"Just give your two-year-old physical access to the media and your choice of a pair of scissors, a screwdriver, a spoon, a key, the corner of your computer desk...."
the up side of never getting through a relationship long enough to involve even the chance of spawning little ones, is that my media have never been in the hands of children... relatives rarely come to visit me, and none with small children would visit me now anyways.
i was lucky enough that when i started burning CDs that the people i was living with then had no small children, and then i moved in to my parents, who live too far away from their grandkids, and now i live alone, in a small apartment.
I know a lot of slashdot have 'grown up' and got married, but at age 30, i already know I'll never get involved with a woman long term... it doesn't help that people with my mental illness tend to Prefer staying single, even medicated... but perhaps that's a good thing, and a reason why only 1% of the population wind up with my mental illness.. the genetics for it, tend to breed out of the population.
"most of my burned CDs and DVDs start flaking after just a couple of years,"
well, your mileage may vary, but i've had almost no problems with optical media degradation.
my secret? i only check the disks very rarely, and never expose them to harsh temperature changes, and i don't let them go into dark, damp places, because of the use of organic dyes that are suceptible to fungal degredation.
plus, i've always gone for the highest grade media available. I avoid cheap meadia like the plague...
They have a policy at a private amusement. So ? A policy at whatever place cannot override the law. If I have a policy that says I'm allowed to kill you on my private property, I'm still going away for murder if I do. Well, it depends, in North Dakota, it is legal to shoot an indian, if you're in a covered wagon.
there is another law somewhere that you can legally kill indians if you see more than five of them together, but i couldn't find that law on the internet..
oh yeah, and there is a law in Texas iirc, where you're legally able to kill a cattle rustler.
I suppose, you'd want to have proof, if you didn't want to go to jail...
but yeah there are a lot of dumb laws about where it's 'legal' to kill people especially in small states where the law is hundreds of years old.
"How about leaving the stupid thing in your car if you are so worried about it?"
2 problems with that 1. cars get hot in the sun, heat the enemy of all electronics (and plastics for that matter)
2. theft, theft, theft... cars get broken into, even in gated places like theme parks. hiding your electronics under your seat is the FIRST place a car thief is going to look(because of number 1), cameras don't help, and if the guy is doing theft in a parking lot he's probably going to break into every spendy looking car he can and still get away
theme parks always have long lines, what's the problem with passing that time with a smartphone?
so what if people do a bit of their work while their kids are having fun? if a professional can't get away from work (like a sysadmin) but still wants a family fun Sunday at the theme park, what's wrong with him sshing to any server that needs his personal touch so he doesn't have to leave the park?
the kids will still have fun, banning smartphones seems stupid to me.
the wiki article itself states that HVDC starts being 'profitable' at around 600-800 KM, and from what i understand, there are coal plants in Texas that sell power to California, this is far enough to benefit from HVDC.
i only advocated HVDC to replace our long range corridors, not the house to house setup, many power companies have been building massive backbones of AC power lines, even here in the backwoods of Wisconsin. if these massive power line projects aren't to send AC power long distances, then why are they crisscrossing whole states where there aren't even major cities along the way?
the cost of HVDC systems will come down, if we build enough of them, and there have always been ways to protect electronic devices from lightning.
the wiki is very clear, if you want to send power over 800 KM HVDC is the only system that makes sense.
you read wikipedia too much, man I've never in any literature had an mention of a 'trailing dot' not even when i configured bind on freebsd.
seriously I've been using the internet since 1994, and not once has 'an implied trailing dot' been mentioned to me anywhere, except in the wikipedia article (and apparently in the RFCs since wiki cites them)
i don't read RFCs ever, and apparently DNS resolvers automatically add a trailing dot, but this was the first time I'd ever heard of needing a trailing dot. and ironically google, yahoo, ask, cnet, w3c and slashdot work with a trailing dot, but microsoft.com. doesn't weirdly enough download.com./ redirects to download.com/
you think having to try several times is bad... try not being able to log in at all with your browser of choice and being told 'firefox works though' as if i should switch from opera to firefox because slash has a horrible login bug somehow? great just great.
"The drive makers use some other methodology. There being only 8760 hours in a year, dontcha know."
math is my worst subject, i'm a lot better with history, see, in history people repeat the same mistakes over and over, in math they want you to get every question right... that's a bit harder...
i'm good with pattern recognition, weaker in other areas.
although a successor to the 'fusor' called a polywell design, combines inertial electrostatic containment and magnetic containment, needs only Deuterium (heavy water), quite abundant and cheap, especially if you can use fusion power to get you to jupiter, and use giant fusion plants on jupiter to ship the stuff back in bulk.. they spent $2 million on the 'last' research leg of the polywell, and if the final testing stages prove that the design works, then it will cost 150-200 million to build the first test commercial sized polywell fusion plant.
really interesting stuff, the inventor of the original TV set designed the first 'fusor' which lead to the polywell design, which made a hybrid approach, because earlier attempts at purely electrostatic containment required parts that would wear out quickly and didn't scale to full sized fusion plant sized units...
very cool, if fusion power becomes 'real' by 2010 it will all be because scientists decided to use a combo containment field using both inertial electrostatic containment and magnetic containment. if i read the wiki correctly the inertial electrostatic approach 'fixes' a problem with pure electromagnetic designs eg: how to get the fuel into the core predictably... deliver the fuel stream with one approach, and contain the core with another. using superconducting electro magnets (only the full size $150-200 mil version uses superconductors) means you loose no electricity creating the magnetic field (although keeping it in liquid nitrogen might use a small bit of power, it's far less, than a full sized fusion reactor would output)
...my point was they were gerrymandering their MTBF the same way as HDD makers...
I personally have no idea how they are gerrymandering their MTBF, hence my comment. The advantage of this particular statement of mine is that it has a 100% chance of being correct. *wink*
C// I was fairly sure they were abusing SMARTs capabilities to keep a drive running after sectors began failing. if you don't count the drive as dead, til it refuses to spin any longer... then you get a much better MTBF even though nobody uses a disk with 75% of the disk as bad sectors.
obviously only an insider would know Exactly how they do the MTBF numbers, but if google calls a disk failed when one sector fails, and seagate calls it a failure when with 90% of the sectors failed, it stops rotating... then you get Radically different numbers. that's why i'm sure that's how they do it, because MTBF has to be a 'mean' time, not an estimation but a mean time.
"Tomato is the way to go, as half of the posters seem to be saying."
my original suggestion was to use smoothwall's QoS. but some people felt tomato would be better than a smoothwall setup, the only reason i like smoothwall is you don't need to flash a hardware router, and if you use an older PC it will use less power running smoothwall than it ever did running windows, for whatever reason any PC from the 486 on, always uses less power running free open source software than running windows, i think it's the 'system idle thread' i think it literally makes the cpu busy out rather than fall asleep...
never had a problem with a Linux or BSD system doing no CPU activity, just routing a few packets and letting the cpu idle and use any on chip power savings... when i first switched my 486 from 24/7 windows to 24/7 freebsd (in 1996) i saved $10 a month in electric bills. (i still have the bills but they're in storage) plus, i never had to reboot freeBSD windows would crash every week.
Yes, that's why all those pampflets talk so much about it. Specially the Daily Mirror. Or was it... The Sun? Sir, you failed to take me literally enough! When I said 'fusion is a pipe dream' I clearly meant one must rely upon a Fresnel reflector design!
When NAND memory fails, it can fail in such a way as to make the ENTIRE flash memory device unreadable... this is from real world NAND memory devices failing from real world use, all of a sudden not wear leveling seems like a suicidal mode of wear... if the entire chip can short out from a single block failing. There's 0 reason for a properly designed flash device to fail like that due to wear, leveling or not. That's just shitty engineering. "Tunnel injection is the quantum tunneling effect, also called Fowler-Nordheim tunnel injection, when charge carriers are injected to an electric conductor through a thin layer of an electric insulator."
you should have said 'IANAEE' for i am not an electrical engineer. because the way NAND ram works it is entirely possible for failure to be a complete and total failure of the device, or at least 512 blocks of the device, if it doesn't create a short that prevents the whole device from working.
Charge carriers "In semiconductor physics, the traveling vacancies in the valence-band electron population (holes) are treated as charge carriers"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_carrier
So we're using an electric charge, to fill, and create 'electron holes' in a conductor. what could POSSIBLY go wrong, in the real world, rapidly changing if a conductor has electron holes or not, by forcing the electrons in or out of the material...
so trying to intentionally wear out a NAND memory chip can cause a severe problem whereby instead of creating an electron hole, you've created a short circuit. "A short circuit (sometimes abbreviated to short or s/c) allows a current to flow along a different path from the one intended." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_circuit
in advanced mode, you can set upload and download maximums, if you plan on allowing this, and using latency specific online gaming, you should set the limits to HALF of what azureus is capable of without anyone using the internet.
you're forgetting one simple electrical principal...
Putting multiple devices in series.
this is how they do it, just as if you put 12 AA's in series you would still get 1.5 volts (but many many more amps) if you put many many semiconductors in series, the total voltage of the main line stays a constant, as only a small fraction of it's total voltage is converted by each semiconductor.
of course you could have gone here i wouldn't have to explain how it works which i think i did poorly... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC
my point was they were gerrymandering their MTBF the same way as HDD makers, using only 'complete' failure as a failure. MTBF is done via comprehensive testing, they cannot inflate the number without having the type of testing practice I've mentioned.
where the 'statistical rate of partial failure' falls, has nothing to do with how they measure their MTBF tests.
I live in the backwoods of Wisconsin, but I've heard of a guy who makes his living copying DVDs to DVD-r's for $3 a pop, and i heard about this guy from my Social Worker. the person is clearly violating $1,000 a year, if he's making a Living at $3 a movie, but nobody cares about the movie industry in this town, not even the cops.
Let's just hope that person never has a evil ex-significant other.
you had a typo in that url, an extra period. and those devices are meant for rack mounted server boards with 4 4x PCIe slots available, although they are a low profile board, so if they give a low profile backplane as well, then you can get them in a rack mount server. (not sure if 'low profile' means 1u or 2u i am not a sysadmin)
The only adaptation I can see is trying to minimize wearing on certain blocks, but from the looks of it the SDD's are being designed with wear leveling in mind so I doubt even that will matter to the software. Actually with proper software you'd probably like to do the opposite - try to wear out certain blocks as fast as possible. This way the lossage is more predictable and rest of the disk is kept in a better shape. Point being that bad sectors aren't really a big deal if you're prepared for those. When NAND memory fails, it can fail in such a way as to make the ENTIRE flash memory device unreadable... this is from real world NAND memory devices failing from real world use, all of a sudden not wear leveling seems like a suicidal mode of wear... if the entire chip can short out from a single block failing.
"In case of a massive damage,
* If the device is not accessible at all (circuitry failure), no software can even attempt the recovery. Physical intervention is required.
* Even if the device seems accessible, software recovery run the will take excessive time to complete, making the attempt impractical. On top of that, the recovery run puts further stress on the device. This may be undesirable.
In case of the massive damage, there is no point in attempting the do-it-yourself type data recovery at home. There is little you can do to repair a physically damaged device without the special equipment. If you have a physically failed storage device, we have a discount available for a DriveSavers recovery service. DriveSavers are quite good with physically damaged devices and we recommend you contact them if need arises."
"One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers."
Sure you can, they're Human of course they lie. MTBF can be generated, based on how long it takes for 'more than 50% of the data sectors fail' but who would keep using a disc that kept having randomly failing disc sectors, even if SMART technology can reduce the risk of loosing data...
so of course SSD makers are going to calculate a MTBF assuming the type of wear a typical person who boots vista once, for every time it crashes*, and does nothing but plays solitaire, freecell and spider solitaire all day! it takes a lot of hours of playing solitaire, a non disk heavy activity for a SSD device to fail!
remember NAND flash memory is based on changing the structure of a semi-conductor with an electric charge, the more you do it, the sooner the device fails... even reading the state of the material causes wear, because electricity is used to read as well as 'write' to the memory, kinda the way a laser erodes the dye on a recordable optical disc... obviously though if you can Write millions of times, you can read billions of times. there is another problem with NAND though, NAND memory is often made with tantalite, a rare mineral used in semiconductors and capacitors..
if we recycled 100% of computer parts, the tantalite problem would be solved easily, but we're not even close to 10% recycling... so even as we speak gorilla habitat in Africa is being destroyed for tantalite mines. they've been building more and more of the mines, since a price spike in 2000, and the number of mines running are keeping the cost of tantalite from spiking again, but it would be so much better if we just recycled our old computer waste. we could save gorillas, if we pushed for refundable deposits on recycling electronic devices like computers, etc. if it worked for the lead acid battery it can work for tantalite, copper, aluminum, gold, and silver in electronic devices. FWIW plastic in electronics can be recycled into diesel fuel, as i found out from here. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/small-business/recycling.html
*= which is probably every day, more if you install hardware drivers.
sir, they have considered using electricity to make fusion, through magnetic containment. Why they haven't tried to use an electricity... well they have! It's called a Fusor, and it was invented in 1930s, and is considered a cheap, viable neutron generator. sadly, it doesn't scale well to producing electricity.
"Anyway cheap energy would be great and the goverment would love it. You give me enough super cheap electricity and I will make you all the oil you want from water and air."
No problem sir, I have a very reliable source of cheap energy, you might even say 'free' energy, there is a slight problem, in that it is 92,955,887.6 miles away. on the plus side, we are currently only receiving far, far less than.001% of the energy output by this massive, massive source of free energy. Despite the distance, we receive more than enough energy from this source, to power every biological form of life on the planet earth!
just imagine a dyson sphere, around such a massive massive power source;)
That's because by sc3000 they realized that hydrogen fusion plants, actually use massive massive coal fired plants to get the hydrogen plasma hot enough to generate enough fusion to use up all the energy created by the coal fired part of the plant...
fusion is a pipe dream, and this story isn't about cold fusion, but rather putting a lot of expensive hydrogen next to a very expensive hydrogen absorber that generates heat from friction, as it attracts 900 times as much hydrogen as a normal hydrogen attractor like oxygen would draw close to it.
instead of worrying about fusion, we should just switch our long range electric current corridors to High Voltage DC current. after all, over 1000 KM HVDC only looses 3% of the energy, and now semiconductors the cheapest, most environmentally friendly method of reducing HVDC to AC or low voltage DC are common, and easy to mass produce. especially now that you can use lasers and quarts to improve the the performance of HVDC semiconductor parts so they can handle more DC current.
with energy cheaply distributable over long distances, we can harvest and utilize natural, renewable energy in remote places where they are the most economical, even if people live many states away.
Slashdot Mirror
"Just give your two-year-old physical access to the media and your choice of a pair of scissors, a screwdriver, a spoon, a key, the corner of your computer desk...."
the up side of never getting through a relationship long enough to involve even the chance of spawning little ones, is that my media have never been in the hands of children... relatives rarely come to visit me, and none with small children would visit me now anyways.
i was lucky enough that when i started burning CDs that the people i was living with then had no small children, and then i moved in to my parents, who live too far away from their grandkids, and now i live alone, in a small apartment.
I know a lot of slashdot have 'grown up' and got married, but at age 30, i already know I'll never get involved with a woman long term... it doesn't help that people with my mental illness tend to Prefer staying single, even medicated... but perhaps that's a good thing, and a reason why only 1% of the population wind up with my mental illness.. the genetics for it, tend to breed out of the population.
"most of my burned CDs and DVDs start flaking after just a couple of years,"
well, your mileage may vary, but i've had almost no problems with optical media degradation.
my secret? i only check the disks very rarely, and never expose them to harsh temperature changes, and i don't let them go into dark, damp places, because of the use of organic dyes that are suceptible to fungal degredation.
plus, i've always gone for the highest grade media available. I avoid cheap meadia like the plague...
there is another law somewhere that you can legally kill indians if you see more than five of them together, but i couldn't find that law on the internet..
oh yeah, and there is a law in Texas iirc, where you're legally able to kill a cattle rustler.
I suppose, you'd want to have proof, if you didn't want to go to jail...
but yeah there are a lot of dumb laws about where it's 'legal' to kill people especially in small states where the law is hundreds of years old.
"How about leaving the stupid thing in your car if you are so worried about it?"
2 problems with that 1. cars get hot in the sun, heat the enemy of all electronics (and plastics for that matter)
2. theft, theft, theft... cars get broken into, even in gated places like theme parks. hiding your electronics under your seat is the FIRST place a car thief is going to look(because of number 1), cameras don't help, and if the guy is doing theft in a parking lot he's probably going to break into every spendy looking car he can and still get away
theme parks always have long lines, what's the problem with passing that time with a smartphone?
so what if people do a bit of their work while their kids are having fun? if a professional can't get away from work (like a sysadmin) but still wants a family fun Sunday at the theme park, what's wrong with him sshing to any server that needs his personal touch so he doesn't have to leave the park?
the kids will still have fun, banning smartphones seems stupid to me.
the wiki article itself states that HVDC starts being 'profitable' at around 600-800 KM, and from what i understand, there are coal plants in Texas that sell power to California, this is far enough to benefit from HVDC.
i only advocated HVDC to replace our long range corridors, not the house to house setup, many power companies have been building massive backbones of AC power lines, even here in the backwoods of Wisconsin. if these massive power line projects aren't to send AC power long distances, then why are they crisscrossing whole states where there aren't even major cities along the way?
the cost of HVDC systems will come down, if we build enough of them, and there have always been ways to protect electronic devices from lightning.
the wiki is very clear, if you want to send power over 800 KM HVDC is the only system that makes sense.
you read wikipedia too much, man I've never in any literature had an mention of a 'trailing dot' not even when i configured bind on freebsd.
seriously I've been using the internet since 1994, and not once has 'an implied trailing dot' been mentioned to me anywhere, except in the wikipedia article (and apparently in the RFCs since wiki cites them)
i don't read RFCs ever, and apparently DNS resolvers automatically add a trailing dot, but this was the first time I'd ever heard of needing a trailing dot. and ironically google, yahoo, ask, cnet, w3c and slashdot work with a trailing dot, but microsoft.com. doesn't weirdly enough download.com./ redirects to download.com/
"Add another 10,000 a month for maintenance/support/supply contracts."
but, what does cowboyneil do then? I thought he was their primary hardware guy, and maybe they have a second guy so he doesn't have to be on call 24/7
it's not just slashdot, they run sourceforge everything2, the OSDN, loads of complex websites.
i doubt they'd pay $10,000 a month when they already have a dedicated hardware guy on the payroll.
you think having to try several times is bad... try not being able to log in at all with your browser of choice and being told 'firefox works though' as if i should switch from opera to firefox because slash has a horrible login bug somehow? great just great.
"The drive makers use some other methodology. There being only 8760 hours in a year, dontcha know."
math is my worst subject, i'm a lot better with history, see, in history people repeat the same mistakes over and over, in math they want you to get every question right... that's a bit harder...
i'm good with pattern recognition, weaker in other areas.
although a successor to the 'fusor' called a polywell design, combines inertial electrostatic containment and magnetic containment, needs only Deuterium (heavy water), quite abundant and cheap, especially if you can use fusion power to get you to jupiter, and use giant fusion plants on jupiter to ship the stuff back in bulk.. they spent $2 million on the 'last' research leg of the polywell, and if the final testing stages prove that the design works, then it will cost 150-200 million to build the first test commercial sized polywell fusion plant.
really interesting stuff, the inventor of the original TV set designed the first 'fusor' which lead to the polywell design, which made a hybrid approach, because earlier attempts at purely electrostatic containment required parts that would wear out quickly and didn't scale to full sized fusion plant sized units...
very cool, if fusion power becomes 'real' by 2010 it will all be because scientists decided to use a combo containment field using both inertial electrostatic containment and magnetic containment. if i read the wiki correctly the inertial electrostatic approach 'fixes' a problem with pure electromagnetic designs eg: how to get the fuel into the core predictably... deliver the fuel stream with one approach, and contain the core with another. using superconducting electro magnets (only the full size $150-200 mil version uses superconductors) means you loose no electricity creating the magnetic field (although keeping it in liquid nitrogen might use a small bit of power, it's far less, than a full sized fusion reactor would output)
I personally have no idea how they are gerrymandering their MTBF, hence my comment. The advantage of this particular statement of mine is that it has a 100% chance of being correct. *wink*
C// I was fairly sure they were abusing SMARTs capabilities to keep a drive running after sectors began failing. if you don't count the drive as dead, til it refuses to spin any longer... then you get a much better MTBF even though nobody uses a disk with 75% of the disk as bad sectors.
obviously only an insider would know Exactly how they do the MTBF numbers, but if google calls a disk failed when one sector fails, and seagate calls it a failure when with 90% of the sectors failed, it stops rotating... then you get Radically different numbers. that's why i'm sure that's how they do it, because MTBF has to be a 'mean' time, not an estimation but a mean time.
"Tomato is the way to go, as half of the posters seem to be saying."
my original suggestion was to use smoothwall's QoS. but some people felt tomato would be better than a smoothwall setup, the only reason i like smoothwall is you don't need to flash a hardware router, and if you use an older PC it will use less power running smoothwall than it ever did running windows, for whatever reason any PC from the 486 on, always uses less power running free open source software than running windows, i think it's the 'system idle thread' i think it literally makes the cpu busy out rather than fall asleep...
never had a problem with a Linux or BSD system doing no CPU activity, just routing a few packets and letting the cpu idle and use any on chip power savings... when i first switched my 486 from 24/7 windows to 24/7 freebsd (in 1996) i saved $10 a month in electric bills. (i still have the bills but they're in storage) plus, i never had to reboot freeBSD windows would crash every week.
Yes, that's why all those pampflets talk so much about it. Specially the Daily Mirror. Or was it... The Sun? Sir, you failed to take me literally enough! When I said 'fusion is a pipe dream' I clearly meant one must rely upon a Fresnel reflector design!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Fresnel_reflectors
you should have said 'IANAEE' for i am not an electrical engineer. because the way NAND ram works it is entirely possible for failure to be a complete and total failure of the device, or at least 512 blocks of the device, if it doesn't create a short that prevents the whole device from working.
first today's flash memory is NAND memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory
NAND memory is written with tunnel injection, which causes charge carriers to be injected into a conductor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_injection
Charge carriers "In semiconductor physics, the traveling vacancies in the valence-band electron population (holes) are treated as charge carriers"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_carrier
So we're using an electric charge, to fill, and create 'electron holes' in a conductor. what could POSSIBLY go wrong, in the real world, rapidly changing if a conductor has electron holes or not, by forcing the electrons in or out of the material
so trying to intentionally wear out a NAND memory chip can cause a severe problem whereby instead of creating an electron hole, you've created a short circuit. "A short circuit (sometimes abbreviated to short or s/c) allows a current to flow along a different path from the one intended." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_circuit
as opposed to using traffic shaping, you can force the guy to switch clients to azureus http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
in advanced mode, you can set upload and download maximums, if you plan on allowing this, and using latency specific online gaming, you should set the limits to HALF of what azureus is capable of without anyone using the internet.
you can put it between the router and the net if you're using the wireless capabilities.
a forum about traffic shaping with smoothwall
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?s=dffc19493975498724b50564217f05e4&showtopic=3250&pid=11502&st=0&#entry11502
smoothwall linux
http://www.smoothwall.org/
you're forgetting one simple electrical principal...
Putting multiple devices in series.
this is how they do it, just as if you put 12 AA's in series you would still get 1.5 volts (but many many more amps) if you put many many semiconductors in series, the total voltage of the main line stays a constant, as only a small fraction of it's total voltage is converted by each semiconductor.
of course you could have gone here i wouldn't have to explain how it works which i think i did poorly... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC
my point was they were gerrymandering their MTBF the same way as HDD makers, using only 'complete' failure as a failure. MTBF is done via comprehensive testing, they cannot inflate the number without having the type of testing practice I've mentioned.
where the 'statistical rate of partial failure' falls, has nothing to do with how they measure their MTBF tests.
"total value over $1,000,"
I live in the backwoods of Wisconsin, but I've heard of a guy who makes his living copying DVDs to DVD-r's for $3 a pop, and i heard about this guy from my Social Worker. the person is clearly violating $1,000 a year, if he's making a Living at $3 a movie, but nobody cares about the movie industry in this town, not even the cops.
Let's just hope that person never has a evil ex-significant other.
you had a typo in that url, an extra period. and those devices are meant for rack mounted server boards with 4 4x PCIe slots available, although they are a low profile board, so if they give a low profile backplane as well, then you can get them in a rack mount server. (not sure if 'low profile' means 1u or 2u i am not a sysadmin)
http://www.fusionio.com/
"In case of a massive damage,
* If the device is not accessible at all (circuitry failure), no software can even attempt the recovery. Physical intervention is required.
* Even if the device seems accessible, software recovery run the will take excessive time to complete, making the attempt impractical. On top of that, the recovery run puts further stress on the device. This may be undesirable.
In case of the massive damage, there is no point in attempting the do-it-yourself type data recovery at home. There is little you can do to repair a physically damaged device without the special equipment. If you have a physically failed storage device, we have a discount available for a DriveSavers recovery service. DriveSavers are quite good with physically damaged devices and we recommend you contact them if need arises."
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/physical-flash-memory-failure.htm
"One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers."
Sure you can, they're Human of course they lie. MTBF can be generated, based on how long it takes for 'more than 50% of the data sectors fail' but who would keep using a disc that kept having randomly failing disc sectors, even if SMART technology can reduce the risk of loosing data...
so of course SSD makers are going to calculate a MTBF assuming the type of wear a typical person who boots vista once, for every time it crashes*, and does nothing but plays solitaire, freecell and spider solitaire all day! it takes a lot of hours of playing solitaire, a non disk heavy activity for a SSD device to fail!
remember NAND flash memory is based on changing the structure of a semi-conductor with an electric charge, the more you do it, the sooner the device fails... even reading the state of the material causes wear, because electricity is used to read as well as 'write' to the memory, kinda the way a laser erodes the dye on a recordable optical disc... obviously though if you can Write millions of times, you can read billions of times. there is another problem with NAND though, NAND memory is often made with tantalite, a rare mineral used in semiconductors and capacitors..
if we recycled 100% of computer parts, the tantalite problem would be solved easily, but we're not even close to 10% recycling... so even as we speak gorilla habitat in Africa is being destroyed for tantalite mines. they've been building more and more of the mines, since a price spike in 2000, and the number of mines running are keeping the cost of tantalite from spiking again, but it would be so much better if we just recycled our old computer waste. we could save gorillas, if we pushed for refundable deposits on recycling electronic devices like computers, etc. if it worked for the lead acid battery it can work for tantalite, copper, aluminum, gold, and silver in electronic devices. FWIW plastic in electronics can be recycled into diesel fuel, as i found out from here. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/small-business/recycling.html
*= which is probably every day, more if you install hardware drivers.
sir, they have considered using electricity to make fusion, through magnetic containment. Why they haven't tried to use an electricity... well they have! It's called a Fusor, and it was invented in 1930s, and is considered a cheap, viable neutron generator. sadly, it doesn't scale well to producing electricity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_fusion_energy
"Anyway cheap energy would be great and the goverment would love it.
.001% of the energy output by this massive, massive source of free energy. Despite the distance, we receive more than enough energy from this source, to power every biological form of life on the planet earth!
;)
You give me enough super cheap electricity and I will make you all the oil you want from water and air."
No problem sir, I have a very reliable source of cheap energy, you might even say 'free' energy, there is a slight problem, in that it is 92,955,887.6 miles away. on the plus side, we are currently only receiving far, far less than
just imagine a dyson sphere, around such a massive massive power source
That's because by sc3000 they realized that hydrogen fusion plants, actually use massive massive coal fired plants to get the hydrogen plasma hot enough to generate enough fusion to use up all the energy created by the coal fired part of the plant...
fusion is a pipe dream, and this story isn't about cold fusion, but rather putting a lot of expensive hydrogen next to a very expensive hydrogen absorber that generates heat from friction, as it attracts 900 times as much hydrogen as a normal hydrogen attractor like oxygen would draw close to it.
instead of worrying about fusion, we should just switch our long range electric current corridors to High Voltage DC current. after all, over 1000 KM HVDC only looses 3% of the energy, and now semiconductors the cheapest, most environmentally friendly method of reducing HVDC to AC or low voltage DC are common, and easy to mass produce. especially now that you can use lasers and quarts to improve the the performance of HVDC semiconductor parts so they can handle more DC current.
with energy cheaply distributable over long distances, we can harvest and utilize natural, renewable energy in remote places where they are the most economical, even if people live many states away.