Yeah, Apple's products are too successful, so now they're not cool enough for you? And the people that buy Apple products are the "hipsters"? Weird.
How about - Apple's better at figuring out what people need and giving it to them in a high quality product than most tech companies, and they sell and support them better than most tech companies' distribution and support channels, so people really like using Apple products and their products sell extremely well, and people are willing to pay a premium for them over the competition.
Why do some companies spend so much time worrying about phones. People have all sorts of devices from the company that can't be locked out if people just use the device "out of the box". Laptop, desktop, USB stick, hard drive, tablet, car, etc. Companies get people to return company property when they leave the company, with all sorts of traditional mechanisms. Salespeople have company cars fairly often, and companies don't have a remote lock on the car to make sure that they get it back. Why get worked up about being able to lock people out of their phone? Sure, it's nice to have that ability, I suppose, but why do you care about the phone so much more than the other devices, which cost more and/or contain more data?
And really, who has company phones any more - hasn't everyone moved to "bring your own device" where people buy whatever (approved) device they like, and configure it to get company mail, etc. Then when they leave, the data is locked or deleted (that's been a solved problem for many years, on all major platforms) and they keep their phone.
It depends on your application space. If you're making a monitor to alert you when plants need to be watered, you're going to want to use a controller that can run on AA batteries for months, and costs a few dollars. That's not anything that Intel sells - that's more like an Arduino Atemel chip. So yes, compared to a high end CPU, a low end Intel CPU is cheap and low power, but compared to a $3 controller that can run on an AA battery for months, it's expensive and power hungry.
There's an important difference that you're missing, in that the DMCA was passed in to law, and it completely changed the situation.
Before the DMCA the parties met in court as equals, and a judge (or jury) had to rule as to whether the claim of infringement was valid. Because this required effort to prove, and because courts really hate having their time wasted, this tended to prevent baseless claims from being made. And until the claim was proved to be valid, the site was unaffected.
The DMCA completely shifted the balance in favor of any claim of infringement. All claims of infringement are presumed to be valid, and that the ISP/Site must immediately take down anything claimed to be infringing (the "safe harbor"). And then, after the site is down, the burden is on the site to prove that the content is not infringing.
So looking at the Qualcomm / Github situation, before DMCA Qualcomm would have filed claims in court and Github would make the case against the claims, and the claims would have to be proven, with the repository owners able to defend themselves from the claims, before any repositories were taken down. That is, the burden of proof is on the person claiming infringement, and nothing happens until they make a case in court. And if the claims are baseless, all that happens is that Qualcomm wastes a bunch of money, and pisses off the court, and likely has to pay Github's expenses.
Under DMCA, Qualcomm files claims, Github has to immediately take the repositories down, and then each repo owner has to prove that their repo is not infringing to bring it back up. So Qualcomm has, without any proof at all, forced tons of repositories down, and even if they've done nothing wrong it could be months until they're back up, damaging those projects and wasting huge amounts of their time and money.
Article I, Section 6, of the Constitution provides that "Senators and Representatives . . . shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place."
You're right that Congressmen can be arrested for breaking the law, by the police, as a part of a court case. But that's not the case here, we're talking about preventing a Congressman from flying. If a Congressman is traveling to or from Congress, or is flying as a course of Congressional business, they can't be interfered with by anyone other than the Congressional Sergeant at Arms. Unless you want to argue that the Congressman is guilty of "Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace" because they have the same name as someone anonymously placed on a list, with no accuser, no evidence, no trial and no means of challenging the list or even knowing that you're actually on it. That seems like a pretty weak legal argument.
Add in the constitutional issue that the executive branch is not allowed to interfere with the Congress' travel, so whatever idiot stopped a Congressman from flying should have ended up in jail. The branches aren't allowed to interfere with each other's ability to function, for the fairly obvious reason that otherwise the executive branch could arrest Congressmen to throw votes, could arrest judges who rule against them, etc. The branches need to police themselves - that's why Congress has a Sergeant at Arms.
Ironically related to "I understand that Bin-Laden should have probably been on some "no fly list"." keep in mind that the first thing that Bush did after 9/11 was covertly fly every member of the Bin Laden family out of the US to make sure that they couldn't be detained and questioned. Presumably because Saudis who control lots of oil are your golfing buddies, not "terrorists". Once you've ensured that the people who knew the mastermind behind the attacks best in the world couldn't be questioned, there's not much logic in stopping anyone else, much less stopping random people with the same names as people who were rumored to be terrorists. And since the people on the "no fly list" aren't accused of any crime, they can just leave the airport and then do whatever they like, only they're more pissed off. So I don't see how that would prevent any terrorism - I'd think that irritating suspected terrorists but not charging or arresting them would just encourage more terrorism..
And, of course, there's the "separation of powers" thing. The TSA is under the executive branch, so they can't really do anything to judges - the judicial branch has to police itself. For pretty much the same reason that the executive branch can't do anything to Congress - the police are constitutionally not allowed to arrest a congressman, because if they could, then the executive branch could (legally) take over the government by physically arresting Congress to prevent votes, etc.
You can make a better "gun" than the Liberator using a piece of wood and a drill, faster and cheaper than a 3D print. The US doesn't suffer from a shortage of guns or the ability to make guns.
The only reason to 3D print a gun is because you really like guns and want to use 3D printing to get some press.
Sure, there would be regular supply schedules. But that means that the part arrives weeks or months after it's ordered. Which means either maintaining a large inventory of spares before they're needed, or waiting weeks or months while equipment is out of commission.
With an SLS printer, they could have the part in a few hours. So if the value of time is high, it's worth the cost of the SLS part.
You're right that SLS printers are slow and expensive, but they're still faster than physically shipping parts (hours vs. days), and if the value of time is high then it's worth using an expensive process to get the part faster. And it lets the unit be more self-sufficient, which is valuable when traditional shipping breaks down - many wars have been lost over control over supply lines.
And an SLS printer and metal powder is much simpler to warehouse and keep supplied than a complete inventory of all needed metal parts. I suspect that the complete supply chain optimization is pretty impressive when you add it all up. Mass production is very efficient, but add in massive manufacturer markup, then all of the wearhousing, shipping, security, inventory, etc., logistics to manage and move everything around, and "print in the field on demand" is probably pretty appealing.
I'd bet that the the only thing holding it up would be negotiations with manufacturers - I'm sure that the manufacturers will want to get paid tons of money even if all they're doing is licensing the design files (i.e. not actually making or shipping anything). So the $500 specialized wrench would continue to cost $500.
But if the army guys had SLS printers in the field, how rapidly do you think they'd model their own parts that are better than the ones from the vendor? Those guys are quite ingenious at making things work with whatever they have available, and with an SLS printer, they sky's the limit!
There are lots of people doing casting from 3D prints. You can 3D print the master in PLA, then make a plaster cast, burn out the PLA, and pour in metal. For example, http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/ . It works, it's just more dangerous and complex than most people want to deal with.
Not just 'tried to', but actually delivered. Thinking Machines CM-1 and CM-2 had routers on chip with 32 CPUs per chip. In the hybercube architecture, the 5 lowest bits of CPU address routed on-chip, and the rest of the CPU address routed between chips. It worked quite well, and was the fastest computer on the planet for several years running.
Sounds like pretty much every time there's a new industry standard, where the major players all come up with their own incompatible option, trying to be the one that wins and gets to charge everyone else licensing fees for their patents and trademarks. And so, as usual, the innovative new field is fragmented, confusing consumers, wasting money, and delaying or even killing the new industry. These sorts of format wars happen so often that I can only think of one case (CDs) where it didn't happen. You think that after wasting so many years, and $billions, on these pissing contests, and seeing that the one time they didn't screw it up it was a huge success making everyone rich for decades, that businesses would learn that it's better to cooperate on standards rather than compete. But I guess they're so competitive that they do it every when it's a consistently bad strategy.
You can learn some languages that have clean/consistent designs in a few hours. Lisp, C, Lua, Smalltalk... those languages are simple, clean languages that you can learn the syntax of in a few hours.
That begin said, to really get work done you need to understand the runtime environment, GUI and other frameworks, database/persistence, messaging, performance characteristics, etc., and that's vastly more complex than the syntax of the language. Even if you learn Python in a few hours (you can), there's no way you're going to understand the frameworks and how to get real work done in a real application in a few hours. Even in an environment that takes care of most of the details (like Google App Engine) it takes a few weeks to wrap your head around the High Availability Data Store, Google's APIs, etc.
I suppose you have a chance, if all your code needs to do is run on a command line, process stdin and generate stdout with no persistence. But that doesn't describe most applications these days.
You're picking random numbers to try to make a comparison that's not meaningful. 292 groups applying for tax-exempt status had names contained "tea party", "patriot", or "9/12", who were all given more scrutiny, and only 20 groups applying for tax-exempt status had names contained "progress" or "progressive". Of course, those numbers you care about are only about a third of the groups given deeper scrutiny - the large majority of groups investigated for possibly being political groups (and this not allowed to claim tax exempt status and hide their donor lists) weren't right-wing groups, they had terms like "Democrat", "Occupy" or "Israel" in their names, and only a third of the groups were right-wing groups, so the scrutiny wasn't politically biased against right-wing groups. If anything, it affected more left-wing groups than right. It was still a bad idea to use a list of terms to trigger deeper investigation, of course, but as the "BOLO list" system was put in place by a conservative Republican who was trying to make the system more efficient and consistent, and was applied to groups across the political spectrum, and the outcome was that only a third of the groups affected were right-wing, the evidence suggest that it wasn't politically biased against the right-wing.
The political bias that is most obvious is that the Inspector General's office in charge of the IRS audit had been asked by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) "to narrowly focus on Tea Party organizations". And, of course, Issa kept most of the testimony secret, selecting a few bits to try to distort the program as anti-right-wing.
The reality is that using a list of terms to watch for is a bad mechanism, because it's substituting a mechanical rule for human judgement in making a determination about a group's being political vs. social, and that's wrong. But if you ignore the rhetoric, the facts don't support the accusation that the BOLO lists were aimed purely at right-wing groups. The real problem is that Congress passed a law requiring the IRS to make an extremely vague determination ("primarily political") so the IRS came up with a system for making that determination that pissed people off.
Looking at the lists, I can't see how most of them were ever granted tax exempt status. How can a group with a political party in its name, that raises money for and donates time to political candidates, not be a political group? The IRS should have rejected far more of the groups, both Republicans/Tea Party and Democrats, and instead of seems like all they did was ask a lot of questions and then approve almost every application, which seems a bit pathetic.
+1 this. The only time I've ever had Mac filesystem problems was when there were unexpected power loss. When you lose power while writing to the drive, bad things can happen. But I've not seen even that since Mac OS 7 or so.:-)
I used to work in supercomputing, and with terabytes of RAM and Petabytes of data I/O, you *bed* everything had ECC and parity bits every step of the way (yeah, extra parity bits in the RAM). And cosmic rays really do flip bits in RAM from time to time, and when you're running a $10M machine running a 2 month computation, you really do care about being able to detect the error, restore the machine's state to the previous snapshot, and keep running.
It's amusing to me that consumers now have enough data that this stuff starts affecting them. It'll be interesting to see if consumers start paying extra for the reliability.
The issue is that the headline and summary have HFS all over the place, and even say that "HFS corrupted files", when HFS wasn't relevant to the corruption - no standard filesystem protects you completely from disk drives' blocks going bad.
That being said, some of the high end SAN/NAS systems do have controls like forcing all blocks on the device to be read and (if needed) rewritten periodically, which would refresh the data and prevent "bit rot". But that's not done by the filesystem, either - it's a layer between the filesystem and the disk drives.
ZFS was a Sun project, and they've effectively killed it. Apple might have been looking at ZFS, but they never made it a part of their OS.
Shame, as it's a really nice filesystem. My previous file server was ZFS, and it was a delight. But it's kinda picky about what hardware it'll run on, and the old file server (dual Xeon) was just too power hungry to keep running at home...
To correct slightly - ECC isn't really about disk capacity. It's there because magnetic media isn't perfect, so even on a well written block there's a percentage chance of a read having a bit mis-read, and even on a failed read there's some percentage of good data read. The ECC lets the drive controller correct for those errors, so the vast majority of errors are corrected by the controller. A really smart controller or driver (GCC Technologies had this 20 years ago, perhaps they all do now) pays attention to ECC errors and re-writes blocks that have errors so that any marginal writes are rewritten with the user's data is protected before the block degrades to an unrecoverable failure, automatically. And if a read is so bad that ECC fails, you can re-try the read until you get a good enough read for ECC to recover the data, which almost always works, then rewrite it. If you do that, it's very, very hard to lose data on magnetic media, because it's nearly impossible for a block to go completely bad with no warning.
That being said, with the huge volumes of data that people use now, even a very rare percentage multiplied by that huge pile of data means they'll lose data. If you really care about that, you need to store your data on two physically separate devices, so a physical failure of one can't affect the other. This is expensive-ish, but that's the cost of protecting data. So an offsite backup is really the only solid option. Anything in your house can be affected by a fire, power spike, etc., so if you really care about the data, get CrashPlan or something like that.
No, in reality the IRS investigated all groups with political parties and movements in their names, since they're required by law (i.e. Congress) to only allow non-political groups to be granted tax exempt status. And the IRS investigated (and rejected) far more liberal groups than conservative groups. So (1) they were required to investigate political groups, so the investigation was not only proper, it was required by law passed by Congress, and (2) they didn't target Tea Party groups exclusively or even disproportionately.
Wow, the parent company was modded to zero despite being relevant, factual, and linking to more info. What pathetic person is so afraid of these facts that they mod them down instead of engaging in a rational discussion?
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Lenovo is a manufacturing company that makes laptops and servers. They don't make software or do systems integration or mobile devices.
Why would IBM partner with them to integrate mobile devices into the enterprise?
Yeah, Apple's products are too successful, so now they're not cool enough for you? And the people that buy Apple products are the "hipsters"? Weird.
How about - Apple's better at figuring out what people need and giving it to them in a high quality product than most tech companies, and they sell and support them better than most tech companies' distribution and support channels, so people really like using Apple products and their products sell extremely well, and people are willing to pay a premium for them over the competition.
Why do some companies spend so much time worrying about phones. People have all sorts of devices from the company that can't be locked out if people just use the device "out of the box". Laptop, desktop, USB stick, hard drive, tablet, car, etc. Companies get people to return company property when they leave the company, with all sorts of traditional mechanisms. Salespeople have company cars fairly often, and companies don't have a remote lock on the car to make sure that they get it back. Why get worked up about being able to lock people out of their phone? Sure, it's nice to have that ability, I suppose, but why do you care about the phone so much more than the other devices, which cost more and/or contain more data?
And really, who has company phones any more - hasn't everyone moved to "bring your own device" where people buy whatever (approved) device they like, and configure it to get company mail, etc. Then when they leave, the data is locked or deleted (that's been a solved problem for many years, on all major platforms) and they keep their phone.
It depends on your application space. If you're making a monitor to alert you when plants need to be watered, you're going to want to use a controller that can run on AA batteries for months, and costs a few dollars. That's not anything that Intel sells - that's more like an Arduino Atemel chip. So yes, compared to a high end CPU, a low end Intel CPU is cheap and low power, but compared to a $3 controller that can run on an AA battery for months, it's expensive and power hungry.
There's an important difference that you're missing, in that the DMCA was passed in to law, and it completely changed the situation.
Before the DMCA the parties met in court as equals, and a judge (or jury) had to rule as to whether the claim of infringement was valid. Because this required effort to prove, and because courts really hate having their time wasted, this tended to prevent baseless claims from being made. And until the claim was proved to be valid, the site was unaffected.
The DMCA completely shifted the balance in favor of any claim of infringement. All claims of infringement are presumed to be valid, and that the ISP/Site must immediately take down anything claimed to be infringing (the "safe harbor"). And then, after the site is down, the burden is on the site to prove that the content is not infringing.
So looking at the Qualcomm / Github situation, before DMCA Qualcomm would have filed claims in court and Github would make the case against the claims, and the claims would have to be proven, with the repository owners able to defend themselves from the claims, before any repositories were taken down. That is, the burden of proof is on the person claiming infringement, and nothing happens until they make a case in court. And if the claims are baseless, all that happens is that Qualcomm wastes a bunch of money, and pisses off the court, and likely has to pay Github's expenses.
Under DMCA, Qualcomm files claims, Github has to immediately take the repositories down, and then each repo owner has to prove that their repo is not infringing to bring it back up. So Qualcomm has, without any proof at all, forced tons of repositories down, and even if they've done nothing wrong it could be months until they're back up, damaging those projects and wasting huge amounts of their time and money.
Those aren't the same.
Article I, Section 6, of the Constitution provides that "Senators and Representatives . . . shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place."
You're right that Congressmen can be arrested for breaking the law, by the police, as a part of a court case. But that's not the case here, we're talking about preventing a Congressman from flying. If a Congressman is traveling to or from Congress, or is flying as a course of Congressional business, they can't be interfered with by anyone other than the Congressional Sergeant at Arms. Unless you want to argue that the Congressman is guilty of "Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace" because they have the same name as someone anonymously placed on a list, with no accuser, no evidence, no trial and no means of challenging the list or even knowing that you're actually on it. That seems like a pretty weak legal argument.
Add in the constitutional issue that the executive branch is not allowed to interfere with the Congress' travel, so whatever idiot stopped a Congressman from flying should have ended up in jail. The branches aren't allowed to interfere with each other's ability to function, for the fairly obvious reason that otherwise the executive branch could arrest Congressmen to throw votes, could arrest judges who rule against them, etc. The branches need to police themselves - that's why Congress has a Sergeant at Arms.
Ironically related to "I understand that Bin-Laden should have probably been on some "no fly list"." keep in mind that the first thing that Bush did after 9/11 was covertly fly every member of the Bin Laden family out of the US to make sure that they couldn't be detained and questioned. Presumably because Saudis who control lots of oil are your golfing buddies, not "terrorists". Once you've ensured that the people who knew the mastermind behind the attacks best in the world couldn't be questioned, there's not much logic in stopping anyone else, much less stopping random people with the same names as people who were rumored to be terrorists. And since the people on the "no fly list" aren't accused of any crime, they can just leave the airport and then do whatever they like, only they're more pissed off. So I don't see how that would prevent any terrorism - I'd think that irritating suspected terrorists but not charging or arresting them would just encourage more terrorism..
And, of course, there's the "separation of powers" thing. The TSA is under the executive branch, so they can't really do anything to judges - the judicial branch has to police itself. For pretty much the same reason that the executive branch can't do anything to Congress - the police are constitutionally not allowed to arrest a congressman, because if they could, then the executive branch could (legally) take over the government by physically arresting Congress to prevent votes, etc.
You can make a better "gun" than the Liberator using a piece of wood and a drill, faster and cheaper than a 3D print. The US doesn't suffer from a shortage of guns or the ability to make guns.
The only reason to 3D print a gun is because you really like guns and want to use 3D printing to get some press.
Sure, there would be regular supply schedules. But that means that the part arrives weeks or months after it's ordered. Which means either maintaining a large inventory of spares before they're needed, or waiting weeks or months while equipment is out of commission.
With an SLS printer, they could have the part in a few hours. So if the value of time is high, it's worth the cost of the SLS part.
You're right that SLS printers are slow and expensive, but they're still faster than physically shipping parts (hours vs. days), and if the value of time is high then it's worth using an expensive process to get the part faster. And it lets the unit be more self-sufficient, which is valuable when traditional shipping breaks down - many wars have been lost over control over supply lines.
And an SLS printer and metal powder is much simpler to warehouse and keep supplied than a complete inventory of all needed metal parts. I suspect that the complete supply chain optimization is pretty impressive when you add it all up. Mass production is very efficient, but add in massive manufacturer markup, then all of the wearhousing, shipping, security, inventory, etc., logistics to manage and move everything around, and "print in the field on demand" is probably pretty appealing.
I'd bet that the the only thing holding it up would be negotiations with manufacturers - I'm sure that the manufacturers will want to get paid tons of money even if all they're doing is licensing the design files (i.e. not actually making or shipping anything). So the $500 specialized wrench would continue to cost $500.
But if the army guys had SLS printers in the field, how rapidly do you think they'd model their own parts that are better than the ones from the vendor? Those guys are quite ingenious at making things work with whatever they have available, and with an SLS printer, they sky's the limit!
There are lots of people doing casting from 3D prints. You can 3D print the master in PLA, then make a plaster cast, burn out the PLA, and pour in metal. For example, http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/ . It works, it's just more dangerous and complex than most people want to deal with.
Not just 'tried to', but actually delivered. Thinking Machines CM-1 and CM-2 had routers on chip with 32 CPUs per chip. In the hybercube architecture, the 5 lowest bits of CPU address routed on-chip, and the rest of the CPU address routed between chips. It worked quite well, and was the fastest computer on the planet for several years running.
Sounds like pretty much every time there's a new industry standard, where the major players all come up with their own incompatible option, trying to be the one that wins and gets to charge everyone else licensing fees for their patents and trademarks. And so, as usual, the innovative new field is fragmented, confusing consumers, wasting money, and delaying or even killing the new industry. These sorts of format wars happen so often that I can only think of one case (CDs) where it didn't happen. You think that after wasting so many years, and $billions, on these pissing contests, and seeing that the one time they didn't screw it up it was a huge success making everyone rich for decades, that businesses would learn that it's better to cooperate on standards rather than compete. But I guess they're so competitive that they do it every when it's a consistently bad strategy.
You can learn some languages that have clean/consistent designs in a few hours. Lisp, C, Lua, Smalltalk ... those languages are simple, clean languages that you can learn the syntax of in a few hours.
That begin said, to really get work done you need to understand the runtime environment, GUI and other frameworks, database/persistence, messaging, performance characteristics, etc., and that's vastly more complex than the syntax of the language. Even if you learn Python in a few hours (you can), there's no way you're going to understand the frameworks and how to get real work done in a real application in a few hours. Even in an environment that takes care of most of the details (like Google App Engine) it takes a few weeks to wrap your head around the High Availability Data Store, Google's APIs, etc.
I suppose you have a chance, if all your code needs to do is run on a command line, process stdin and generate stdout with no persistence. But that doesn't describe most applications these days.
You're picking random numbers to try to make a comparison that's not meaningful. 292 groups applying for tax-exempt status had names contained "tea party", "patriot", or "9/12", who were all given more scrutiny, and only 20 groups applying for tax-exempt status had names contained "progress" or "progressive". Of course, those numbers you care about are only about a third of the groups given deeper scrutiny - the large majority of groups investigated for possibly being political groups (and this not allowed to claim tax exempt status and hide their donor lists) weren't right-wing groups, they had terms like "Democrat", "Occupy" or "Israel" in their names, and only a third of the groups were right-wing groups, so the scrutiny wasn't politically biased against right-wing groups. If anything, it affected more left-wing groups than right. It was still a bad idea to use a list of terms to trigger deeper investigation, of course, but as the "BOLO list" system was put in place by a conservative Republican who was trying to make the system more efficient and consistent, and was applied to groups across the political spectrum, and the outcome was that only a third of the groups affected were right-wing, the evidence suggest that it wasn't politically biased against the right-wing.
The political bias that is most obvious is that the Inspector General's office in charge of the IRS audit had been asked by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) "to narrowly focus on Tea Party organizations". And, of course, Issa kept most of the testimony secret, selecting a few bits to try to distort the program as anti-right-wing.
The reality is that using a list of terms to watch for is a bad mechanism, because it's substituting a mechanical rule for human judgement in making a determination about a group's being political vs. social, and that's wrong. But if you ignore the rhetoric, the facts don't support the accusation that the BOLO lists were aimed purely at right-wing groups. The real problem is that Congress passed a law requiring the IRS to make an extremely vague determination ("primarily political") so the IRS came up with a system for making that determination that pissed people off.
Looking at the lists, I can't see how most of them were ever granted tax exempt status. How can a group with a political party in its name, that raises money for and donates time to political candidates, not be a political group? The IRS should have rejected far more of the groups, both Republicans/Tea Party and Democrats, and instead of seems like all they did was ask a lot of questions and then approve almost every application, which seems a bit pathetic.
+1 this. The only time I've ever had Mac filesystem problems was when there were unexpected power loss. When you lose power while writing to the drive, bad things can happen. But I've not seen even that since Mac OS 7 or so. :-)
I used to work in supercomputing, and with terabytes of RAM and Petabytes of data I/O, you *bed* everything had ECC and parity bits every step of the way (yeah, extra parity bits in the RAM). And cosmic rays really do flip bits in RAM from time to time, and when you're running a $10M machine running a 2 month computation, you really do care about being able to detect the error, restore the machine's state to the previous snapshot, and keep running.
It's amusing to me that consumers now have enough data that this stuff starts affecting them. It'll be interesting to see if consumers start paying extra for the reliability.
The issue is that the headline and summary have HFS all over the place, and even say that "HFS corrupted files", when HFS wasn't relevant to the corruption - no standard filesystem protects you completely from disk drives' blocks going bad.
That being said, some of the high end SAN/NAS systems do have controls like forcing all blocks on the device to be read and (if needed) rewritten periodically, which would refresh the data and prevent "bit rot". But that's not done by the filesystem, either - it's a layer between the filesystem and the disk drives.
ZFS was a Sun project, and they've effectively killed it. Apple might have been looking at ZFS, but they never made it a part of their OS.
Shame, as it's a really nice filesystem. My previous file server was ZFS, and it was a delight. But it's kinda picky about what hardware it'll run on, and the old file server (dual Xeon) was just too power hungry to keep running at home...
To correct slightly - ECC isn't really about disk capacity. It's there because magnetic media isn't perfect, so even on a well written block there's a percentage chance of a read having a bit mis-read, and even on a failed read there's some percentage of good data read. The ECC lets the drive controller correct for those errors, so the vast majority of errors are corrected by the controller. A really smart controller or driver (GCC Technologies had this 20 years ago, perhaps they all do now) pays attention to ECC errors and re-writes blocks that have errors so that any marginal writes are rewritten with the user's data is protected before the block degrades to an unrecoverable failure, automatically. And if a read is so bad that ECC fails, you can re-try the read until you get a good enough read for ECC to recover the data, which almost always works, then rewrite it. If you do that, it's very, very hard to lose data on magnetic media, because it's nearly impossible for a block to go completely bad with no warning.
That being said, with the huge volumes of data that people use now, even a very rare percentage multiplied by that huge pile of data means they'll lose data. If you really care about that, you need to store your data on two physically separate devices, so a physical failure of one can't affect the other. This is expensive-ish, but that's the cost of protecting data. So an offsite backup is really the only solid option. Anything in your house can be affected by a fire, power spike, etc., so if you really care about the data, get CrashPlan or something like that.
No, in reality the IRS investigated all groups with political parties and movements in their names, since they're required by law (i.e. Congress) to only allow non-political groups to be granted tax exempt status. And the IRS investigated (and rejected) far more liberal groups than conservative groups. So (1) they were required to investigate political groups, so the investigation was not only proper, it was required by law passed by Congress, and (2) they didn't target Tea Party groups exclusively or even disproportionately.
So what were you complaining about?
Wow, the parent company was modded to zero despite being relevant, factual, and linking to more info. What pathetic person is so afraid of these facts that they mod them down instead of engaging in a rational discussion?
True, it's a "hack" but it's a pretty trivial hack.