Looks like I was answering the wrong question, too, since on rereading it appears you are concerned with hard drive storage, now. md5sum and diff (to compare the results) can do what you asked. However, what they are checking for doesn't really address the underlying problem. Checksums/hashes on the file will catch files corrupted from software errors but disk drives don't normally return corrupted data; instead, they return read errors. So, you can read the files with any program with reasonable error reporting and find out if you have a hard read error. Usually, what happens when the sector starts to go bad is that the hard drive reads it repeatedly until it gets a good read then it relocates the sector to another place on the drive fixing the problem, though some drives may wait until you rewrite the data to relocate (remapping is a configurable setting). Reading the entire file with any program will trigger this and thus it is to your advantage to read the file periodically so it gets remapped while it is still recoverable. Other than a delay, however, you may have no indication that your file was rescued. smartmontools, smartsuite, or a similar program, will report drive error statistics. That is your best chance of getting a warning, if there is a warning to be had (failures are often catastrophic with no warning). You need to turn smart on when you boot. On linux, you can use the badblocks utility (read-only mode) to scan for bad blocks. Badblocks may not get an indication of soft errors but it will read the entire disk and you can check the smart values for soft error counts.
Bear in mind that the lifetime of a hard drive is typically around 5 years. With manufacturers switching to lead free solder to meet european regulations, maybe significantly less. If you leave the drive powered down, maybe it lasts longer, maybe it doesn't. Might even shorten life if you leave it powered down all of the time (think bearings, lubrication, etc). There are a lot of aging effects (diffusion, thermal cycling, etc) even when a drive isn't powered up.
Think diversity. Back it up on CD/DVD and hard drive and assume both deteriorate with age.
You are asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is for tools that will tell you the disc is suffering from bitrot before it becomes unreadable.
These tools exist. I have run across them. Unfortunately, they only work on certain model drives that have the ability to report internal measurements. Qpxtool supports about 45 drives from 8 manufacturers. Qpxtool measures recoverable and unrecoverable errors (PI/PIF), Jitter/Beta, FE/TE (Focus Error/Tracking Error). http://qpxtool.sourceforge.net/
pxlinux was similar, however they got threatening letters and/or lawsuits from the company that makes plextools (parent company of plextor). PXscan/PXview runs under windows (pxlinux is a port of PXscan/PDview), had the same problem. Qpxtool doesn't seem to have the same problem.
Here is another program that might work on any drive but may not report there is a problem as early. It times how long the drive takes to read each sector. If the drive has to reread a sector, that takes longer. Some drives reportedly either read full speed or fail (probably means they don't have any retries). http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdck/
dvdisaster records additional recovery information. The author was apparently able to recover data from a disk after carrying it around in a backpack with no sleave. It records one ECC block per 223 sectors and can tolerate up to 32 read errors per block. The error correction files can be stored on separate media (it looks like one disk could store ECC information for a couple hundred disks). http://dvdisaster.sourceforge.net/en/
I have also noticed (on some damaged discs from a friend) that the dd program stops when there is a read error but the sdd program has the option to retry.
Record your data to multiple disks (preferably different brands) using the exact same ISO image (burn the same image multiple times or copy your disk) and store them in different locations. This gives you a form of software raid. If someone hasn't already written it, it would not be hard at all to write a program that will read a disk to an ISO image on the hard drive, retrying bad sectors and recording a list of sectors it was unable to read. Then try to read those missing sectors from a different disc. A more sophisticated version might ask the drive to return the data even in the event of a CRC error and do majority rules for each byte of the sector across three or more source disks. For added protection, use different brand drives to record the disks.
Deterioration reportedly tends to start on the outside of the disk, so if you only record half a disks worth of data it may last longer. Or use dvdisaster.
Levels of deterioration:
- Detectable only by reading internal parameters from the drive
- Drive can read the sector after multiple tries (detectable from timing)
- Drive gives up but you may be able to issue multiple read commands and get the data
- Permanent failure. May still be able to get data if you have recorded redundant info using a tool like dvdisaster
- so many read errors, or damaged lead in, such that full recovery is impossible
As far as the original problem of protecting films, I would consider the following:
- Use archival quality single layer DVD+/-R media.
One example: http://www.verbatim.com/optical/archival/ (about $1.50 each)
- Use a drive
Your points are all sound, it is really just a question of how things stack up in this case.
I would also point out, that the mutation problem applies to certain types of drugs much more than others. A big part of the problem is what, in military circles, is called IFF: Identification Friend or Foe. When you identify a microbe to attack based on some identifying trait that is not essential to its function, it can easily mutate. If the identifying trait is essential, however, or the attack takes away something which is needed without trying to identify, mutation is potentially much harder. HIV hides its true identifying characteristics inside an envelope that can change, thus the common denominator is not easily attacked.
Alcohol is used to kill many microbes. Certain types (such as fungi) are immune to it but the types that are aren't tend to evolve resistance since the attack is based on the intrinsic structure of many single celled organisms. Thus the mutation needed is along the lines of mutating from a bacteria to a fungi (a major structural change) rather than from one strain of bacteria to another similar strain. Also, mutation occurs during replication and if you stop replication completely, you also stop mutation.
There are plenty of harsh chemicals that kill HIV; unfortunately, they aren't good for humans, either. Chlorox kills HIV. It also damages human tissue in a way that makes it more susceptible to HIV infection. Which is why cleaning hyperdermics with Chlorox, which was actually recommended for a while, actually makes the problem worse (plain soap and water is better but not as good as a clean needle). Nonoxynol-9 used for sex has a similar problem.
And yes, treatment is much more effective if you give an individual as much treatment as needed and treat all individuals. In the long run, it can be cheaper to treat everybody than to treat just those who can pay. If this treatment proves effective, those who discovered it should be rewarded with a big fat one time payment rather than a per-dose profit.
In actual practice, abstinence involves denying urges until they become overwhelming and you do something reckless, actually increasing risk. Abstinence/Prohibition efforts have a long history of making problems worse, not better. Doesn't matter whether you are talking about Alcohol, Drugs, or Sex.
A healthy attitude that accepts sexuality as a good thing and involves understanding the risks and how to mitigate them would be far more effective. If the majority of the population simply engaged in standard safe sex practices, they could have twice as much sex and I seriously doubt that HIV could sustain itself as an epidemic. A tenfold reduction in risk offset by a 2 fold increase in activity is still a 5:1 reduction in total risk. People with HIV would, on average, die off long before they could transmit it. Except perhaps for concentrated black populations such as in Africa or urban areas that are apparently five times more susceptible to start with (lack of a gene present in people who descended from Bubonic Plague survivors).
The anti-sex people do far more to contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS. An study showed that in the eight years (at the time of the study) since safe sex rules were instituted in the legal brothels of Nevada, not a single sex worker there contracted HIV. HIV/AIDS was largely ignored due to the anti-sex people when it primarily affected the gay population instead of nipping it in the bud. And gay people were told not to have gay sex (i.e. Abstinence) which significantly delayed safe sex practices in the gay community. And rather than distribute clean needles, IV drug users are told to abstain. The anti-sex folks oppose sex education in schools (which reduces the risk of both pregnancy and diseases).
While MSM (gay male) still has the highest incidence of new cases, the growth rate has started to level off even though 30% had not been HIV tested in the last year, 34% had unprotected anal sex with a casual partner in the last year, and 47% did not know the HIV status of their last casual partner. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5506a1. htm?s_cid=ss5506a1_e
Obviously, this guy doesn't remember his PC history very well.
IIRC, many years ago (1980s), a reporter from one of the PC magazines installed a legal copy of a piece of Microsoft Software. The software printed the message "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Now trashing your program disk." and his hard drive was trashed. That was when Microsoft (and most other companies) stopped using copy protection. It was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The more complicated the ballot is, the easier it is to do it from your PC than in a voting booth. On your PC at least you can look stuff up.
Internet voting is also a lot easier than the ballot box when it comes to multiple regions. You can vote thousands of times in thousands of regions all from the comfort of your home. Thats the rub. Validating voters is fairly easy. Validating that the vote being transmitted is the actual vote of the person in front of the computer, when there are millions of compromised computers, that is the problem. Voting machines can't be trusted either. Whether you vote on a voting machine or at home, the vote needs to be printed in a SINGLE form that is simultaneously human and machine readable (such as check boxes next to names in an OCR font, not text and a barcode) on a tangible physical medium such as paper and the tangible medium presented for counting where it is counted by multiple independent tabulators.
Home printers can't really be trusted for print quality which is why you would want to use a voting machine.
Voting machines themselves can't be trusted. The purpose of the voting machine should be to render the vote onto paper in a totally unambiguous format (scanning it as it is printed to check for print quality) that is subsequently verified by the voter. And in all cases, at least one box must be checked, even if it is just the no-vote box. The voting machine's job is to eliminate loose chads, dimples, erasures, marks added after the fact where the voter had no preference, multiple votes, missing votes, etc. The paper cancels out the weakness in the machines and the machines cancel out the weakness in the paper.
Tabulators need to be secured by having multiple tabulators operated by both partisans from multiple parties and non-partisan watchdogs and by having every vote listed individually by a unique serial number rather than mere total. Serial numbers should not be traceable to a particular individual. Voters can't take home an actual receipt for their vote if vote buying or thugs outside the polls is a concern but they can take home a random receipt from a raffle drum which they can then check online to see if that ballot was listed on the right candidates list. Assume that they won't file a complaint if they got a receipt from a voter who voted differently so around 50% won't be checked but that means that the other 50% can be checked for accuracy. It then becomes impossible to change a significant number of votes without detection.
Google didn't see overtemp failures only because google kept their drives cool. Possibly too cold. Their graph cuts off at only 10 degrees hotter than a typical PC. But if you extrapolate the data on the right hand side of the graph, you see that drives fail at higher temperatures just as expected. Also, they appear to have looked at average temperatures over the life of the drive, not the temperatures near the time of failure. And they totally ignored temperature fluctuations.
In fact, the conclusion one should reasonably draw from their data (if it can be trusted and I called that into question saturday) is that drives are designed to operate at 40 degrees C (which, happens to be the operating temperature of the hard drive on this machine right now in a typical mid tower case) and that any deviation higher or lower will result in increased failure rates:
But it is also possible that the cooling systems, and not the temperatures themselves, are possible for the drive failures seen in googles systems. They had some hard drives (the ones particularly responsible for the low temp failures) that were operating at around room temperature. With light fan cooling, a drive operates at around 20 celsius degrees above ambient. So how do you get an operating temperature around room temperature? You cool the server room to freezing, you put A/C evaporator coils inside the server boxes or racks, you water cool them, or you sandblast the drives with hurricane force winds (slight exaggeration). All of those approaches raise the possibility of creating environmental hazards other than temperature.
But it is quite possible that it is just the temperature and that drive manufacturers have done the sensible thing and optimized their designs for the typical operating temperature of a drive. I also point out that there are a number of failure modes associated with over-temp, under-temp, and temperature variation.
In a typical PC, the most likely cause of an overtemp failure is a fan failure.
Using google, ironically, I found at least one example dating back to 2003 of people discussing the effects of too low an operating temperature (i.e. room temperature) through excessive cooling adversely affecting hard drives (not even getting into industrial or outdoor temperature ranges). And I wasn't even looking for that: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php ?t=7677
Conclusion: For best results use a closed loop temperature control system with redundant variable speed fans to keep the drive itself (not the ambient air) at a constant temperature of 40 degrees C. Or operate your machine with moderate cooling in an environment comfortable for humans and use software to power down the drive and raise alarms if it gets much above 50 degrees C. Whether you should shut down if the drive gets below 25 degrees C (after time to come up to operating temp) is debatable. If you have had a major heating system failure or a broken window in winter, the drives own heat might be giving it some protection but the drive is also more vulnerable when operating than when shut down.
I am not advocating the mercury link. However, IIRC the theory is that about 0.4% of the population has a genetic defect that makes them more susceptible to mercury and those are the people who are affected by the mercury in the vaccine.
Regular fluorescents and compact fluorescents are available in dimmable varieties. A friend of mine actually made a color organ from fluorescent lights some 25 years ago to demonstrate rather dramatically that it was possible. Newer technology makes it much easier. It is just a matter of having a smart electronic ballast and a way to communicate the dimming commands. Some ballasts for regular fluorescents have a 0-10V input, X-10 control, or other electronic input. Some ballasts also can work downstream of a regular incandescent dimmer; you only use the top range of the dimmer (so the ballast has enough power to work on) and the ballast senses that you have reduced the duty cycle by say 25% and reduces the current through the bulb by 50%. A dimmable CFL will cost around $18 (less than I used to pay for the regular variety but enough for half a dozen now). Whether your fixture takes 4 foot long tubes, circular tubes, floodlights, or compact fluorescent/ordinary lightbulbs, there are dimmable replacements for either the bulb, balast, or fixture.
Yep. But the newfangled device supposedly uses cheap organic materials instead of expensive metals. Of course, looking at their picture you see hundreds of atoms of gold for every organic molecule. But maybe they can make the device cheaper by using cheaper metals and only cut the efficiency from something like 2% to 1%. And the thing probably melts a lot quicker than the old fashioned thermoelectric modules. Not to mention that "nanotechnology" tends to be a short way of saying not remotely economically viable to produce.
Now if we had a way to convert all the energy vaporware out there to real vapors, we could run a turbine and actually get some electricity.
I am all for doing the research but the hype that tends to surround it does get ridiculous. Most of these breakthroughs we read about are extreme long shots. They usually start out inferior to present technology and unfortunately, they usually stay that way. A long time ago Bell Labs invented a device that could perform some of the functions of a vacuum tube. Do enough research and maybe we will get another transistor.
This device currently appears to have nothing but disadvantages compared to existing technology but it does open up new avenues of research.
Well, if you stick it on the engine block you lose the air cooling, meaning the radiator has to work harder and the engine fries faster when the radiator fails. Plus you are possibly reducing the carnot efficiency of the engine. But if you splice it into the hose between the engine and the radiator, you get something. The exhaust manifold does offer a significant temperature differential, though it would probably fry the device and overheat the manifold (due to the insulating effect).
What do you do with the energy? You put it into motors (if you have enough of it (unlikely)) or use it to charge the battery reducing the load from the alternator. Or you run the alternator backwards as a motor to add a small boost.
Using the energy is the easy part. Getting it is the hard part.
The waste heat heats the atmosphere once. But the fossil fuels we burn to compensate for the inefficiency create CO2 which is a gift that keeps on giving in terms of the destructive greenhouse effect. So the direct heat contribution is dwarfed by the indirect effects.
Except that this technology requires a substantial temperature differential to generate power. That temperature differential gets added to your CPU junction temperature. To overcome this, you would need an enormous heat sink to reduce the heat sink to ambient loss.
In the winter, the heat generated by the computer heats your house which reduces the waste. In the summer, however, you AC has to work harder. You could save a substantial amount of energy by hanging your PC out the window.
I think you are partly right in this assumption, but for the wrong reasons. Some failure modes are a function of temperature and other failure modes are a function of temperature variation. A long time ago
platter expansion and contraction was a major cause of problems when drives used stepper motor positioning;
since they switched to servo positioning, the drive automatically tracks the expansion and contraction
of the platters and that is pretty much a non-issue as long as the coating on the platters is not
affected.
This report reads like it was done by statisticians, not engineers. Handling of temperature, in particular, reveals this. As someone who has designed electronic circuits, been involved in reliability
analysis, and repaired broken computers and other equipment at both the board level and chip level, I get the impression that the writers have not done any of those things.
Also, the conditions in google RAID arrays are likely very different than may
be encountered in many other areas such as office and desktop PCs. In the raid arrays drives are not powered down daily and you also expect better cooling design.
The higher failure of lower average temperature drives is a definite eyebrow raiser. Not because it
disproves the common wisdom (which still applies in the expected range) but because it is probably the clue that some important data was overlooked. If you actually extrapolate the right side of the graph, you see that failure does increase dramatically with temperature over the range of temperatures that would be experienced in normal cooling situations and particularly cooling failures.
Google has drives that are running at room temperature? This could point to some serious temperature fluctuation, measurement error, or to extremely aggressive cooling local cooling (chilled water or freon A/C) or a server room that is chilled like a walk in freezer. In which case, those drive failures are probably caused by moisture.
At normal operating temperatures, a drive will drive off moisture. At the cooler temperatures, there
may be condensation issues on the drive itself or on cooling components near the drive.
The reason that we don't see high temperature rate failures is that the sample of temperatures
is abnormally low. The most common temperature related failures would be when you have a
cooling failure or poor cooling. Good cooling does improve the lifetime of the drive. That does
not mean, however, that cooling to extremes is a good idea. In a typical PC, the drive is going
to run at somewhere around 40 degrees C. The drive on this computer, right now, which is mounted
in a typical mid tower case in a slightly chilly room (it is winter here) that would be a lot
more chilly without three computers heating it, is running at 39degrees. That temperature corresponds
to the crest of the failure vs. temperature curve on googles graphs. What temperature do
you think drive manufacturers would optimize their designs for? A typical commercial grade chip is
rated 0 to 70 degrees C so the thresholds would be expected to be optimized for 35 degrees C.
Drive manufacturers would expect the normal operating temperature to be around 40 degrees C. The paper says they use consumer grade drives. The
datasheet for a WD 250GB hard drive says the minimum operating (ambient, not drive temperature) is 5
degrees C (41F) to 55 degrees C (131F). I noticed in doing a google search that some drives specified
a minimum storage temperature of -13C.
Also, if the average temperature is low, that may be an indication that the drives in that particular
population are drives that are spun down or even powered down much of the time, perhaps because
the particular datasets they are serving are infrequently used or because they data is entirely
cached in RAM.
Also, they talked about average temperature over the life
While TFA did not make the point very well, the author may have a point. To call it the linux foundation instead of the "something linux something foundation" creates a lot of expectations that are not likely to be met.
When someone casually encounters the name, what expectations might they reasonably have:
- That the organization is the producer of linux. The Apache Software Foundation produces
apache, for example.
- That the organization speaks for the linux community. A pay-to-play board composed of
representatives of various huge corporations can not credibly do that.
- That it owns the trademark "Linux"
- That it is they trustee of Linux intellectual property.
- That Linus Torvalds is at least a board member. There is some very ambiguous language which
suggests they may sponsor him.
- that the board includes representatives of the major distributions.
- that it speaks for or at least balances the interest the linux creators, linux users, linux
distributions, and the other open source
software that is included in linux distributions, to the extent that that is possible.
- that it promotes linux
- that it contributes to linux. By choosing the name "Linux Foundation", they imply a far more intimate association with the linux community than appears to actually exist. Of the reasonable expectations listed, only the last two seem to apply.
Yeah, seats on the board is a good way to raise capitol. But this appears to be a "Computer Industry Consortium for the Advancement of Linux". Which could be a good thing, if that was what it was called. Even "Foundation for Linux" would be a better name.
Someone pointed out that patents could be an issue where a corporate board could diverge significantly from the community at large.
The Free Software Foundation is another deceptively named organization. It absolutely does not represent the free software community. Instead it represents the viral license fanatics who produce software that is less free than the permissive license and public domain communities and advocate that developers use the less free viral licenses for their software.
Well, I didn't make money off Y2K and I agree with the grandparent. Y2K wasn't a big disaster partly because a fuss was made about it.
Now, I have to admit that when Y2K was first publicised, I snorted at it. After all, I had been writing programs for 20 years at that point that were immune to Y2K. Even when space considerations (and I cut my teeth on a system with 256 bytes of RAM) required the use of 2 digit dates they still took rollover into account. And, of course, I used Un*x systems. But then I realized that other programmers were not as careful - especially cobol programmers.
Grandparent described an installation that took months to fix; if they had waited until 2000-01-01 to start, they very well could have been out of business. Also, all of those bugs occurring on the same day would have severely overtaxed the available people to fix the problem. And we simply wont hear about the severity of critical errors that were fixed because management doesn't want the public to know how negligent they were before the hype. It might lead them to wonder about what else is held together with chewing gum and baling wire.
Y2K was at least partly a case of a self-unfulfilling prophecy.
Fortunately, most critical control systems may be time sensitive but usually aren't very date sensitive.
Yes, Y2K was way over-hyped. But would it have gotten through the thick skulls of management, and less competent programmers, if it had not been? I even caught Y2K style bugs introduced into important systems after the hype.
It also turns out that a number of Y2K precautions and disaster plans ended up being used on 2001-09-11.
Fix-on-failure has another name: incompetence.
In the case of the flu, another pandemic is inevitable whether it is avian flu or not.
You give the industry bean counters far too much credit. If you (for reasonable values of "you") go down to the store and movies are priced at $6 each, you walk out with 5, spending $30. If they are priced at $20 each, you walk out with one... or zero - spending an average of say $10. So, if they price the movie reasonably, they get half of $30; if they overprice it, they get half of $10. If movies are overpriced, consumers rent, share, copy, buy used, have movie parties, watch the same movies repeatedly, do without, choose a more cost effective mode of entertainment, or simply do without. Also, in much of the world they buy bollywood instead of hollywood. Meanwhile, they have to spend big bucks on marketing (including big bucks on brand name stars) to recoup a fraction of the market they have killed. And because of the big bucks, they are afraid to take any risk and so turn out the same old formulaic shit.
The added profits of raising the price, preventing copying, etc. are an illusion. They love to multiply the number of copies by the retail price of the movies and call that lost profits but the underlying assumption that the copiers had both the money and the inclination to purchase an original is wrong in the majority of cases. They also look at profit per copy sold and neglect the effect of price on number of units sold.
Meanwhile, they fail to give an upgrade price (i.e. trade in) for DVDs or VHS which, along with the copy protection hassles, not only discourages people moving to HD formats it makes people somewhat reluctant to buy DVDs today. One company came out with double sided combo disks with DVD on one side and HD on the other; warner has announced they will be using that format (saves space on retailer shelves, too). At current rates of adoption, HD-DVD and Blu-ray may well be superceded by holographic or polarization based disks before they are a widely adopted, while those may offer diminishing returns for movies (at least originals) they are a lot better for backing up your computer.
The ability to copy doesn't substantially hurt sales of reasonably priced products. Books are still sold. VHS movies sold well in spite of being trivial to copy. Stupidity and greed hurts sales. The ability to copy keeps corporations honest. We have seen the great lengths corporations will go, implementing copy protection and buying politicians, just to avoid being honest. Look what happened to US automakers when they resorted to buying politicians instead of producing fuel efficient cars; their sales tanked.
And the much feared "perfect digital copy", that is the basis of much corrupt policy, doesn't seem to be much of an issue in the real world. I suspect an order of magnitude more DVD's have been copied compressed onto single layer media ($0.30) than double layer media ($2.00). This tells us a lot about the perceived worth of a copy, the discretionary income of the copiers, and/or the perceived worth of the movies that are copied rather than purchased. In many cases, it also is an indication that the copy is just a stop gap measure until one can afford the original. Copiers often happen to movie buffs who provide value to the movie industry by promoting those movies which are actually worth promoting. And I think we will see a lot of HD movies copied onto single layer DVDs as well. Yeah, you get "perfect" copies of single layer disks; that just means the original was an imperfect copy to start with.
You are right that the art of movie making will survive, even if there were real actual profits to be lost. I have seen perfectly good movies made for as little as $4000 and there are a lot of good movies made for under a million. The more modest budgets even force people to solve problems artistically rather than just throwing money at the problem. There are some types of movies that actually require expensive special effects such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Perfect Storm, a lot of science fiction, etc. to t
Actually, the attempt to prevent a context switch would be a dead giveaway and make it that much easier to find the key. With emulators, hardware assisted debuggers, code morphing processors, etc anything in the CPU is readily accessible. The only way around this is to not let the CPU do the decoding at all but push that to the video card or the monitor. Which they would love to do, I am sure, but it will just create problems for consumers of a magnitude to great to go unnoticed. Having to spend more $$$ for hardware upgrades will cause a backlash. The context switch prevention gag is also likely to drive interrupt latencies to too high a level and cause problems, as well.
They may also try limiting computer playback to treacherous computing platforms only thereby cutting themselves off from millions of consumers.
"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities." -- Sir Winston Churchill
The MPAA folks will try to exhaust all other possibilities. In the meantime, they will alienate consumers who think that actually buying a legitimate copy is the fair thing to do; there is nothing fair about spending money to buy broken products. And of course, there are the consumers who buy the product to avoid hassles; if the "legitimate" product comes with more hassles than the copy, that goes out the window too.
And all of this so they can "protect" their ability to price movies at a price that becomes a powerful disincentive to purchase. At $6 per copy, the average consumer will buy any movie they have any interest in; a $20+ per copy, they will probably spend significantly less total on movies than they would have at $6 per copy.
If you treat the customer like the enemy, they will do their best to live up to your expectations.
Just to clarify the lowest bidder comment. The price of mineral resources tracks the highest cost of those lowest cost producers necessary to meet
demand. While buyers purchase from the lowest bidders, the lowest bidders
will raise their price to just a hair below the highest cost producer needed
to be brought online to satisfy current demand levels. So, the price never really tracks the lowest bidder (unless they can produce 100% of demand or unless they are not aware of what others are being paid), though it may look like it. By lowest bidder
in this case, I meant the lowest cost producers in a situation where the low cost producers could meet demand would set the price and the others would basically shut down or not startup production. So, if you have various cost groups of producers each capable of meeting 10% of current demand at $0.10, $0.20, $0.30,... Then the current price will be $1 with the cheap producers getting a huge windfall and the $1.10 producer not being able to sell their goods. In that example, price would be linear with demand but in the real world, extraction costs are likely to be non-linear (perhaps exponential) vs. demand.
Market prices reflect short term scarcity, not long term scarcity. What matters is if the rate of consumption exceeds the rate of extraction, not the long term availibility of a resource. Corporations are concerned with short term (quarterly report) profits and routinely sacrifice the long term. Imagine what would happen if a copper mining company were to raise the price due to long term concerns in the current market. As long as enough other copper suppliers are willing to sell at the current prices, the corporation in question would lose 100% of its sales. Its next quarterly report would be dismal, if it stayed in business that long. Therefore, corporate management will continue to sell copper at lower prices and simply lay off employees and golden parachute out when supply ran out. The exception is if there is a widespread price fixing but the copper equivalent of OPEC is defunct (and the US rendered OPEC pretty ineffective as well through political and military means).
As long as there is enough copper that can be extracted cheaply to satisfy current consumption, copper prices are likely to reflect the lowest bidder.
Copper prices will increase, however, if the cost of extraction for even a small portion of the mining needed to extract the current copper usage rate goes up. Imagine if current copper consumption is 1 million tons per year (actually, closer to 13.6 million)
and we can extract 750 thousand tons/year at $1/pound and 500 thousand tons
per year at $2/pound. At that point, the price of all copper will go to around $2/pound because no one who can extract it at $1/pound is in danger of losing sales by raising the price to just shy of $2/pound since demand is sufficient to guarantee the purchase of all of the "cheap" copper even though after windfall pricing cheap copper will only be a few cents cheaper than expensive copper. How fast copper (or most other natural resources) can be extracted depends on how much you are willing to pay for it if you are above the level where it is all easy to extract, with delays to deploy new mines or bring idle mines online.
When demand exceeds total current production capacity, then simple supply and demand kick in and drive prices up even further.
You were dead wrong on your claims that there is plenty of oil availible. Sure, you may read about new oil discoveries all the time. But the rate of
new oil discoveries is much lower than the rate at which oil is depleted.
The price of oil has risen, though, not because of scarcity of total supply but because the current demand exceeds the rate at which oil can be extracted from the cheap easy oil fields. You have made the common mistake of looking at a numerator while ignoring the denominator or putting it into context. Even worse, you didn't even look at the whole numerator. New mine discoveries are meaningless without being compared to things like the number of mine closures (and their production levels), total consumption, and relative cost of extraction.
In some ways, the oil shortage may mitigate the copper demand - the third world simply is not going to rise to our standard of living due to energy costs; it is more likely that US standards will decline towards those of the third world. On the other hand, a scarcity of copper is an issue for alternate energy. Wind turbines and electric motors on hybrid and electric cars frequently use significant amounts of copper. Fortunately, we can probably substitute aluminum for the bulk of that with some loss of efficiency. But the time for that is before we use large amounts of copper in those applications, not after.
The worlds largest producer of copper is Chile, which produces 36% of the world supply and more than the next several largest producers combined.
I have been there and seen the small backyard scale smelting operations; large scale copper mining has largely displaced the small scale operations, in recent years, however. If Chile decided to take a long term view and levy a substantial tax on resource extraction, it could double copper prices overnight. But that would probably be followed by a US backed coup attempt
and other countries would ramp up production.
Seriously, one of the first things I thought about was if it can do cats it could do people and that might be a good thing. In the US, what are
my alternatives when I die? Being pumped full of toxic chemicals, put in an expensive box that uses material and energy resources, and burried in the ground or being cremated which uses a lot of fuel when done individualy. Both are environmentally bad and will be worse when fuel is scarce. Just digging a hole and dumping my body in without toxins and letting it decompose in the normal amount of time doesn't seem to be an option here legally. On the other hand, you don't want people or animals being killed to produce fuel in a shortage. No idea how many nasty chemicals are used in his process and whether any disease organisms can survive but TDP is said to even be able to destroy mad cow prions that survive incineration. As long as there is no foul play, I don't have a problem with the idea of soylent diesel. Paren't posters yield calculations were way off, though; the body is mostly water.
This is off the narrower topic of entertainment appliances but on the larger topic of appliance intercommunications and home networking.
One area where it would be beneficial for consumer appliances to communicate is an area where most consumers (except for a few home automation or alternate energy buffs) don't yet realize the need (not that many consumers aren't ignorant of the potential benifits
of entertainment appliances interoperating seamlessly) And in many ways, energy is the more
important area for interoperation.
As cheap energy becomes more scarce it would be useful if the Inverter (Photovoltaic, wind, or fuel cell cogeneration plant) and heavy power consuming appliances interoperate reducing peak load. Examples would be electric heaters, air conditioners, Washing Machines, Dryers, Dishwashers, Lights, Microwaves, crock pots, stoves, refrigerators, and toaster ovens. Pop a burrito
in the Microwave and the Washer, Dryer, and/or dishwasher automatically pause. Pop a load in each of the washer, dryer, and dishwasher before going to bed. The washing machine waits for the dishwasher to finish before it starts and the dryer waits for the washing machine. The $50
more you spend on each appliance (if widely produced, several hundred if not) is offset by
the lower cost of inverters and solar panels.
Some cheap power consuming appliances such as microwaves and toaster ovens can perhaps be passive participants. When the load on the inverter is too high because you are toasting a bagel, it tells the smarter large appliances to pause. But there is a small advantage to having the microwave and toaster oven warn the inverter a second before they start hogging power.
Many devices can potentially delay their energy use at least some of the time. Dishwasher, Washer, Dryer, heater, AC, refrigerator (if the door hasn't been opened or it has phase change thermal storage), crock pot, etc. Most electric cooking appliances want instant gratification.
Even those who are connected to the utility grid as their primary source of power could benifit in the long run from time of use metering. In times of low demand, the utility can charge a lower price. Some appliances (washer/dryer/dishwasher) can delay their electricity use until after the 3PM power crunch on a summer day (when everyones air conditioner is running). In a better designed house with thermal mass, the AC might run at night instead. Time Of Use metering already exists but is primarily used by people with grid tie solar systems and certain commercial users.
If you have a house with photovoltaics, you are more likely to be aware of the savings. Paying
an extra $1K to reduce the cost of your solar
system from $30K to $25K is an obvious win. Of course, these would often be combined with other conservation features so you might pay $3K extra to save $10K. If you are connected to the utility grid, you are still paying the extra $5K to 10K (on power plant construction, operating, fuel costs, carbon emissions certificates, nuclear waste disposal costs, etc.), but the cost is spread over time and the cause/effect relationships are largely hidden from the consumer. And when oil shortages and global warming require us to shut down fossil fuel plants in favor of renewable energy plants,
the capital costs passed on to consumers will get higher. Even if you use nuclear power instead of renewable energy power plants, it is cheaper and better for the environment to build 2 power plants and minimize peak load than build 4 plants.
Some appliances can wait a certain amount of time for cheap power before resorting to using expensive power. So, they might wait until the sun is shining or the wind is blowing; whether you are off grid, using grid tie, or buying power from an electric company that has some renewable energy plants (that therfore need less storage capacity),
the benefit is still there.
Some appliances can potentially store energy cheaper than using regenerative fuel cells or batterie
Wristbands with RFID/barcode/human readable serial number
could be used to (voluntarily) track victims like packages. This would, among other things, reduce load on cell phone networks from (often futile) attempts to deterimine
the location of missing people or reassure family members.
Serial number must include checkdigits at the very least. A random password is also printed on the reverse side (for logging in remotely after leaving area).
Wristband serial #12345678
2004-08-29T1200
Wristband assigned to victim on board
helicopter NG1234 after retrieving from
rooftop at latittude/longitude.
Status: uninjured
2004-08-29T1205
Audio recording of victims identity
recorded (enroute). lat/long.
2005-08-29T1210
Data uploaded to FEMA webservers via
Wifi-Satelite uplink ABC123 at New Orleans
Superdome (as helicopter approached)
2005-08-29T1213
Western Union Cash Transfer ID assigned
KAT12345678
(this allows people to wire money without
knowing the destination. Strong crypto
required on RFID tag for verification in
case wallet lost).
2005-08-29T1212
Leaving helicopter at latitude/longitude.
destination: new orleans superdome.
2005-08-29T1213
data upload
2005-08-29T1220
Swiped entering new orleans astrodome
lat/long
2005-08-29T1300
Audio recording transcribed (in, for example topeka, kansas). Spelling errors likely.
Name: Jon Q public
2005-08-29T1330
Friend/family member registered for
status notifications: Bob Public bpublic@sprintpcs.net
2005-08-29T1400
Name/address entered at data entry station
DEF456 at new orleans superdome
Name: John Q Public
Address: 1234 Bourboun Street, New Orleans
12345
Medical Alert: none (private field)
2005-08-29T1430
Checked email at email station QRZ100 at
new orleans superdome. station lat/long
2005-08-29T1435
Public message recorded at email station
QRZ100. station lat/long.
Public message:
I am ok but my cat drowned. Lost my wallet evacuating house. Don't have my address book.
2005-09-02T1000
Leaving new orleans superdome station XYZ456. station lat/long. Destination: bus
2005-09-02T1015
Boarding bus #1234.
station lat/long.
Destination: Houston astrodome
2005-09-02T1017
Data Upload
2005-09-02T1800
Leaving bus #1234
Destination: Houston astrodome
portable station lat/long.
2005-09-02T1812
Entering houston astrodome
station lat/long
2005-09-02T1830
Checked email. Email Station UIP888, houston astrodome. station lat/long.
2005-09-02T1845
Visited mobile western union station WU-K-101. Location: houston astrodome lat/long.
2005-09-02T1917
Leaving Houston Astrodome lat/long.
Destination: taxi to airport
2005-09-02T2000
Logged into FEMA via internet
(from kiosk at houston airport).
Public Message:
I am taking UA flight 456 to Tucson, AZ.
I will be staying at my brother bob's house:
444 main street, tucson AZ 11111, phone: 987-654-3210, email: bob@tucson-online.org
2005-09-02T2100
Logged in via internet. Email Forwarding
address set to jpublic@earthlink.net
2005-09-02T2102
Logged in via internet. Snail mail forwarding addre
Even with 100% efficient power transmission, the
space station you described is capable of powering new york city, not the US.
10,000m^2 * pi * 1000W/m^2 * 20/100 (efficiency) = 62GW. This is much lower than your projected
yield of 1TW. So, now we are looking at a much smaller dent in the US energy budget. You are taking about a solar
cell area of 314Mm^2 (typo: 300Km^2 is 300K square meters, not 300K square kilometers). There are about 100 million households in the US. So, you can take the same solar cells and spread them out with 3 meters on each household, generating about 620W each. In geosynchronous orbit your power station would generate full power 20 hours a day which is better than earth based solar. The efficiency of the loses in the maser, power receiver, and transmission grid would have to be at least 20%. Unlike the 98% maser efficiency you mention, the record efficiency set by russians in 2000 was 35%. By the time you
take the other loses into account, your space based system will probably just break even with
a ground based system. Further, your system has a single point of failure. And your system has centralized control with a utility company monopoly. Better (and cheaper) to put solar
collectors on each house. It would probably work out that households would pay about the same price for ten years as with the centralized scheme but for the next twenty years they
get power for free. Even if rooftop panels weighed 50,000 times more, it would still be 126 times cheaper (in terms of pure work) to lift them 20 feet onto rooftops than 127 million feet into orbit. That energy difference would help pay for the added materials. But if the nanotube solar cells had enough tensile strength to withstand wind, hail, snow, and rain, one can imagine them simply stretched on frames, cutting material costs.
I would like to see solar panels on every house,
a concentrating solar collecter the size of a large satellite dish driving a sterling cycle heat pump to provide heating, hot water, cooling, and refrigeration in each yard, and the mostly wasted space in most peoples back yards used to grow biofuels instead of grass. Additional space in
rural areas is used to grow more biofuels or for solar towers with wind turbines as well. Houses can be remodelled to improve solar gain in winter and reduce it in the summer. Incandescent lighting would be eliminated.
The floating rafts are an interesting idea though there would be issues with marine life. These would be to whales what a parchute is to a submerged skydiver. The problem isn't so much having land to put photocells on as having cheap
photocells to put on the land. Cities are a problem, though, and that is where larger projects can come in.
If you want space based power, I will meet you half way. Well, actually about a thousandth of the way. Flying Electric Generators look interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like I was answering the wrong question, too, since on rereading it appears you are concerned with hard drive storage, now.
md5sum and diff (to compare the results) can do what you asked. However, what they are checking for doesn't really address the underlying problem.
Checksums/hashes on the file will catch files corrupted from software errors but disk drives don't normally return corrupted data; instead, they
return read errors. So, you can read the files with any program with reasonable error reporting and find out if you have a hard read error.
Usually, what happens when the sector starts to go bad is that the hard drive reads it repeatedly until it gets a good read then it relocates
the sector to another place on the drive fixing the problem, though some drives may wait until you rewrite the data to relocate (remapping is a configurable
setting).
Reading the entire file with any program will trigger this and thus it is to your
advantage to read the file periodically so it gets remapped while it is still recoverable. Other than a delay, however, you may have no indication that
your file was rescued. smartmontools, smartsuite, or a similar program, will report drive error statistics. That is your best chance of getting a warning, if there is a warning to be had (failures are often catastrophic with no warning). You need to turn smart on when you boot. On linux, you can use the
badblocks utility (read-only mode) to scan for bad blocks. Badblocks may not get an indication of soft errors but it will read the entire disk and
you can check the smart values for soft error counts.
Bear in mind that the lifetime of a hard drive is typically around 5 years. With manufacturers switching to lead free solder to meet european regulations, maybe significantly less. If you leave the drive powered down, maybe it lasts longer, maybe it doesn't. Might even shorten life if you leave it powered down all of the time (think bearings, lubrication, etc). There are a lot of aging effects (diffusion, thermal cycling, etc) even when a drive isn't powered up.
Think diversity. Back it up on CD/DVD and hard drive and assume both deteriorate with age.
You are asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is for tools that will tell you the disc is suffering from bitrot before it becomes unreadable.
These tools exist. I have run across them. Unfortunately, they only work on certain model drives that have the ability to report internal measurements.
Qpxtool supports about 45 drives from 8 manufacturers. Qpxtool measures recoverable and unrecoverable errors (PI/PIF), Jitter/Beta, FE/TE (Focus Error/Tracking Error).
http://qpxtool.sourceforge.net/
pxlinux was similar, however they got threatening letters and/or lawsuits from the company that makes plextools (parent company of plextor).
PXscan/PXview runs under windows (pxlinux is a port of PXscan/PDview), had the same problem.
Qpxtool doesn't seem to have the same problem.
Nero appears to have some sort of disk quality test.
Windows software for testing before your record (FE/TE): http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=192488
Here is another program that might work on any drive but may not report there is a problem as early. It times how long the drive takes to read each sector.
If the drive has to reread a sector, that takes longer. Some drives reportedly either read full speed or fail (probably means they don't have any retries).
http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdck/
dvdisaster records additional recovery information. The author was apparently able to recover data from a disk after carrying it around in a backpack
with no sleave. It records one ECC block per 223 sectors and can tolerate up to 32 read errors per block. The error correction files can be stored
on separate media (it looks like one disk could store ECC information for a couple hundred disks).
http://dvdisaster.sourceforge.net/en/
I have also noticed (on some damaged discs from a friend) that the dd program stops when there is a read error but the sdd program has the option to retry.
Record your data to multiple disks (preferably different brands) using the exact same ISO image (burn the same image multiple times or copy your disk) and store them in different locations. This gives you a form of software raid. If someone hasn't already written it, it would not be hard at all to write a program that will
read a disk to an ISO image on the hard drive, retrying bad sectors and recording a list of sectors it was unable to read. Then try to read those missing sectors from a different disc. A more sophisticated version might ask the drive to return the data even in the event of a CRC error and do majority rules for each byte
of the sector across three or more source disks. For added protection, use different brand drives to record the disks.
Deterioration reportedly tends to start on the outside of the disk, so if you only record half a disks worth of data it may last longer. Or use dvdisaster.
Levels of deterioration:
- Detectable only by reading internal parameters from the drive
- Drive can read the sector after multiple tries (detectable from timing)
- Drive gives up but you may be able to issue multiple read commands and get the data
- Permanent failure. May still be able to get data if you have recorded redundant info using a tool like dvdisaster
- so many read errors, or damaged lead in, such that full recovery is impossible
As far as the original problem of protecting films, I would consider the following:
- Use archival quality single layer DVD+/-R media.
One example: http://www.verbatim.com/optical/archival/ (about $1.50 each)
- Use a drive
Your points are all sound, it is really just a question of how things stack up in this case.
I would also point out, that the mutation problem applies to certain types of drugs much more than others. A big part of the problem is what, in military circles, is called IFF: Identification Friend or Foe. When you identify a microbe to attack based on some identifying trait that is not essential to its function, it
can easily mutate. If the identifying trait is essential, however, or the attack takes away something which is needed without trying to identify, mutation is potentially much harder. HIV hides its true identifying characteristics inside an envelope that can change, thus the common denominator is not easily attacked.
Alcohol is used to kill many microbes. Certain types (such as fungi) are immune to it but the types that are aren't tend to evolve resistance since the attack is based on the intrinsic structure of many single celled organisms. Thus the mutation needed is along the lines of mutating from a bacteria to a fungi (a major structural change) rather than from one strain of bacteria to another similar strain. Also, mutation occurs during replication and if you stop replication completely, you also stop mutation.
There are plenty of harsh chemicals that kill HIV; unfortunately, they aren't good for humans, either. Chlorox kills HIV. It also damages human tissue
in a way that makes it more susceptible to HIV infection. Which is why cleaning hyperdermics with Chlorox, which was actually recommended for a while, actually makes the problem worse (plain soap and water is better but not as good as a clean needle). Nonoxynol-9 used for sex has a similar problem.
And yes, treatment is much more effective if you give an individual as much treatment as needed and treat all individuals. In the long run, it can be cheaper to treat everybody than to treat just those who can pay. If this treatment proves effective, those who discovered it should be rewarded with a big fat one time payment rather than a per-dose profit.
In actual practice, abstinence involves denying urges until they become overwhelming and you do something reckless, actually increasing risk.
. htm?s_cid=ss5506a1_e
Abstinence/Prohibition efforts have a long history of making problems worse, not better. Doesn't matter whether you are talking about Alcohol, Drugs,
or Sex.
A healthy attitude that accepts sexuality as a good thing and involves understanding the risks and how to mitigate them would be far more effective.
If the majority of the population simply engaged in standard safe sex practices, they could have twice as much sex and I seriously doubt that HIV could
sustain itself as an epidemic. A tenfold reduction in risk offset by a 2 fold increase in activity is still a 5:1 reduction in total risk. People with
HIV would, on average, die off long before they could transmit it. Except perhaps for concentrated black populations such as in Africa or urban areas that are apparently five times more susceptible to start with (lack of a gene present in people who descended from Bubonic Plague survivors).
The anti-sex people do far more to contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS. An study showed that in the eight years (at the time of the study) since safe sex rules were instituted in the legal brothels of Nevada, not a single sex worker there contracted HIV. HIV/AIDS was largely ignored due to the anti-sex people when it primarily affected the gay population instead of nipping it in the bud. And gay people were told not to have gay sex (i.e. Abstinence) which significantly delayed safe sex practices in the gay community. And rather than distribute clean needles, IV drug users are told to abstain. The anti-sex folks oppose sex education in schools (which reduces the risk of both pregnancy and diseases).
While MSM (gay male) still has the highest incidence of new cases, the growth rate has started to level off even though 30% had not been HIV tested in the last year, 34% had unprotected anal sex with a casual partner in the last year, and 47% did not know the HIV status of their last casual partner. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5506a1
Obviously, this guy doesn't remember his PC history very well.
IIRC, many years ago (1980s), a reporter from one of the PC magazines installed a legal copy of a piece of Microsoft Software. The software printed the message "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Now trashing your program disk." and his hard drive was trashed. That was when Microsoft (and most other companies) stopped using copy protection. It was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The weed of DRM bears bitter fruit.
The more complicated the ballot is, the easier it is to do it from your PC than in a voting booth. On your PC
at least you can look stuff up.
Internet voting is also a lot easier than the ballot box when it comes to multiple regions. You can vote thousands
of times in thousands of regions all from the comfort of your home. Thats the rub. Validating voters
is fairly easy. Validating that the vote being transmitted is the actual vote of the person in front of the computer,
when there are millions of compromised computers, that is the problem. Voting machines can't be trusted either.
Whether you vote on a voting machine
or at home, the vote needs to be printed in a SINGLE form that is simultaneously human and machine readable (such
as check boxes next to names in an OCR font, not text and a barcode) on a tangible physical medium such as paper
and the tangible medium presented for counting where it is counted by multiple independent tabulators.
Home printers can't really be trusted for print quality which is why you would want to use a voting machine.
Voting machines themselves can't be trusted. The purpose of the voting machine should be to render the vote onto
paper in a totally unambiguous format (scanning it as it is printed to check for print quality) that is subsequently
verified by the voter. And in all cases, at least one box must be checked, even if it is just the no-vote box.
The voting machine's job is to eliminate loose chads, dimples, erasures, marks added after the fact where the
voter had no preference, multiple votes, missing votes, etc. The paper cancels out the weakness in the machines
and the machines cancel out the weakness in the paper.
Tabulators need to be secured by having multiple tabulators operated by both partisans from multiple parties and non-partisan watchdogs and by having every vote listed individually by a unique serial number rather than mere total.
Serial numbers should not be traceable to a particular individual. Voters can't take home an actual receipt
for their vote if vote buying or thugs outside the polls is a concern but they can take home a random receipt from a raffle drum which they can then check online to see if that ballot was listed on the right candidates list. Assume that they won't file a complaint if they got a receipt from a voter who voted differently so around 50% won't be checked but that means that the other 50% can be checked for accuracy. It then becomes impossible to change a significant
number of votes without detection.
Google didn't see overtemp failures only because google kept their drives cool. Possibly too cold. Their graph
7 8&cid=18063644
p ?t=7677
cuts off at only 10 degrees hotter than a typical PC. But if you extrapolate the data on the right hand side of
the graph, you see that drives fail at higher temperatures just as expected. Also, they appear to have looked
at average temperatures over the life of the drive, not the temperatures near the time of failure. And they
totally ignored temperature fluctuations.
In fact, the conclusion one should reasonably draw from their data (if it can be trusted and I called that into
question saturday) is that drives are designed to operate at 40 degrees C (which, happens to be the operating
temperature of the hard drive on this machine right now in a typical mid tower case) and that any deviation higher
or lower will result in increased failure rates:
But it is also possible that the cooling systems, and not the temperatures themselves, are possible for the
drive failures seen in googles systems. They had some hard drives (the ones particularly responsible
for the low temp failures) that were operating at around room temperature. With light fan cooling, a drive
operates at around 20 celsius degrees above ambient. So how do you get an operating temperature around
room temperature? You cool the server room to freezing, you put A/C evaporator coils inside the server boxes or racks,
you water cool them, or you sandblast the drives with hurricane force winds (slight exaggeration). All of those
approaches raise the possibility of creating environmental hazards other than temperature.
But it is quite possible that it is just the temperature and that drive manufacturers have done the sensible thing and optimized their designs for the typical operating temperature of a drive. I also point out that there are
a number of failure modes associated with over-temp, under-temp, and temperature variation.
In a typical PC, the most likely cause of an overtemp failure is a fan failure.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2229
Using google, ironically, I found at least one example dating back to 2003 of people discussing the effects of
too low an operating temperature (i.e. room temperature) through excessive cooling adversely affecting hard drives (not even getting into industrial or outdoor temperature ranges). And I wasn't even looking for that: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.ph
Conclusion: For best results use a closed loop temperature control system with redundant variable speed fans to keep
the drive itself (not the ambient air) at a constant temperature of 40 degrees C. Or operate your machine with
moderate cooling in an environment comfortable for humans and use software to power down the drive and raise alarms if
it gets much above 50 degrees C. Whether you should shut down if the drive gets below 25 degrees C (after time to
come up to operating temp) is debatable. If you have had a major heating system failure or a broken window in winter, the drives own heat might be giving it some protection but the drive is also more vulnerable when operating than when shut down.
I am not advocating the mercury link. However, IIRC the theory is that about 0.4% of the population has a genetic defect
that makes them more susceptible to mercury and those are the people who are affected by the mercury in the vaccine.
Regular fluorescents and compact fluorescents are available in dimmable varieties. A friend of mine actually made a color organ from fluorescent lights some 25 years ago to demonstrate rather dramatically that it
- Light-Bulb/dp/B000BCMZPKx .php?ToDo=view&questId=120&catId=5
was possible. Newer technology makes it much easier. It is just a matter
of having a smart electronic ballast and a way to communicate the dimming commands. Some ballasts for regular fluorescents have a 0-10V input, X-10 control, or other electronic input. Some ballasts
also can work downstream of a regular incandescent dimmer; you only use the top range of the dimmer (so the
ballast has enough power to work on) and the ballast senses that you have reduced the duty cycle by say 25% and reduces the current through the bulb by 50%. A dimmable CFL will cost around $18 (less than I used
to pay for the regular variety but enough for half a dozen now). Whether your fixture takes 4 foot long tubes,
circular tubes, floodlights, or compact fluorescent/ordinary lightbulbs, there are dimmable replacements for
either the bulb, balast, or fixture.
http://www.amazon.com/Dimmable-Spiral-Fluorescent
http://www.worthingtonsolutions.com/activekb/inde
Yep. But the newfangled device supposedly uses cheap organic materials instead of expensive metals.
Of course, looking at their picture you see hundreds of atoms of gold for every organic molecule.
But maybe they can make the device cheaper by using cheaper metals and only cut the efficiency
from something like 2% to 1%. And the thing probably melts a lot quicker than the old fashioned
thermoelectric modules. Not to mention that "nanotechnology" tends to be a short way of saying
not remotely economically viable to produce.
Now if we had a way to convert all the energy vaporware out there to real vapors, we could run a turbine
and actually get some electricity.
I am all for doing the research but the hype that tends to surround it does get ridiculous. Most
of these breakthroughs we read about are extreme long shots. They usually start out inferior
to present technology and unfortunately, they usually stay that way.
A long time ago Bell Labs invented a device that could perform some of the functions of a vacuum tube. Do enough research and maybe we will get another transistor.
This device currently appears to have nothing but disadvantages compared to existing technology but
it does open up new avenues of research.
Well, if you stick it on the engine block you lose the air cooling, meaning the radiator has to work
harder and the engine fries faster when the radiator fails. Plus you are possibly reducing the carnot efficiency of the engine. But if you splice it into the hose between the engine and the radiator, you get something. The exhaust manifold does offer a significant temperature differential, though it would probably fry the device and overheat the manifold (due to the insulating effect).
What do you do with the energy? You put it into motors (if you have enough of it (unlikely)) or use it
to charge the battery reducing the load from the alternator. Or you run the alternator backwards
as a motor to add a small boost.
Using the energy is the easy part. Getting it is the hard part.
The waste heat heats the atmosphere once. But the fossil fuels we burn to compensate for the inefficiency create CO2 which is a gift that keeps on giving in terms of the destructive greenhouse effect. So
the direct heat contribution is dwarfed by the indirect effects.
Except that this technology requires a substantial temperature differential to generate power. That
temperature differential gets added to your CPU junction temperature. To overcome this, you would
need an enormous heat sink to reduce the heat sink to ambient loss.
In the winter, the heat generated by the computer heats your house which reduces the waste. In the summer, however, you AC has to work harder. You could save a substantial amount of energy by hanging your PC out the window.
I think you are partly right in this assumption, but for the wrong reasons. Some failure modes are a function of temperature and other failure modes are a function of temperature variation. A long time ago platter expansion and contraction was a major cause of problems when drives used stepper motor positioning; since they switched to servo positioning, the drive automatically tracks the expansion and contraction of the platters and that is pretty much a non-issue as long as the coating on the platters is not affected.
This report reads like it was done by statisticians, not engineers. Handling of temperature, in particular, reveals this. As someone who has designed electronic circuits, been involved in reliability analysis, and repaired broken computers and other equipment at both the board level and chip level, I get the impression that the writers have not done any of those things.
Also, the conditions in google RAID arrays are likely very different than may be encountered in many other areas such as office and desktop PCs. In the raid arrays drives are not powered down daily and you also expect better cooling design.
The higher failure of lower average temperature drives is a definite eyebrow raiser. Not because it disproves the common wisdom (which still applies in the expected range) but because it is probably the clue that some important data was overlooked. If you actually extrapolate the right side of the graph, you see that failure does increase dramatically with temperature over the range of temperatures that would be experienced in normal cooling situations and particularly cooling failures.
Google has drives that are running at room temperature? This could point to some serious temperature fluctuation, measurement error, or to extremely aggressive cooling local cooling (chilled water or freon A/C) or a server room that is chilled like a walk in freezer. In which case, those drive failures are probably caused by moisture. At normal operating temperatures, a drive will drive off moisture. At the cooler temperatures, there may be condensation issues on the drive itself or on cooling components near the drive.
The reason that we don't see high temperature rate failures is that the sample of temperatures is abnormally low. The most common temperature related failures would be when you have a cooling failure or poor cooling. Good cooling does improve the lifetime of the drive. That does not mean, however, that cooling to extremes is a good idea. In a typical PC, the drive is going to run at somewhere around 40 degrees C. The drive on this computer, right now, which is mounted in a typical mid tower case in a slightly chilly room (it is winter here) that would be a lot more chilly without three computers heating it, is running at 39degrees. That temperature corresponds to the crest of the failure vs. temperature curve on googles graphs. What temperature do you think drive manufacturers would optimize their designs for? A typical commercial grade chip is rated 0 to 70 degrees C so the thresholds would be expected to be optimized for 35 degrees C. Drive manufacturers would expect the normal operating temperature to be around 40 degrees C. The paper says they use consumer grade drives. The datasheet for a WD 250GB hard drive says the minimum operating (ambient, not drive temperature) is 5 degrees C (41F) to 55 degrees C (131F). I noticed in doing a google search that some drives specified a minimum storage temperature of -13C.
Also, if the average temperature is low, that may be an indication that the drives in that particular population are drives that are spun down or even powered down much of the time, perhaps because the particular datasets they are serving are infrequently used or because they data is entirely cached in RAM.
Also, they talked about average temperature over the life
While TFA did not make the point very well, the author may have a point. To call it the linux foundation
instead of the "something linux something foundation" creates a lot of expectations that are not likely
to be met.
When someone casually encounters the name, what expectations might they reasonably have:
- That the organization is the producer of linux. The Apache Software Foundation produces
apache, for example.
- That the organization speaks for the linux community. A pay-to-play board composed of
representatives of various huge corporations can not credibly do that.
- That it owns the trademark "Linux"
- That it is they trustee of Linux intellectual property.
- That Linus Torvalds is at least a board member. There is some very ambiguous language which
suggests they may sponsor him.
- that the board includes representatives of the major distributions.
- that it speaks for or at least balances the interest the linux creators, linux users, linux
distributions, and the other open source
software that is included in linux distributions, to the extent that that is possible.
- that it promotes linux
- that it contributes to linux.
By choosing the name "Linux Foundation", they imply a far more intimate association with the linux
community than appears to actually exist. Of the reasonable expectations listed, only the last
two seem to apply.
Yeah, seats on the board is a good way to raise capitol. But this appears to be a "Computer Industry Consortium for the Advancement of Linux". Which could be a good thing, if that was what it was called.
Even "Foundation for Linux" would be a better name.
Someone pointed out that patents could be an issue where a corporate board could diverge significantly from the community at large.
The Free Software Foundation is another deceptively named organization. It absolutely does not represent
the free software community. Instead it represents the viral license fanatics who produce software that is less free than the permissive license and public domain communities and advocate that developers use the less free viral licenses for their software.
Well, I didn't make money off Y2K and I agree with the grandparent. Y2K wasn't a big disaster
partly because a fuss was made about it.
Now, I have to admit that when Y2K was first publicised, I snorted at it. After all, I had been writing
programs for 20 years at that point that were immune to Y2K. Even when space considerations (and I cut my
teeth on a system with 256 bytes of RAM) required the use of 2 digit dates they still took rollover into
account. And, of course, I used Un*x systems. But then I realized that other programmers were not as careful - especially cobol programmers.
Grandparent described an installation that took months to fix; if they had waited until 2000-01-01
to start, they very well could have been out of business. Also, all of those bugs occurring on
the same day would have severely overtaxed the available people to fix the problem. And we simply
wont hear about the severity of critical errors that were fixed because management doesn't want
the public to know how negligent they were before the hype. It might lead them to wonder about
what else is held together with chewing gum and baling wire.
Y2K was at least partly a case of a self-unfulfilling prophecy.
Fortunately, most critical control systems may be time sensitive but usually aren't very date sensitive.
Yes, Y2K was way over-hyped. But would it have gotten through the thick skulls of management, and less competent programmers, if it had not been? I even caught Y2K style bugs introduced into important systems after the hype.
It also turns out that a number of Y2K precautions and disaster plans ended up being used on 2001-09-11.
Fix-on-failure has another name: incompetence.
In the case of the flu, another pandemic is inevitable whether it is avian flu or not.
You give the industry bean counters far too much credit. If you (for reasonable values of "you") go down ... or zero - spending an average of say $10. So, if they
to the store and movies are priced at $6 each, you walk out with 5, spending $30. If they are
priced at $20 each, you walk out with one
price the movie reasonably, they get half of $30; if they overprice it, they get half of $10.
If movies are overpriced, consumers rent, share, copy, buy used, have movie parties, watch the same movies repeatedly, do without, choose a more cost effective mode of entertainment, or simply do without. Also, in much of the world they buy bollywood instead of hollywood. Meanwhile, they have to spend big bucks on marketing (including big bucks on brand name stars) to recoup a fraction of the market they have killed.
And because of the big bucks, they are afraid to take any risk and so turn out the same old formulaic shit.
The added profits of raising the price, preventing copying, etc. are an illusion. They love to multiply the number of copies by the retail price of the movies and call that lost profits but the underlying assumption that the copiers had both the money and the inclination to purchase an original is wrong in the majority of cases. They also look at profit per copy sold and neglect the effect of price on number
of units sold.
Meanwhile, they fail to give an upgrade price (i.e. trade in) for DVDs or VHS which, along with the copy protection hassles, not only discourages people moving to HD formats it makes people somewhat reluctant to buy DVDs today. One company came out with double sided combo disks with DVD on one side and HD on the other; warner has announced they will be using that format (saves space on retailer shelves, too). At current rates of adoption, HD-DVD and Blu-ray may well be superceded by holographic or polarization based disks before they are a widely adopted, while those may offer diminishing returns for movies (at least originals) they are a lot better for backing up your computer.
The ability to copy doesn't substantially hurt sales of reasonably priced products. Books are still sold. VHS movies sold well in spite of being trivial to copy. Stupidity and greed hurts sales. The ability to copy keeps corporations honest. We have seen the great lengths corporations will go, implementing copy protection and buying politicians, just to avoid being honest. Look what happened to US automakers when they resorted to buying politicians instead of producing fuel efficient cars; their sales tanked.
And the much feared "perfect digital copy", that is the basis of much corrupt policy, doesn't seem to be much of an issue in the real world. I suspect an order of magnitude more DVD's have been copied compressed onto single layer media ($0.30) than double layer media ($2.00). This tells us a lot about the perceived worth of a copy, the discretionary income of the copiers, and/or the perceived worth of the movies that are copied rather than purchased. In many cases, it also is an indication that the copy is just a stop gap measure until one can afford the original. Copiers often happen to movie buffs who provide value to the movie industry by promoting those movies which are actually worth promoting. And I think we will see a lot of HD movies copied onto single layer DVDs as well. Yeah, you get "perfect" copies of single layer disks; that just means the original was an imperfect copy to start with.
You are right that the art of movie making will survive, even if there were real actual profits to be lost. I have seen perfectly good movies made for as little as $4000 and there are a lot of good movies made for under a million. The more modest budgets even force people to solve problems artistically rather than just throwing money at the problem. There are some types of movies that actually require expensive special effects such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Perfect Storm, a lot of science fiction, etc. to t
Actually, the attempt to prevent a context switch would be a dead giveaway and make it that much easier to find the key. With emulators, hardware assisted debuggers, code morphing processors, etc anything
in the CPU is readily accessible. The only way around this is to not let the CPU do the decoding
at all but push that to the video card or the monitor. Which they would love to do, I am sure, but
it will just create problems for consumers of a magnitude to great to go unnoticed. Having to spend more
$$$ for hardware upgrades will cause a backlash. The context switch prevention gag is also likely to drive interrupt latencies to too high a level and cause problems, as well.
They may also try limiting computer playback to treacherous computing platforms only thereby cutting themselves off from millions of consumers.
"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities." -- Sir Winston Churchill
The MPAA folks will try to exhaust all other possibilities. In the meantime, they will alienate consumers who think that actually buying a legitimate copy is the fair thing to do; there is nothing
fair about spending money to buy broken products. And of course, there are the consumers who buy
the product to avoid hassles; if the "legitimate" product comes with more hassles than the copy, that
goes out the window too.
And all of this so they can "protect" their ability to price movies at a price that becomes a powerful disincentive to purchase. At $6 per copy, the average consumer will buy any movie they have any
interest in; a $20+ per copy, they will probably spend significantly less total on movies than they would have at $6 per copy.
If you treat the customer like the enemy, they will do their best to live up to your expectations.
Here is the link to the article on Neurotypical Personality Disorder .
Just to clarify the lowest bidder comment. The price of mineral resources tracks the highest cost of those lowest cost producers necessary to meet demand. While buyers purchase from the lowest bidders, the lowest bidders will raise their price to just a hair below the highest cost producer needed to be brought online to satisfy current demand levels. So, the price never really tracks the lowest bidder (unless they can produce 100% of demand or unless they are not aware of what others are being paid), though it may look like it. By lowest bidder in this case, I meant the lowest cost producers in a situation where the low cost producers could meet demand would set the price and the others would basically shut down or not startup production. So, if you have various cost groups of producers each capable of meeting 10% of current demand at $0.10, $0.20, $0.30, ... Then the current price will be $1 with the cheap producers getting a huge windfall and the $1.10 producer not being able to sell their goods. In that example, price would be linear with demand but in the real world, extraction costs are likely to be non-linear (perhaps exponential) vs. demand.
Market prices reflect short term scarcity, not long term scarcity. What matters is if the rate of consumption exceeds the rate of extraction, not the long term availibility of a resource. Corporations are concerned with short term (quarterly report) profits and routinely sacrifice the long term. Imagine what would happen if a copper mining company were to raise the price due to long term concerns in the current market. As long as enough other copper suppliers are willing to sell at the current prices, the corporation in question would lose 100% of its sales. Its next quarterly report would be dismal, if it stayed in business that long. Therefore, corporate management will continue to sell copper at lower prices and simply lay off employees and golden parachute out when supply ran out. The exception is if there is a widespread price fixing but the copper equivalent of OPEC is defunct (and the US rendered OPEC pretty ineffective as well through political and military means).
As long as there is enough copper that can be extracted cheaply to satisfy current consumption, copper prices are likely to reflect the lowest bidder. Copper prices will increase, however, if the cost of extraction for even a small portion of the mining needed to extract the current copper usage rate goes up. Imagine if current copper consumption is 1 million tons per year (actually, closer to 13.6 million) and we can extract 750 thousand tons/year at $1/pound and 500 thousand tons per year at $2/pound. At that point, the price of all copper will go to around $2/pound because no one who can extract it at $1/pound is in danger of losing sales by raising the price to just shy of $2/pound since demand is sufficient to guarantee the purchase of all of the "cheap" copper even though after windfall pricing cheap copper will only be a few cents cheaper than expensive copper. How fast copper (or most other natural resources) can be extracted depends on how much you are willing to pay for it if you are above the level where it is all easy to extract, with delays to deploy new mines or bring idle mines online. When demand exceeds total current production capacity, then simple supply and demand kick in and drive prices up even further.
You were dead wrong on your claims that there is plenty of oil availible. Sure, you may read about new oil discoveries all the time. But the rate of new oil discoveries is much lower than the rate at which oil is depleted. The price of oil has risen, though, not because of scarcity of total supply but because the current demand exceeds the rate at which oil can be extracted from the cheap easy oil fields. You have made the common mistake of looking at a numerator while ignoring the denominator or putting it into context. Even worse, you didn't even look at the whole numerator. New mine discoveries are meaningless without being compared to things like the number of mine closures (and their production levels), total consumption, and relative cost of extraction.
In some ways, the oil shortage may mitigate the copper demand - the third world simply is not going to rise to our standard of living due to energy costs; it is more likely that US standards will decline towards those of the third world. On the other hand, a scarcity of copper is an issue for alternate energy. Wind turbines and electric motors on hybrid and electric cars frequently use significant amounts of copper. Fortunately, we can probably substitute aluminum for the bulk of that with some loss of efficiency. But the time for that is before we use large amounts of copper in those applications, not after.
The worlds largest producer of copper is Chile, which produces 36% of the world supply and more than the next several largest producers combined. I have been there and seen the small backyard scale smelting operations; large scale copper mining has largely displaced the small scale operations, in recent years, however. If Chile decided to take a long term view and levy a substantial tax on resource extraction, it could double copper prices overnight. But that would probably be followed by a US backed coup attempt and other countries would ramp up production.
Seriously, one of the first things I thought about was if it can do cats it could do people and that might be a good thing. In the US, what are my alternatives when I die? Being pumped full of toxic chemicals, put in an expensive box that uses material and energy resources, and burried in the ground or being cremated which uses a lot of fuel when done individualy. Both are environmentally bad and will be worse when fuel is scarce. Just digging a hole and dumping my body in without toxins and letting it decompose in the normal amount of time doesn't seem to be an option here legally. On the other hand, you don't want people or animals being killed to produce fuel in a shortage. No idea how many nasty chemicals are used in his process and whether any disease organisms can survive but TDP is said to even be able to destroy mad cow prions that survive incineration. As long as there is no foul play, I don't have a problem with the idea of soylent diesel. Paren't posters yield calculations were way off, though; the body is mostly water.
This is off the narrower topic of entertainment appliances but on the larger topic of appliance intercommunications and home networking.
One area where it would be beneficial for consumer appliances to communicate is an area where most consumers (except for a few home automation or alternate energy buffs) don't yet realize the need (not that many consumers aren't ignorant of the potential benifits of entertainment appliances interoperating seamlessly) And in many ways, energy is the more important area for interoperation.
As cheap energy becomes more scarce it would be useful if the Inverter (Photovoltaic, wind, or fuel cell cogeneration plant) and heavy power consuming appliances interoperate reducing peak load. Examples would be electric heaters, air conditioners, Washing Machines, Dryers, Dishwashers, Lights, Microwaves, crock pots, stoves, refrigerators, and toaster ovens. Pop a burrito in the Microwave and the Washer, Dryer, and/or dishwasher automatically pause. Pop a load in each of the washer, dryer, and dishwasher before going to bed. The washing machine waits for the dishwasher to finish before it starts and the dryer waits for the washing machine. The $50 more you spend on each appliance (if widely produced, several hundred if not) is offset by the lower cost of inverters and solar panels.
Some cheap power consuming appliances such as microwaves and toaster ovens can perhaps be passive participants. When the load on the inverter is too high because you are toasting a bagel, it tells the smarter large appliances to pause. But there is a small advantage to having the microwave and toaster oven warn the inverter a second before they start hogging power.
Many devices can potentially delay their energy use at least some of the time. Dishwasher, Washer, Dryer, heater, AC, refrigerator (if the door hasn't been opened or it has phase change thermal storage), crock pot, etc. Most electric cooking appliances want instant gratification.
Even those who are connected to the utility grid as their primary source of power could benifit in the long run from time of use metering. In times of low demand, the utility can charge a lower price. Some appliances (washer/dryer/dishwasher) can delay their electricity use until after the 3PM power crunch on a summer day (when everyones air conditioner is running). In a better designed house with thermal mass, the AC might run at night instead. Time Of Use metering already exists but is primarily used by people with grid tie solar systems and certain commercial users. If you have a house with photovoltaics, you are more likely to be aware of the savings. Paying an extra $1K to reduce the cost of your solar system from $30K to $25K is an obvious win. Of course, these would often be combined with other conservation features so you might pay $3K extra to save $10K. If you are connected to the utility grid, you are still paying the extra $5K to 10K (on power plant construction, operating, fuel costs, carbon emissions certificates, nuclear waste disposal costs, etc.), but the cost is spread over time and the cause/effect relationships are largely hidden from the consumer. And when oil shortages and global warming require us to shut down fossil fuel plants in favor of renewable energy plants, the capital costs passed on to consumers will get higher. Even if you use nuclear power instead of renewable energy power plants, it is cheaper and better for the environment to build 2 power plants and minimize peak load than build 4 plants.
Some appliances can wait a certain amount of time for cheap power before resorting to using expensive power. So, they might wait until the sun is shining or the wind is blowing; whether you are off grid, using grid tie, or buying power from an electric company that has some renewable energy plants (that therfore need less storage capacity), the benefit is still there.
Some appliances can potentially store energy cheaper than using regenerative fuel cells or batterie
Wristbands with RFID/barcode/human readable serial number could be used to (voluntarily) track victims like packages. This would, among other things, reduce load on cell phone networks from (often futile) attempts to deterimine the location of missing people or reassure family members. Serial number must include checkdigits at the very least. A random password is also printed on the reverse side (for logging in remotely after leaving area).
Wristband serial #12345678
Name: John Q Public
Address: 1234 Bourboun Street, New Orleans 12345
Medical Alert: none (private field)
Public message:
I am ok but my cat drowned. Lost my wallet evacuating house. Don't have my address book.
Even with 100% efficient power transmission, the space station you described is capable of powering new york city, not the US. 10,000m^2 * pi * 1000W/m^2 * 20/100 (efficiency) = 62GW. This is much lower than your projected yield of 1TW. So, now we are looking at a much smaller dent in the US energy budget. You are taking about a solar cell area of 314Mm^2 (typo: 300Km^2 is 300K square meters, not 300K square kilometers). There are about 100 million households in the US. So, you can take the same solar cells and spread them out with 3 meters on each household, generating about 620W each. In geosynchronous orbit your power station would generate full power 20 hours a day which is better than earth based solar. The efficiency of the loses in the maser, power receiver, and transmission grid would have to be at least 20%. Unlike the 98% maser efficiency you mention, the record efficiency set by russians in 2000 was 35%. By the time you take the other loses into account, your space based system will probably just break even with a ground based system. Further, your system has a single point of failure. And your system has centralized control with a utility company monopoly. Better (and cheaper) to put solar collectors on each house. It would probably work out that households would pay about the same price for ten years as with the centralized scheme but for the next twenty years they get power for free. Even if rooftop panels weighed 50,000 times more, it would still be 126 times cheaper (in terms of pure work) to lift them 20 feet onto rooftops than 127 million feet into orbit. That energy difference would help pay for the added materials. But if the nanotube solar cells had enough tensile strength to withstand wind, hail, snow, and rain, one can imagine them simply stretched on frames, cutting material costs.
I would like to see solar panels on every house, a concentrating solar collecter the size of a large satellite dish driving a sterling cycle heat pump to provide heating, hot water, cooling, and refrigeration in each yard, and the mostly wasted space in most peoples back yards used to grow biofuels instead of grass. Additional space in rural areas is used to grow more biofuels or for solar towers with wind turbines as well. Houses can be remodelled to improve solar gain in winter and reduce it in the summer. Incandescent lighting would be eliminated.
The floating rafts are an interesting idea though there would be issues with marine life. These would be to whales what a parchute is to a submerged skydiver. The problem isn't so much having land to put photocells on as having cheap photocells to put on the land. Cities are a problem, though, and that is where larger projects can come in.
If you want space based power, I will meet you half way. Well, actually about a thousandth of the way. Flying Electric Generators look interesting.