Cracker as a term predates slavery in the US; it actually predates the whole country. See the crackers on wikipedia or The Secret History Of The Word 'Cracker' for an outline of the theories and history here. There was a large enough intersection between white slave owners and the white people called crackers that it probably helped popularize the term, but they were not the same group.
No, those are dictionary definitions. I didn't write webster's.
When you copied the definitions into your post, was that copyright infringement, theft, or sharing? Consider that some potential ad revenue moved from the dictionary site to Slashdot with that paste.
The number of discs does not relate to the vibration or heat or any other factors.
They are correlated. More discs guarantees more vibration and heat, all other things being equal. Yes, there are other sources too, and all the other things are not equal. So what?
That you are calling ""NAS with 1-5 disks" a subjective specification means you're not actually using words in a way I can respond to there. Whether Backblaze's custom modifications net better or worse levels of vibration is a complicated discussion that could use some direct measurements; agreed. But what's extremely clear is that they are not using the consumer drives in anything like a consumer environment. That means using their results as a commentary on what people will see in the broader consumer system market is extrapolation, with the obvious risks that come along with it.
For example, "Backblaze sees no reliability differences between their consumer and enterprise grade drives" is a fact. Saying "there is no reliability differences between consumer and enterprise grade drives" is an invalid extrapolation of that data.
Using your example, what if one of the consumer drive models has a serious vibration issue, and Backblaze's anti-vibration sleeve makes it wildly more reliable than it would otherwise be? That would make their statistics pretty worthless for consumers who don't have one of those sleeves. Home users might actually see better reliability with one of the enterprise drives that include anti-vibration technology in that case. That's all I was saying here--that you can't just assume their numbers will translate into other environments.
The intended environment for WD's drives includes a description of how many drives should be in the array. They are numbers like "NAS with 1 to 5 disks". They state that the lower tier models will not work well inside of massive arrays, where things like vibration need to be better controlled. Their more expensive models have specific technology (at an extra cost) aimed at keeping vibration related issues under better control.
BackBlaze ignores those guidelines, putting drives that were not designed for the vibration of a dense drive array into one. When Backblaze drives fail, it's completely appropriate to ask "would they have failed there if they were used only as specified"?, which means putting them into smaller arrays. There's a very real possibility that the failure rate heavy reflects that unusual setup, and that it is not representative of reliability for the disks in other environments.
Libel and slander against an individual is generally invalidated if you're making a truthful and factual statement. There are exceptions, like when there is intention of malice. And the minute you layer any opinion onto what are straight facts, you're in fuzzy territory.
And statements published by a company about another company are not necessarily protected by the sort of free speech guidelines that guide individual interaction. I don't claim to know those rules. No larger company would publish this sort of information without passing it through legal counsel first to figure it out. And that overhead influences why those companies just don't bother.
The most common reasonable criticism of Backblaze's reports I've seen is that the drives are not being used in their intended environment. I would not want to be part of a legal defense where I had to legally prove the data originating from that use case is strictly factual commentary about the product.
Exactly. If the data is decrypted within Backblaze before being transmitted out...fail. Whether or not they store that private key only impacts how they can act when the person requesting the data isn't accessing it. Someone who sniffs the whole operation at the right place in the network while you're accessing your data will still get it. The only hope of real security you have is if the data is encrypted all the way to your computer, and then only decrypted there. Anything less is kidding yourself.
I really don't want to buy a huge SSD - so I should probably consider installing everything to a large HD and then just moving data to SSD when it is in use. I just don't know how well-supported that is in Windows.
What you're asking for there sounds a lot like what the hybrid drives do, and they don't need any software support. I'm happily using one of the Seagate SSHD hybrids in one laptop. It's a nice middle step between the speed of full SSD and the capacity of a regular drive. I got 1TB and faster boots than a regular drive for something like $60.
In Google's big paper on drive reliability, they claimed "we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data". I'm not sure exactly what that means. Might be part of their purchasing contract, to reduce liability for naming bad vendors, or it might be considering that information a competitive advantage.
I'm surprised Backblaze has published so much without getting into lawsuit trouble already. If you wonder why you haven't been offered a better deal on drives...have you considered that it's because you're not playing the big commercial buyer secrecy game? The best deal isn't necessarily the one you get if people are worried you're going to rat them out as a bad vendor. It's often the buddy who watches out for them that companies want to do large amounts of business with.
RedHat's signature RHEL product (among others) contains a massive amount of GPL code. There are major ramifications to their business should that license be weakened in a way that hurts their legal right to distribute all that code. Same thing is true of every other company making money selling Linux based solutions. There is no community behind Linux anymore if the license all the contributors were working together via falls.
That the GPL will be invalidated completely by any of this is admittedly an unlikely straw-man position. That's not mine though--I was responding to commentary presuming that was a feasible goal, if money were applied to the problem.
I was responding to the parent post's mocking of someone's credentials by pointing out that criticism was invalid. Go back and read what I wrote again, pay attention this time, and you'll see I wasn't doing an appeal to authority at all.
If it comes down to pocket depth, companies like RedHat have a lot more money at stake then either of these bozos. If this goes on long enough, I expect some of the big GPL-based software companies like them to get involved in the appropriate side of this, either directly or via FSF funding.
GPL software doesn't become "unlocked" into the public domain if the license is ruled invalid. Instead the copyright of the source code itself becomes a giant mess of individual author rights, which is useful to almost no one. The commercial competitors to software like Linux would be the main benefactors of that. There may be some shift toward BSD-ish software licenses until this clears up too. I saw a few companies adopt FreeBSD over Linux for that reason, back when the SCO UNIX case was going on, due to perceived legal risk. But most just said "it's OK, IBM and The Nazgul have got this".
Re:If only PJ was still running groklaw!
on
The GPLv2 Goes To Court
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· Score: 5, Informative
Groklaw folded mainly due to e-mail privacy concerns. PJ wanting more of her personal time back was a factor, as she'd tried to back away from the site a few times already. But it wasn't the main stated reason for the shutdown. I could understand that some people feel e-mail privacy was a silly reason to fold the site, even if I don't agree myself.
The details of the Python license jousting was lead by Eben; there's a good summary of the backstory in his 2.1 FSF e-mail. As Mr. Moglen listed himself then as "Professor of Law & Legal History" at Columbia's law school, you're not going to get very far with cheap personal attacks on his credibility. Not that how you tried to do that with Stallman was very productive either, given he's regularly advised by legal counsel when writing.
Again, I know exactly what I am getting into, and there is no further education for me right now. Deciding to have multiple cheaper installations seats can total to cost more, and it will have more potential failure points. But all I care about is having multiple installs with reasonable odds of having one good copy even in the face of serious hardware issues--think electricity strike that fries one box completely. And what I've learned about data integrity from this perspective is that every cheap copy you spin up massively reduces the odds you'll have an unrecoverable data loss. The odds you'll have a single failure go up, yes, but I don't worry about those.
Thanks for the only serious answer to what I was asking about. I really didn't need all the lectures on ECC and ZFS I got from almost everyone else; knew what I was getting into already.
ZFS highly recommends ECC memory. You can always go against the recommendation and run the risk of a total failure later.
You know what else will cause a total failure? If the system is so expensive, you can't afford to get many of them, and then you lose all the good copies. I'm really done with the idea of a single infallible box. ECC, dual power supplies, I don't care about any of those things. I want inexpensive enough to duplicate the whole box offsite.
I was asking about something small, which tends to come with less noise and power consumption too. I have a 4U server already; it's not small. It also sounds like a jet engine sometimes. Those things limit where I can put such a server.
I haven't decided on FreeBSD vs. FreeNAS (and NAS4Free) yet. I figured that anything known to work well for FreeNAS would alternately run straight FreeBSD fine as well.
You absolutely can do much cheaper than the FreeNAS Mini, I got a useful answer to my question (HP Microserver N54L), and I'd already rolled my eyes at that guide. I have a budget that doesn't allow spending $2000 on this, and I want to have more than one server to have real redundancy. At home, I'd rather have a $500 box here and another one off-site than spend $1000 on a single system.
And once you've done that, the whole class of errors ECC is aiming to protect against--things like an insane scrubber wiping out good data--are something I want to address at the system level. I'm too paranoid to ever assume one copy of something is good, no matter how much work is put into validating it, and occasional bit flipping errors at the memory level is just one of many such problems. Little changes for a paranoid multiple server system design if it's there or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, skeptigate has a nice ring to it. "Some idiot was complaining about some conspiracy theories and I had to skeptigate him until he shut up".
Don't you oppress me.
Cracker as a term predates slavery in the US; it actually predates the whole country. See the crackers on wikipedia or The Secret History Of The Word 'Cracker' for an outline of the theories and history here. There was a large enough intersection between white slave owners and the white people called crackers that it probably helped popularize the term, but they were not the same group.
No, those are dictionary definitions. I didn't write webster's.
When you copied the definitions into your post, was that copyright infringement, theft, or sharing? Consider that some potential ad revenue moved from the dictionary site to Slashdot with that paste.
The number of discs does not relate to the vibration or heat or any other factors.
They are correlated. More discs guarantees more vibration and heat, all other things being equal. Yes, there are other sources too, and all the other things are not equal. So what?
That you are calling ""NAS with 1-5 disks" a subjective specification means you're not actually using words in a way I can respond to there. Whether Backblaze's custom modifications net better or worse levels of vibration is a complicated discussion that could use some direct measurements; agreed. But what's extremely clear is that they are not using the consumer drives in anything like a consumer environment. That means using their results as a commentary on what people will see in the broader consumer system market is extrapolation, with the obvious risks that come along with it.
For example, "Backblaze sees no reliability differences between their consumer and enterprise grade drives" is a fact. Saying "there is no reliability differences between consumer and enterprise grade drives" is an invalid extrapolation of that data.
Using your example, what if one of the consumer drive models has a serious vibration issue, and Backblaze's anti-vibration sleeve makes it wildly more reliable than it would otherwise be? That would make their statistics pretty worthless for consumers who don't have one of those sleeves. Home users might actually see better reliability with one of the enterprise drives that include anti-vibration technology in that case. That's all I was saying here--that you can't just assume their numbers will translate into other environments.
The intended environment for WD's drives includes a description of how many drives should be in the array. They are numbers like "NAS with 1 to 5 disks". They state that the lower tier models will not work well inside of massive arrays, where things like vibration need to be better controlled. Their more expensive models have specific technology (at an extra cost) aimed at keeping vibration related issues under better control.
BackBlaze ignores those guidelines, putting drives that were not designed for the vibration of a dense drive array into one. When Backblaze drives fail, it's completely appropriate to ask "would they have failed there if they were used only as specified"?, which means putting them into smaller arrays. There's a very real possibility that the failure rate heavy reflects that unusual setup, and that it is not representative of reliability for the disks in other environments.
Hopefully "the truth" is a valid defense?
Libel and slander against an individual is generally invalidated if you're making a truthful and factual statement. There are exceptions, like when there is intention of malice. And the minute you layer any opinion onto what are straight facts, you're in fuzzy territory.
And statements published by a company about another company are not necessarily protected by the sort of free speech guidelines that guide individual interaction. I don't claim to know those rules. No larger company would publish this sort of information without passing it through legal counsel first to figure it out. And that overhead influences why those companies just don't bother.
The most common reasonable criticism of Backblaze's reports I've seen is that the drives are not being used in their intended environment. I would not want to be part of a legal defense where I had to legally prove the data originating from that use case is strictly factual commentary about the product.
Exactly. If the data is decrypted within Backblaze before being transmitted out...fail. Whether or not they store that private key only impacts how they can act when the person requesting the data isn't accessing it. Someone who sniffs the whole operation at the right place in the network while you're accessing your data will still get it. The only hope of real security you have is if the data is encrypted all the way to your computer, and then only decrypted there. Anything less is kidding yourself.
The author bio says "Andy has 20+ years experience in technology marketing". They're not exactly being evasive about the marketing angle of the blog.
I really don't want to buy a huge SSD - so I should probably consider installing everything to a large HD and then just moving data to SSD when it is in use. I just don't know how well-supported that is in Windows.
What you're asking for there sounds a lot like what the hybrid drives do, and they don't need any software support. I'm happily using one of the Seagate SSHD hybrids in one laptop. It's a nice middle step between the speed of full SSD and the capacity of a regular drive. I got 1TB and faster boots than a regular drive for something like $60.
In Google's big paper on drive reliability, they claimed "we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data". I'm not sure exactly what that means. Might be part of their purchasing contract, to reduce liability for naming bad vendors, or it might be considering that information a competitive advantage.
I'm surprised Backblaze has published so much without getting into lawsuit trouble already. If you wonder why you haven't been offered a better deal on drives...have you considered that it's because you're not playing the big commercial buyer secrecy game? The best deal isn't necessarily the one you get if people are worried you're going to rat them out as a bad vendor. It's often the buddy who watches out for them that companies want to do large amounts of business with.
Seagate isn't using SMR on the 6TB drives, at least not yet as far as I know. That's rolling out with the 8TB models.
Not lazy enough for me; here's a link with both the archive DVD and the Small C one: https://store.drdobbs.com/category/4/CDROM.
RedHat's signature RHEL product (among others) contains a massive amount of GPL code. There are major ramifications to their business should that license be weakened in a way that hurts their legal right to distribute all that code. Same thing is true of every other company making money selling Linux based solutions. There is no community behind Linux anymore if the license all the contributors were working together via falls.
That the GPL will be invalidated completely by any of this is admittedly an unlikely straw-man position. That's not mine though--I was responding to commentary presuming that was a feasible goal, if money were applied to the problem.
I was responding to the parent post's mocking of someone's credentials by pointing out that criticism was invalid. Go back and read what I wrote again, pay attention this time, and you'll see I wasn't doing an appeal to authority at all.
RTFA. The whole point of why this one is interesting is that the upstream here--Ximpleware--is suing and claiming damages.
If it comes down to pocket depth, companies like RedHat have a lot more money at stake then either of these bozos. If this goes on long enough, I expect some of the big GPL-based software companies like them to get involved in the appropriate side of this, either directly or via FSF funding.
GPL software doesn't become "unlocked" into the public domain if the license is ruled invalid. Instead the copyright of the source code itself becomes a giant mess of individual author rights, which is useful to almost no one. The commercial competitors to software like Linux would be the main benefactors of that. There may be some shift toward BSD-ish software licenses until this clears up too. I saw a few companies adopt FreeBSD over Linux for that reason, back when the SCO UNIX case was going on, due to perceived legal risk. But most just said "it's OK, IBM and The Nazgul have got this".
Groklaw folded mainly due to e-mail privacy concerns. PJ wanting more of her personal time back was a factor, as she'd tried to back away from the site a few times already. But it wasn't the main stated reason for the shutdown. I could understand that some people feel e-mail privacy was a silly reason to fold the site, even if I don't agree myself.
The details of the Python license jousting was lead by Eben; there's a good summary of the backstory in his 2.1 FSF e-mail. As Mr. Moglen listed himself then as "Professor of Law & Legal History" at Columbia's law school, you're not going to get very far with cheap personal attacks on his credibility. Not that how you tried to do that with Stallman was very productive either, given he's regularly advised by legal counsel when writing.
Google won't torture you by mistake.
That's what I used to think, until I tried to decipher my first AdWords bill.
Again, I know exactly what I am getting into, and there is no further education for me right now. Deciding to have multiple cheaper installations seats can total to cost more, and it will have more potential failure points. But all I care about is having multiple installs with reasonable odds of having one good copy even in the face of serious hardware issues--think electricity strike that fries one box completely. And what I've learned about data integrity from this perspective is that every cheap copy you spin up massively reduces the odds you'll have an unrecoverable data loss. The odds you'll have a single failure go up, yes, but I don't worry about those.
Thanks for the only serious answer to what I was asking about. I really didn't need all the lectures on ECC and ZFS I got from almost everyone else; knew what I was getting into already.
ZFS highly recommends ECC memory. You can always go against the recommendation and run the risk of a total failure later.
You know what else will cause a total failure? If the system is so expensive, you can't afford to get many of them, and then you lose all the good copies. I'm really done with the idea of a single infallible box. ECC, dual power supplies, I don't care about any of those things. I want inexpensive enough to duplicate the whole box offsite.
I was asking about something small, which tends to come with less noise and power consumption too. I have a 4U server already; it's not small. It also sounds like a jet engine sometimes. Those things limit where I can put such a server.
I haven't decided on FreeBSD vs. FreeNAS (and NAS4Free) yet. I figured that anything known to work well for FreeNAS would alternately run straight FreeBSD fine as well.
You absolutely can do much cheaper than the FreeNAS Mini, I got a useful answer to my question (HP Microserver N54L), and I'd already rolled my eyes at that guide. I have a budget that doesn't allow spending $2000 on this, and I want to have more than one server to have real redundancy. At home, I'd rather have a $500 box here and another one off-site than spend $1000 on a single system.
And once you've done that, the whole class of errors ECC is aiming to protect against--things like an insane scrubber wiping out good data--are something I want to address at the system level. I'm too paranoid to ever assume one copy of something is good, no matter how much work is put into validating it, and occasional bit flipping errors at the memory level is just one of many such problems. Little changes for a paranoid multiple server system design if it's there or not.