells fairly bad.
Are you in a 3rd world country or just the USA? I have 20Mb/s uplink speed and my ISP has just offered to double that if I renew my contract for 12 months. Gotta love a free market.
"With tape, the backup time can quite quickly become a bottleneck, so you end up needing a second jukebox."
Why a second jukebox when you can just toss a second drive into the existing one?
The bottlenecks are seldom tape speed anyway.
The biggest holdup is the speed of disk arrays - an actively used mechanical array simply can't provide data to a LTO-4 or better drive fast enough to keep the thing 100% occupied. This is best dealt with by dumping the disks to a ssd array local to the tapes and then despooling from that (that ssd array costs as much as a tape drive by the way, but it can spool/despool at an aggregate 1200Mb/s without seek penalties so it feeds a dozen tape drives)
Network speed is a lesser bottleneck. Have you priced up 100Gb/s kit recently?
The only way anyone could justify tape for home use would be to club together and backup a whole bunch of sites across the Internet, like, say.... a cloud drive.
Cloud storage might well be "putting your shit on someone else's computers", but 1: you can encrypt it and 2: you don't have to put it on just _one_ cloud vendor (in fact it's a good idea not to).
"In short, yes. LTO is dead whether it knows it yet or not."
I have several Petabytes of data to curate. My experience with rotating media over the last 30 years is less happy than yours and over the last 3-4 years there's been a noticeable deterioration of drive manufacturing quality (which is probably why domestic drive warranties are now 12 months and enterprise moving towards 2 years)
Tape still has a place and it's still an enterprise staple. It never really was that well suited to domestic/small business use anyway.
"Obviously, these are Taiyo Yuden archival grade discs, not cheap rubbish, but not terribly expensive either"
Anything based on pthalocyanin should stand the test of time if not left in sunlight or in high temperatures.
Unfortunately NASA usually used cheap and nasty stuff for data distribution, so we achieve a success rate of "only" 98% on 20-year old CD-Rs.
If you want "archival" bluray/dvd then the only material worth considering is M-disc (but that's not cheap) and you're left with the problem of readers - the BBC domesday disc (1980s laserdisc and reader attached to a BBC micro) was not only in a proprietary data format but working laserdisc players became scarcer than hen's teeth in the 1990s. The discs themselves are still perfectly readable - but they're no use whatsoever if nothing can read them.
DVD drives are becoming less common on computers and Bluray never really took off as a data storage format.
If you want long term storage that can guarantee readability in the future there's a lot of milage in punched cards or microfiche - but you do need a lot of them.
The only long-term solution is to ensure your datasets are migrated to new media before the old media becomes unreadable and that's not just a factor of the longevity of the materials.
"I still have SDLT tapes that are still readable after 15 years."
ASSUMING that you have a working SDLT drive.
Lest you think I'm being facetious: I regularly have people show up in my office with 30+ year old open reel "archive tapes" that they want restored. The only place you'll find anything which can handle that is a specialist archivist outfit and they'll charge $500-800/reel for the job because every pass on the equipment is that much closer to the date when it won't be repairable anymore.
There are sound reasons for migrating your old archives to new media periodically.
The real killer issue is cell size. Smaller cells have shorter lifespans and are slower
For this reason Samsung backed off from 20nm substantially when they perfected 3d technology. The result is 10 year warranties on the 850pro family and there's no reason to disbelieve them on it.
"This is nothing but yet another one of his charades and PR stunts. "
Indeed - but no matter what, there are laws and due process to be followed.
The New Zealand police have a long history of bypassing laws when it suits them, despite what the New Zealand public is led to believe. (It's worth checking out http://laudafinem.com/ - which is blocked for people from within New Zealand, with no supporting legal paperwork)
That's probably why they and the FBI thought they could get away with it.
"That said, taking action against a private company, selling at a loss out of its own pocket, would likely play differently than taking action against a company being supported by the state to sell at a loss. "
The USA has done it on many occasions. Farming tariff barriers spring to mind immediately (USA farmers are extremely inefficient and are very good at lobbying their politicians for protection+subsidies instead of getting their shit together).
"It''ll have to approach slowly, maneuvering to find a level place and touch down very gently to prevent a bounce"
This is a classic application for ion thrusters. The problem is that the exhaust for anything pointing "downwards" (chemical or ion) will contaminate the ground you want to sample, making the whole mission pointless.
This is why the landing thruster was a cold gas (nitrogen) device pointing upwards (away from the comet). It was intended to hold the thing on the ground whilst the harpoons fired and the legscrews locked it down. After that failed, the odds of Philae staying where it first arrived were greatly diminished but given a choice of "not bothering" or "may as well try anyway" I know which option I'd have taken.
For the naysayers: If you think you can do better then by all means come up with the funding to do it.
"The design likely wasn't locked down until 5 years before launch or so."
Which was around 2000-2001 - and space-rated semiconductors tend to lag terrestrial development by about a decade, more so for stuff which doesn't have the advantage of the earth's magnetosphere for protection.
We were still launching rad-hardened P90s in 2006. Many sub 200nm circuit elements would end up being destroyed (not just disturbed) by an errant cosmic ray (most often a near-light-speed proton or neutron, not a photon), which limits what's available, given that shielding from such things is virtually impossible in the allowable mass budgets.
With the best will in the world, by August 2015 the probe would be completely baked even in its current location.
Solar cells were a life-extension measure. The probe was designed to get all the essential science done in the lifetime of the batteries and the hope was to keep going for a few months after that.
At least the Iron Chicken didn't steal its legs for nesting material.
"To be honest, the trajectory calculations aren't that difficult"
First order calculations aren't hard. It's the myriad perturbations to both comet and probe trajectories caused by gravitational influences of various bodies which adds to the fun.
Space science is easy. Space ENGINEERING is bloody hard, and the environment is harsh on a scale which even people who work on these things have trouble comprehending (Disclosure: I work for a space lab with one of the best-regarded instrument engineering facilities in the world and we do have devices on the orbiter)
There are a number of ways the lander could have been built - all of which would probably have added more launch mass/operational complexity and reduced the science payload. This won't be the last comet lander and as a first one, it's informed a lot more than it's frustrated. As long as we're tied to making things as lightweight as possible there will always be compromises, especially when each probe is a one-off handbuilt design (even the "mass produced" birds are heavily customised)
"Companies in China or any asian design shop out east will buy lots and I mean lots of rejected Flash chips or bare dies from a Fab that has failed some method of testing. "
This kind of thing could be eliminated if the fabs implemented a policy of "into the grinder"
"of course that will never happen" - except that some fabs already do.
Slashdot Mirror
That "long term risk" is the more severe form of chicken pox - "shingles" - people who catch chickenpox as adults tend to get the shingles form.
HOWEVER. Anyone who's had chicken pox as a kid is likely to develop shingles as an adult anyway. It happens when the virus periodically reactivates.
I caught chicken pox aged 7, before a vaccine existed. I've had a number of shingles breakouts since i was 35.
If you've had chicken pox the chances of having at least one shingles breakout in later life is extremely high (although admittedly it usually happens in the over 60s - but the older you get the worse the effects)
The drugs to control a shingles breakout (aclovir family) cost about $200-400 for a WEEK - and they don't prevent future breakouts. Once you have herpes zoster in your system it can never be eliminated.
Properly done vaccinations (ie, with an adult booster) pretty much eliminate the risk and they're a lot cheaper than aclovir.
"The problem is that IOS is a sort of cargo cult system held together with bailing wire and marketed as some sort of cohesive system. "
It's a swiss army knife, only less well designed.
Sendmail is just as bad and for much the same reasons.
At some point you have to decide that all that complexity IS the problem (especially for security) and the best thing to do is start over.
"Because the command line structure is an industry-standard software API/human interface to well-understood network device behaviors."
IOS command line structure was quite different to the old Bay and other equipment I cut my teeth on in the early 90s, but it's now ubiquitious - mainly because it's not byzantine.
Nonetheless, cisco HAVE sued competitors over similar command structures, which is one of the reasons that there are a few online translation pages between Huawei/cisco/hp commands which do identical things but are called different names.
Cisco's business model isn't centred on overpriced hardware - they'll drop to match everyone else if prodded about it. Noone ever pays list pricing and 90% discounts aren't unheard of.
Their model is in overpriced support contracts(which aren't discounted - ever), overpriced training courses, "noone ever got fired for buying Cisco" and extensive FUD campaigns, including invoking "the yellow peril" to management on one visit to my site when it became clear they were likely to lose out on a large (7 figure) sale.
Bearing in mind that they followed the microsoft model of taking over the market(*) it's no wonder that they're running scared of a whole crop of low priced makers using Broadcom or other commodity silicon - especially when scratching below the surface reveals that Cisco is using the exact same silicon in a bunch of products and charging 3-5 times as much.
(*) Don't be perfect, just be good enough, and cheaper with no addon charges, then when you have dominance by taking market share away from the big players, buy out the small ones and shut them down, then jack the pricing up and introduce differential licensing
diamond wafers are already a reality (albeit small sized). Sooner or later we'll step up to carbon semiconductors.
"Protection circuitry will lockout recharging of the whole pack, which wouldn't work with the dead cell anyway"
A lot of packs have irreversible lockouts - once a pack has failed it won't charge even if the failed cell is replaced.
"Programmed obselescence", etc etc. There's no good reason for this kind of obnoxious behaviour, except to make the packs "unrepairable"
I've lived in a number of places around the world. If there's any difference it's smaller than the margin of error for tests.
Cultural and religious differences have far greater effects (people put up with bad shit because they're brainwashed into believing they're inferior/deserve it/will have a better life next time round), as does access to education.
"presumably you send the people on a one-month or less high speed journey"
The Orion you are thinking of is hampered by nuclear disarmament treaties.
Bump up the windowing count. A lot of the internet was run through international satellite links just fine in the late 80s through to mid-90s
Non-interactive stuff (http, ftp, audio/video streaming) isn't an issue, but even telnet works over a geosynchronous satellite link (I used to do that a lot up to about 1997 or so).
The problems start if you're trying to do phone/video calling or play fragfest-style online games.
OTOH given the sparseness of the area and the lack of population, you don't really need to trench fibre. Overhead poles work just as well and distribution can be fairly cheap (you don't need dedicated fibre from the central office to each site, just use CWDM or similar principles to tap each user into the line - and this gives the inhabitants of the area an incentive to keep an eye out for nefarious activities too (any interference by anyone means that everyone loses their signal)
"Actual single-mode fiber cable isn't very expensive when new and really isn't worth much when used, so attempting to scrap it out wouldn't be worthwhile."
Your average cable thief will steal it first and curse you for not having copper in the cable later.
The thieves around here are known to take active railway feeders and to break into substations and throw chains over 100kV feeders to try and get at copper. This backfires spectacularly in most cases because the standard grid level response to a feeder short is to try and burn it out by using rebreakers to reconnect the circuit, not cut off the juice. Burning human smells fairly bad.
"Ever back up a 3 TB hard drive at 300 kbps? "
Are you in a 3rd world country or just the USA? I have 20Mb/s uplink speed and my ISP has just offered to double that if I renew my contract for 12 months. Gotta love a free market.
"With tape, the backup time can quite quickly become a bottleneck, so you end up needing a second jukebox."
Why a second jukebox when you can just toss a second drive into the existing one?
The bottlenecks are seldom tape speed anyway.
The biggest holdup is the speed of disk arrays - an actively used mechanical array simply can't provide data to a LTO-4 or better drive fast enough to keep the thing 100% occupied. This is best dealt with by dumping the disks to a ssd array local to the tapes and then despooling from that (that ssd array costs as much as a tape drive by the way, but it can spool/despool at an aggregate 1200Mb/s without seek penalties so it feeds a dozen tape drives)
Network speed is a lesser bottleneck. Have you priced up 100Gb/s kit recently?
For home use: Don't bother with tape. Seriously.
The only way anyone could justify tape for home use would be to club together and backup a whole bunch of sites across the Internet, like, say.... a cloud drive.
Cloud storage might well be "putting your shit on someone else's computers", but 1: you can encrypt it and 2: you don't have to put it on just _one_ cloud vendor (in fact it's a good idea not to).
"In short, yes. LTO is dead whether it knows it yet or not."
I have several Petabytes of data to curate. My experience with rotating media over the last 30 years is less happy than yours and over the last 3-4 years there's been a noticeable deterioration of drive manufacturing quality (which is probably why domestic drive warranties are now 12 months and enterprise moving towards 2 years)
Tape still has a place and it's still an enterprise staple. It never really was that well suited to domestic/small business use anyway.
"Obviously, these are Taiyo Yuden archival grade discs, not cheap rubbish, but not terribly expensive either"
Anything based on pthalocyanin should stand the test of time if not left in sunlight or in high temperatures.
Unfortunately NASA usually used cheap and nasty stuff for data distribution, so we achieve a success rate of "only" 98% on 20-year old CD-Rs.
If you want "archival" bluray/dvd then the only material worth considering is M-disc (but that's not cheap) and you're left with the problem of readers - the BBC domesday disc (1980s laserdisc and reader attached to a BBC micro) was not only in a proprietary data format but working laserdisc players became scarcer than hen's teeth in the 1990s. The discs themselves are still perfectly readable - but they're no use whatsoever if nothing can read them.
DVD drives are becoming less common on computers and Bluray never really took off as a data storage format.
If you want long term storage that can guarantee readability in the future there's a lot of milage in punched cards or microfiche - but you do need a lot of them.
The only long-term solution is to ensure your datasets are migrated to new media before the old media becomes unreadable and that's not just a factor of the longevity of the materials.
"I still have SDLT tapes that are still readable after 15 years."
ASSUMING that you have a working SDLT drive.
Lest you think I'm being facetious: I regularly have people show up in my office with 30+ year old open reel "archive tapes" that they want restored. The only place you'll find anything which can handle that is a specialist archivist outfit and they'll charge $500-800/reel for the job because every pass on the equipment is that much closer to the date when it won't be repairable anymore.
There are sound reasons for migrating your old archives to new media periodically.
The real killer issue is cell size. Smaller cells have shorter lifespans and are slower
For this reason Samsung backed off from 20nm substantially when they perfected 3d technology. The result is 10 year warranties on the 850pro family and there's no reason to disbelieve them on it.
"This is nothing but yet another one of his charades and PR stunts. "
Indeed - but no matter what, there are laws and due process to be followed.
The New Zealand police have a long history of bypassing laws when it suits them, despite what the New Zealand public is led to believe. (It's worth checking out http://laudafinem.com/ - which is blocked for people from within New Zealand, with no supporting legal paperwork)
That's probably why they and the FBI thought they could get away with it.
"That said, taking action against a private company, selling at a loss out of its own pocket, would likely play differently than taking action against a company being supported by the state to sell at a loss. "
The USA has done it on many occasions. Farming tariff barriers spring to mind immediately (USA farmers are extremely inefficient and are very good at lobbying their politicians for protection+subsidies instead of getting their shit together).
"It''ll have to approach slowly, maneuvering to find a level place and touch down very gently to prevent a bounce"
This is a classic application for ion thrusters. The problem is that the exhaust for anything pointing "downwards" (chemical or ion) will contaminate the ground you want to sample, making the whole mission pointless.
This is why the landing thruster was a cold gas (nitrogen) device pointing upwards (away from the comet). It was intended to hold the thing on the ground whilst the harpoons fired and the legscrews locked it down. After that failed, the odds of Philae staying where it first arrived were greatly diminished but given a choice of "not bothering" or "may as well try anyway" I know which option I'd have taken.
For the naysayers: If you think you can do better then by all means come up with the funding to do it.
Which parts? I can think of 3 items on each (including the cameras) which were made in Europe.
"The design likely wasn't locked down until 5 years before launch or so."
Which was around 2000-2001 - and space-rated semiconductors tend to lag terrestrial development by about a decade, more so for stuff which doesn't have the advantage of the earth's magnetosphere for protection.
We were still launching rad-hardened P90s in 2006. Many sub 200nm circuit elements would end up being destroyed (not just disturbed) by an errant cosmic ray (most often a near-light-speed proton or neutron, not a photon), which limits what's available, given that shielding from such things is virtually impossible in the allowable mass budgets.
With the best will in the world, by August 2015 the probe would be completely baked even in its current location.
Solar cells were a life-extension measure. The probe was designed to get all the essential science done in the lifetime of the batteries and the hope was to keep going for a few months after that.
At least the Iron Chicken didn't steal its legs for nesting material.
"To be honest, the trajectory calculations aren't that difficult"
First order calculations aren't hard. It's the myriad perturbations to both comet and probe trajectories caused by gravitational influences of various bodies which adds to the fun.
Space science is easy. Space ENGINEERING is bloody hard, and the environment is harsh on a scale which even people who work on these things have trouble comprehending (Disclosure: I work for a space lab with one of the best-regarded instrument engineering facilities in the world and we do have devices on the orbiter)
There are a number of ways the lander could have been built - all of which would probably have added more launch mass/operational complexity and reduced the science payload. This won't be the last comet lander and as a first one, it's informed a lot more than it's frustrated. As long as we're tied to making things as lightweight as possible there will always be compromises, especially when each probe is a one-off handbuilt design (even the "mass produced" birds are heavily customised)
"Companies in China or any asian design shop out east will buy lots and I mean lots of rejected Flash chips or bare dies from a Fab that has failed some method of testing. "
This kind of thing could be eliminated if the fabs implemented a policy of "into the grinder"
"of course that will never happen" - except that some fabs already do.