That's the Intel 320 series drives. They didn't release a version of those drives claimed suitable for commercial work until the "8MB bug" was sorted out, as the much more expensive 710 series.
All three of the commercial grade SSD failures I've cleaned up after (I do PostgreSQL data recovery) just died. No warning, no degrading in SMART attributes; works one minute, slag heap the next. Presumably some sort of controller level failure. My standard recommendation here is to consider then no more or less reliable than traditional disks and always put them in RAID-1 pairs. Two of the drives were Intel X25 models, the other was some terrible OCZ thing.
Out of more current drives, I was early to recommend Intel's 320 series as a cheap consumer solution reliable for database use. The majority of those I heard about failing died due to firmware bugs, typically destroying things during the rare (and therefore not well tested) unclean shutdown / recovery cases. The "Enterprise" drive built on the same platform after they tortured consumers with those bugs for a while is their 710 series, and I haven't seen one of those fail yet. That's not across a very large installation base nor for very long yet though.
The claim is that the preliminary report is not the source here. It's just being used as a reference for what the guidelines look like. The news, as it were, comes from some anonymous source within AMD. They're the one saying that this is moving quickly toward becoming a real policy. There is no validated source to be found here. This is posting a rumor claimed to be an insider leak.
Huh, a fork that's "Ubuntu -Unity +Gnome 2"? What a crazy and brand new idea. I bet that would overtake Ubuntu at the top of the distrowatch rankings quite fast too.
You can't ignore the daily fluctuations if they cause your account to reach a margin call, and you can have a margin call without trading on margin. I just wrote out a full example since my earlier one was too light on detail.
Here's a proper worked out example, I was sloppy before. The easiest way to get a margin call without trading on margin is to run into the minimum requirements to maintain an account. Open an account at Interactive Brokers (using them simply because that's where my last margin call came from) using $2500. Buy 25 shares of a stock at $100/share. Maintenance margin is $2000 on this position, you have slightly under $2500 (transaction fees) to cover it.
There's a crash in that stock and the price closes at $75/share one day. Your account now is worth $1875, but the maintenance margin is still $2000. The broker can now liquidate some of that position at $75/share via margin call unless you deposit more money. Let's say you don't respond to that in time. Even if the recovers to its original price of $100 per share, your account won't be back to $2500. You'll have sold some shares at the bottom instead.
This example is admittedly a bit forced, but even the simplest long position can hit this sort of margin call in the face of a large enough artificial price crash. The maintenance minimums can change on you after a transaction is made too. Normally they only drop from what it takes to execute a trade in the first place, but there are edge cases that can kill you. Let's say you open an account with $20,000 and make $10,000 of long trades. One day you make some new trades just as the market turns sour, so you immediately sell them. Make too many trades in a short period, and you can suddenly be a Pattern day trader. Your minimum account number goes up to $25,000, and you can face a margin call potentially forcing a bad liquidation trade as part of that, again without having ever traded on margin directly. I did that once, too, and it's no fun to resolve. That rule you can avoid if you open a strictly cash account, without even the possibility of margin.
It's undisputed at this point that HFT played a significant role in the 2010 Flash Crash. Even though the intention is not to move prices, accelerating price moves can be an unintended side-effect of them at play, via things like adding to market congestion. It won't take many of these "4% of trading activity" bots to seize things up so that prices could go bonkers. There are plenty of bots executing real trades based on market activity around to serve as the other side of a bad feedback loop.
I was using a personal example to demonstrate how short-term crashes can result in an unrecoverable bad situation even if prices come back later. But the source of the price crash doesn't have to be identical to mine to run into the same class of problem.
If you open a trading position that goes heavily against you, you can end up trading on margin even if you didn't start there. Take the simple example where someone trades their whole account with standard long positions. If the average price on those drops 25% before the close one day, via something like a flash crash, the next day they'll be on margin relative to the new balance in their account. Margin calls can happen just as easily from bad trading results as they can from using margin for extra leverage.
The claim I object to here is that people will always be able to sit through a crash until the usual regression to the mean afterward. That's true in a lot of cases, but it only takes one bad case to wipe someone out. The math behind Cumulative Risk of Ruin is no fun.
The bidding on the stock I was trading was moved up to benefit a company executive who was selling a block that day. Good luck getting the SEC to cancel trades due to simple forms of insider manipulation on that small of a scale. They're massively understaffed for that, and ineffective at most jobs they claim to be doing. Eventually the stock price went to 0 because this sort of crap put the company out of business, so in the end it all worked out fine.
I don't think executing a simple short transaction on a single stock that seems headed down is beyond the "typical retail investor". It's not like I had some crazy naked short or an options position here. Knowing how to use a stop loss order is not exactly trading rocket science either. This is all "Trading for Dummies" territory.
I've had illegal manipulation of a stock I was shorting result in a margin call against my account. There was no opportunity to "wait a day" for the mess to subside; part of my position was closed at the manipulated price by my broker. I've also had a stop loss order triggered by someone pushing the price around with that as its intended effect, a few seconds before the close proceeding a positive earnings announcement.
The idea that an individual investor will survive a crash long enough for the volatility to end without damage is a very optimistic one. Position entry isn't the problem; yes, you use a limit orders, etc. The problems are on the exit side. Forced closing before the return to normal conditions and making safety stop loss orders impossible to use that just two of the many ways individual investors can get hammered by temporary price manipulation.
There is no waking up Pandora can do here. They're limited by the DCMA as a US-based company. Pandora expanded their business with a well funded IPO in the US, which just means stronger regulation and limitations on how they can operate.
Last.fm is in the UK and Spotify in Sweden; they're playing by different rules. The US market is big enough that Pandora is so far much larger than either of those services still, in terms of customer base and certainly in terms of revenue. If that stop being true, there's nothing Pandora can easily do to compete against them without rocking the carefully balanced legal position they are in.
The only thing I'd expect could really change here is that if US subscribers start using "offshore" radio services like Last.fm and Spotify enough, lobbyists for the music industry in the US (or maybe even ones for Pandora!) will try to get them banned. I see the situation here as being like the one for Internet poker. Right now, people in the US are doing things on foreign servers that are covered by different laws when a US company provides that service. There's a constant risk that if it becomes large enough, someone in the US will try to either regulate it or make it flat out illegal. There's a possible future here where Last.fm and Spotify get pushed into a position where they can offer content to the entire world except the US one day.
You can't expect a judge to be an expert on everything they have to rule on. That's why they call in true experts to testify about technical problems. The problem here has been that the "experts" spouting commentary toward the courts so far have come from "digital forensics" firms hired and paid for by the copyright owners--the ones who are also selling them with the premise of "yes, we can find the pirates for you".
Unfortunately, the individuals being sued in these cases so far haven't been able to provide similarly persuasive experts arguing against those claims. For any one person, it's cheaper to pay the protection money to drop the case than fund such a thing. Well, the wide nets they cast have finally caught the wrong fish this time. One of the "John Does" in this case has gotten the court to read a long paper on the issues around assuming IP address==identity and consider the arguments. The court record has entered "explanations as to how computer-based technology would allow non-subscribers to access a particular IP address" as a serious counter claim.
The really nice part is that the way the case is being constructed, the legal fees from the defendants will fall due on the copyright holder if they lose, if it's proven this was a frivilous, unfounded lawsuit all along. That makes the risk/reward on the defense legal budget here a whole different game than the normal big company vs. single person harassment that companies have been getting away with.
It's clear from the briefing the judge is not just suspicious of IP address identification, they have picked up on that part of the odious way these copyright trolls work, and they don't like that. They're not buying the idea that they should be able to use the court to help identify people, get their contact info from their ISP, and then move onto directly threatening them--outside of the court system.
Non-technical people don't care how version control works or what it does at a low level, and they shouldn't have to. I would explain what type of problems it helps solve, with examples.
Programmers have to make changes to programs to try and improve them. There are several parts of that job that are made easier with version control software. Some examples are:
Sometimes those changes don't work as expected. They might break a program that worked before the change. Version control software lets you easily get back to the older, working version when this happens.
When two programmers make changes, they can conflict with each other. Version control software helps each programmer cooperate, to eliminate the conflicts when this happens.
When programs are tested, programmers need a way to mark exactly what version of the program the tester used. Version control allows doing that. When a tester reports a problem, a programmer using version control software can more easily duplicate the bug.
I suggested making corporate funded lobbyists illegal. I didn't say anything about you and a couple of hundred others lobbying in another structure. A non-profit organization might be a good choice. Even a Political action committee might be appropriate. As bad as those are, they're still downright transparent compared to how corporate lobbyists and lawmakers interact. At best we get these lame lobbyist activity reports, often only after the laws they're involved in are passed.
We've made corporations into people, and letting them dump unlimited funds into lobbyists makes that pseudo-person able to influence our laws to their benefit too. This is not a theory in regards to the topic here, it's documented fact in several places now. Here in Maryland where today's article focuses on, we had Speed Camera Lobbyist charged with Ethics Violations. Chicago has Mayor's speed cameras would help political ally. And the speed camera lobbyists were well represented on the first half of the year's busiest lobbyist reports.
My comments on how these laws are advancing were not speculation; I was commenting on exactly how things have happened in Maryland. A deeper bit of fact checking only suggests I didn't hit all the sources that funded the speed camera lobbying though. Rather than completely bootstrapping itself legally, speed camera lobbying has also been funded by revenue made from red light cameras, another area where for-profit companies lobby in ridiculous ways. Note the comment there on how the red light camera companies have even managed to bypass standard law enforcement rules in some places.
I didn't say anything about your right to lobby. What I said was that the way Apple and Ford (to use your examples; Coke doesn't lobby to the scale it matters) use large amounts of money to lobby the government currently makes your personal lobbying irrelevant in scope. Effective lobbying takes either personal time or money. Right now the money side of things is so large the personal one is drowned by its scale. Your rights to have your voice heard have effectively already been shit on, past tense, by how loud the corporate shouting is.
I didn't blame the lobbyists; I pointed out their role in a system that has blame all over it. Corrupt lawmakers, slimy lobbyists, and the way voters have allowed themselves to become almost irrelevant to how our laws are made; everyone shares blame here.
The companies lobbying for speed cameras now are using the revenue from earlier speed camera income to do so. That's a fundamental flaw in how our government is structured, the ultimate cause of many problems. If you allow a company to profit from shady activities, then they can use those profits to hire lobbyists supporting even more of their shady activities, that is a sound business model. You can't expect regular people to out-lobby them; where does their money come from? Me the anti-camera guy, I have no effective lobbyist voice available to me, unless I raise money to do so. That's why companies profiting from the voters will out-lobby voters every time.
There is no solution here that doesn't make corporate funded lobbyists illegal. The concept of the paid lobbyist who influences our lawmakers makes a travesty of the idea that voters matter.
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That's the Intel 320 series drives. They didn't release a version of those drives claimed suitable for commercial work until the "8MB bug" was sorted out, as the much more expensive 710 series.
All three of the commercial grade SSD failures I've cleaned up after (I do PostgreSQL data recovery) just died. No warning, no degrading in SMART attributes; works one minute, slag heap the next. Presumably some sort of controller level failure. My standard recommendation here is to consider then no more or less reliable than traditional disks and always put them in RAID-1 pairs. Two of the drives were Intel X25 models, the other was some terrible OCZ thing.
Out of more current drives, I was early to recommend Intel's 320 series as a cheap consumer solution reliable for database use. The majority of those I heard about failing died due to firmware bugs, typically destroying things during the rare (and therefore not well tested) unclean shutdown / recovery cases. The "Enterprise" drive built on the same platform after they tortured consumers with those bugs for a while is their 710 series, and I haven't seen one of those fail yet. That's not across a very large installation base nor for very long yet though.
The claim is that the preliminary report is not the source here. It's just being used as a reference for what the guidelines look like. The news, as it were, comes from some anonymous source within AMD. They're the one saying that this is moving quickly toward becoming a real policy. There is no validated source to be found here. This is posting a rumor claimed to be an insider leak.
It seems contrary to aim at the record for highest downward velocity and the one for longest freefall time at the same time.
Huh, a fork that's "Ubuntu -Unity +Gnome 2"? What a crazy and brand new idea. I bet that would overtake Ubuntu at the top of the distrowatch rankings quite fast too.
Awesome, I enjoyed the prequel to that one already.
You can't ignore the daily fluctuations if they cause your account to reach a margin call, and you can have a margin call without trading on margin. I just wrote out a full example since my earlier one was too light on detail.
Here's a proper worked out example, I was sloppy before. The easiest way to get a margin call without trading on margin is to run into the minimum requirements to maintain an account. Open an account at Interactive Brokers (using them simply because that's where my last margin call came from) using $2500. Buy 25 shares of a stock at $100/share. Maintenance margin is $2000 on this position, you have slightly under $2500 (transaction fees) to cover it.
There's a crash in that stock and the price closes at $75/share one day. Your account now is worth $1875, but the maintenance margin is still $2000. The broker can now liquidate some of that position at $75/share via margin call unless you deposit more money. Let's say you don't respond to that in time. Even if the recovers to its original price of $100 per share, your account won't be back to $2500. You'll have sold some shares at the bottom instead.
This example is admittedly a bit forced, but even the simplest long position can hit this sort of margin call in the face of a large enough artificial price crash. The maintenance minimums can change on you after a transaction is made too. Normally they only drop from what it takes to execute a trade in the first place, but there are edge cases that can kill you. Let's say you open an account with $20,000 and make $10,000 of long trades. One day you make some new trades just as the market turns sour, so you immediately sell them. Make too many trades in a short period, and you can suddenly be a Pattern day trader. Your minimum account number goes up to $25,000, and you can face a margin call potentially forcing a bad liquidation trade as part of that, again without having ever traded on margin directly. I did that once, too, and it's no fun to resolve. That rule you can avoid if you open a strictly cash account, without even the possibility of margin.
It's undisputed at this point that HFT played a significant role in the 2010 Flash Crash. Even though the intention is not to move prices, accelerating price moves can be an unintended side-effect of them at play, via things like adding to market congestion. It won't take many of these "4% of trading activity" bots to seize things up so that prices could go bonkers. There are plenty of bots executing real trades based on market activity around to serve as the other side of a bad feedback loop.
I was using a personal example to demonstrate how short-term crashes can result in an unrecoverable bad situation even if prices come back later. But the source of the price crash doesn't have to be identical to mine to run into the same class of problem.
If you open a trading position that goes heavily against you, you can end up trading on margin even if you didn't start there. Take the simple example where someone trades their whole account with standard long positions. If the average price on those drops 25% before the close one day, via something like a flash crash, the next day they'll be on margin relative to the new balance in their account. Margin calls can happen just as easily from bad trading results as they can from using margin for extra leverage.
The claim I object to here is that people will always be able to sit through a crash until the usual regression to the mean afterward. That's true in a lot of cases, but it only takes one bad case to wipe someone out. The math behind Cumulative Risk of Ruin is no fun.
The bidding on the stock I was trading was moved up to benefit a company executive who was selling a block that day. Good luck getting the SEC to cancel trades due to simple forms of insider manipulation on that small of a scale. They're massively understaffed for that, and ineffective at most jobs they claim to be doing. Eventually the stock price went to 0 because this sort of crap put the company out of business, so in the end it all worked out fine.
I don't think executing a simple short transaction on a single stock that seems headed down is beyond the "typical retail investor". It's not like I had some crazy naked short or an options position here. Knowing how to use a stop loss order is not exactly trading rocket science either. This is all "Trading for Dummies" territory.
I've had illegal manipulation of a stock I was shorting result in a margin call against my account. There was no opportunity to "wait a day" for the mess to subside; part of my position was closed at the manipulated price by my broker. I've also had a stop loss order triggered by someone pushing the price around with that as its intended effect, a few seconds before the close proceeding a positive earnings announcement.
The idea that an individual investor will survive a crash long enough for the volatility to end without damage is a very optimistic one. Position entry isn't the problem; yes, you use a limit orders, etc. The problems are on the exit side. Forced closing before the return to normal conditions and making safety stop loss orders impossible to use that just two of the many ways individual investors can get hammered by temporary price manipulation.
There is no waking up Pandora can do here. They're limited by the DCMA as a US-based company. Pandora expanded their business with a well funded IPO in the US, which just means stronger regulation and limitations on how they can operate.
Last.fm is in the UK and Spotify in Sweden; they're playing by different rules. The US market is big enough that Pandora is so far much larger than either of those services still, in terms of customer base and certainly in terms of revenue. If that stop being true, there's nothing Pandora can easily do to compete against them without rocking the carefully balanced legal position they are in.
The only thing I'd expect could really change here is that if US subscribers start using "offshore" radio services like Last.fm and Spotify enough, lobbyists for the music industry in the US (or maybe even ones for Pandora!) will try to get them banned. I see the situation here as being like the one for Internet poker. Right now, people in the US are doing things on foreign servers that are covered by different laws when a US company provides that service. There's a constant risk that if it becomes large enough, someone in the US will try to either regulate it or make it flat out illegal. There's a possible future here where Last.fm and Spotify get pushed into a position where they can offer content to the entire world except the US one day.
The problem with those Casios is they don't come with a special key.
You can't expect a judge to be an expert on everything they have to rule on. That's why they call in true experts to testify about technical problems. The problem here has been that the "experts" spouting commentary toward the courts so far have come from "digital forensics" firms hired and paid for by the copyright owners--the ones who are also selling them with the premise of "yes, we can find the pirates for you".
Unfortunately, the individuals being sued in these cases so far haven't been able to provide similarly persuasive experts arguing against those claims. For any one person, it's cheaper to pay the protection money to drop the case than fund such a thing. Well, the wide nets they cast have finally caught the wrong fish this time. One of the "John Does" in this case has gotten the court to read a long paper on the issues around assuming IP address==identity and consider the arguments. The court record has entered "explanations as to how computer-based technology would allow non-subscribers to access a particular IP address" as a serious counter claim.
The really nice part is that the way the case is being constructed, the legal fees from the defendants will fall due on the copyright holder if they lose, if it's proven this was a frivilous, unfounded lawsuit all along. That makes the risk/reward on the defense legal budget here a whole different game than the normal big company vs. single person harassment that companies have been getting away with.
It's clear from the briefing the judge is not just suspicious of IP address identification, they have picked up on that part of the odious way these copyright trolls work, and they don't like that. They're not buying the idea that they should be able to use the court to help identify people, get their contact info from their ISP, and then move onto directly threatening them--outside of the court system.
"download 300 gigabytes of copyrighted porn" button
They've simplified that to a single button? Thank goodness for progress.
Only now, at the end, do you see the true power of the Facebook 'Want' Button plans.
It's starting to look like Jobs didn't leave operating instructions for the RDF to Tim Cook. No wonder the stock price is plunging.
If you think the anime studios are in a particularly uncomfortable position, you should see what happens to their characters.
You use a debugger? Wuss.
Non-technical people don't care how version control works or what it does at a low level, and they shouldn't have to. I would explain what type of problems it helps solve, with examples.
Programmers have to make changes to programs to try and improve them. There are several parts of that job that are made easier with version control software. Some examples are:
I suggested making corporate funded lobbyists illegal. I didn't say anything about you and a couple of hundred others lobbying in another structure. A non-profit organization might be a good choice. Even a Political action committee might be appropriate. As bad as those are, they're still downright transparent compared to how corporate lobbyists and lawmakers interact. At best we get these lame lobbyist activity reports, often only after the laws they're involved in are passed.
We've made corporations into people, and letting them dump unlimited funds into lobbyists makes that pseudo-person able to influence our laws to their benefit too. This is not a theory in regards to the topic here, it's documented fact in several places now. Here in Maryland where today's article focuses on, we had Speed Camera Lobbyist charged with Ethics Violations. Chicago has Mayor's speed cameras would help political ally. And the speed camera lobbyists were well represented on the first half of the year's busiest lobbyist reports.
My comments on how these laws are advancing were not speculation; I was commenting on exactly how things have happened in Maryland. A deeper bit of fact checking only suggests I didn't hit all the sources that funded the speed camera lobbying though. Rather than completely bootstrapping itself legally, speed camera lobbying has also been funded by revenue made from red light cameras, another area where for-profit companies lobby in ridiculous ways. Note the comment there on how the red light camera companies have even managed to bypass standard law enforcement rules in some places.
I didn't say anything about your right to lobby. What I said was that the way Apple and Ford (to use your examples; Coke doesn't lobby to the scale it matters) use large amounts of money to lobby the government currently makes your personal lobbying irrelevant in scope. Effective lobbying takes either personal time or money. Right now the money side of things is so large the personal one is drowned by its scale. Your rights to have your voice heard have effectively already been shit on, past tense, by how loud the corporate shouting is.
I didn't blame the lobbyists; I pointed out their role in a system that has blame all over it. Corrupt lawmakers, slimy lobbyists, and the way voters have allowed themselves to become almost irrelevant to how our laws are made; everyone shares blame here.
The companies lobbying for speed cameras now are using the revenue from earlier speed camera income to do so. That's a fundamental flaw in how our government is structured, the ultimate cause of many problems. If you allow a company to profit from shady activities, then they can use those profits to hire lobbyists supporting even more of their shady activities, that is a sound business model. You can't expect regular people to out-lobby them; where does their money come from? Me the anti-camera guy, I have no effective lobbyist voice available to me, unless I raise money to do so. That's why companies profiting from the voters will out-lobby voters every time.
There is no solution here that doesn't make corporate funded lobbyists illegal. The concept of the paid lobbyist who influences our lawmakers makes a travesty of the idea that voters matter.
Maryland speed camera pictures should show an uptick of people in Guy Fawkes masks.