IMHO, the biggest things manufacturers could do to make the drives more RAID friendly is to change the name (even with just a v1, v2, etc...) when they change platters.
Nothing is worse than buying a bunch of drives and a couple of spares and building the array and then discovering down the road that in fact one of your spares came from a different production run and has a slightly different (maybe 3 block smaller) geometry and can't be used on your array. Usually there is absolutely no indication on the box or the drive that one of your drives is different unless you decode the cryptic serial number.
For that matter, just printing the exact LBA count on the back of the box would be a huge boon.
This isn't limited to ATA drives either. I've seen it plenty of times in professional SCSI solutions too, especially as the arrays start to get older.
Because that functionality is supposed to be handled by the RAID controller, and if the drive has it enabled you can end up losing performance as the two Command Queue Controllers fight each other. Theoretically you can turn it off (most SCSI based solutions do), but in practice many ATA drives lie to you when you tell them to turn off certain features (like Write Cacheing) and leave them on.
Exactly. I have a Lucent Wavelan Gold PCMCIA card (16 bit!) that still works at almost every internet hotspot in the world. You can tell the card is old because it still calls itself a "Wavelan" and makes a big deal about 802.11b compatability. I actually have no plan to upgrade anytime soon (my access point is an original Apple Airport) because it's still faster than my DSL connection and my friends with G equipment seem to have a lot more trouble with it than I do with mine (nobody ever has trouble with their cards in my house, whereas I've seen access points that repeatedly crash if someone starts up one of those integrated Intel cards in a laptop and stuff like that).
Sure it's terrible when someone wants to transfer a gigabyte sized file to someone else in the network via Windows File Sharing, but that's what the spare (10/100) switch is for.
It works because most people don't really know what is good and what isn't, especially when they're young (MTV's target audience). When someone tells them something is good, they tend to belive it, even if they have some personal reservations. Plus, even if you aren't swayed by such media tactics directly, your friends probably are and lots of people pick stuff up just to fit in with their friends (especially with teenagers). This is why Radio monopolies and MTV are so vital to the record industry. If your carefully crafted message about who what to buy is mixed up with independant operators not under your control, you can lose your grip over the target audience.
Stealth will probably still turn a profit. Overseas and DVD sales are a big factor these days. Besides, I know some kids that liked it (stuff exploded).
While I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to "fix" this once you have the HDD pulled and attached to your comptuer, it's already a pretty big step to do that. Also, TiVo has been making it harder and harder to modify the OS in their boxes over time. It's an ordeal to get a simple SSH daemon installed, and you have to do it over every time the OS is updated. Plus, the majority of the TiVo community has a gentelmens agreement to not talk about extracting shows and defeating protections in public. However, as TiVo becomes more and more friendly with Macrovision and less friendly with the hacker community, I can see this gentlemans agreement start to disappear over time and leave us with a dynamic like the outright hostility between DirectTV and their hackers.
I think the lesson is that in the old days the densites were low enough that you could get some high power equipment to read the slop from the heads or do analysis on the residual fields to get the data. These days densites are so high that consumer hard drives are working in the same realm as the high power scientific equipment and there are no machines precise enough to do what you could do in the old days.
Hard drive technology changes extremely fast, but electron force microscope technology changes very slowly. It was only a matter of time before the old techniques were rendered useless. The only hope they have is the fact that hard drives have to be manufactured cheaply and expensive scientific equipment can afford to be made to higher tolerances, but even that margin is slim.
I started out on the GIMP and now find Photoshop's interface infurating at places. There are some things the GIMP just does better, and some of the interfaces just seem to work better.
A lot of the griping probably comes from people who just are expecting Photoshop. OTOH, there are some things you can do in Photoshop that you just can't do in the GIMP, and some of the interface decisions are a result of needing to accomodate additional features.
I got a letter about this back in June, and they offered the same deal to everybody in the letter. There was also an option to opt-out of the suit entirely, but the deadline was pretty soon after I got the letter itself.
I've got bad news for you, everytime someone looks at your data they're going to make a copy of it. Browsers store a copy every time they visit a site. Google is much the same way, they need to store data about your site to index off of.
It's not like Google is going to open up "google: Momoru's site" or something. They're grabbing the data to index. Frankly, if you're that worried that someone make make money (however indirectly) off of your work, you'd better keep it locked up and hidden from the world because you never know when someone might satarize it or use it indirectly somehow and leave you out of the loop. Part of the web is letting go of the 100% control that some people want to exercise over everything they do. It's realizing that not everybody thinks the same way and that what is "illegal use for profit" in your eyes is "part of the most useful and extensive cataloging of the largest collection of data known to man"
Finally, I remind you that no great artist/author/etc... works in a vacuume. All of the greats stole stuff from their contemporaries. Overly restrictive copyright laws hurt society in the long run.
Because the implicit assumption when you POST SOMETHING TO THE WEB is that people can see it whenever they want. This isn't like tacking something up to the wall in your house, it's like putting it up on a billboard. That's why you need to take special measures if you don't want people to do the obivous.
Who is "they" in this case? It seems to me this is being developed for use in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the biggest threat to aircraft is shoulder launched SAMs. One notable thing about these is that they're hard to coordinate, especially if you're spread out and trying to remain hidden. Plus, the news says "cheap" but that's a comparitive thing, especially in places like Afghanistan.
Uh, yeah. I was pointing out that you DID get that stuff at a 4 year college, where you don't necessarily get it at one of those 6 week deals.
The difference is that 4 year institiutions are moving their core CS degree away from something designed to ready you for graduate work so you can go on and be a CS teacher (IE, the traditional course with a gobs of obscure math courses--especially the theories of computation type courses where you spend a lot of time working up mathematical proofing techniques that you're not going to use outside of a college campus) towards a more Engineering based CS course, where the students take the fundimentals of engineering type courses instead.
I don't think the complaint was about the noise at cruising altitudes, but at takeoff and landing, and unfortunatly a LAXLHR has the Concorde doing those things right over downtown LA. It's not like LHR where you can take off over the river.
I've never thought of beach umbrellas as all THAT portable.:)
That a cool sounding gadget, although probably a little bit limited in where you can use it, although a lot of those outdoor coffeeshops have those tables that happen to include the hole for the umbrella. Although it'll look weird that you're the only one there with shade.
You know most Universities have been slowly migrating their CS degrees from their Arts/Science Colleges to the Engineering Colleges. It's really been years in coming at this point too. Most people going to the CS program at 4 year institutions are looking to not only be well rounded, but well adapted at creating large software projects once they graduate. Most of them are far less interested in the 8 different esoteric math courses that spend forever talking about stuff like the Halting Problem (which is something you don't actauly worry about much at all in real life) or proving that some particular configuration of a Turing Machine is optimal. I actaully put the AI course on my schedule in my Senior year because I was interested in game design at the time. It took me two class periods to relize that the class was never going to cover anything close to practical with regards to game design or anything in the mundane world. Looking through the textbook it seemed like the course would be nothing but a long string of arcane proofs that were not going to ever be useful outside of an academic setting.
What they want is the courses that will actually be useful to them in the real world that you're not going to get at DeVry, like determining the upper and lower bounds on an algorithm (the Big O, Big Omega, Big Theta stuff) and some good solid grounding in application design and project management.
Well, it's not data loss, but it IS expensive
on
10 Computer Mishaps
·
· Score: 1
A co-worker and me were co-oping with SGI back in 1997 and we had some Origin 2000s set up for demos. One of the processor boards had gone bad so we did the nominal replacement procedure. This is pretty straightforward, although a little time consuming. As it turns out SGI used these incredibly touchy connecters to attach the Node (CPU) boards to the backplane. Besides the normal mounting bolts on the cards, there were also these two long screws that were attached on either side of the connector. When you installed the board, the proper proceedure for screwing those screws in was to alternate between the two and turn them only one half turn at a time.
Anyway, I was teaching the new co-op (being the senior co-op:P ) on this and was cateloging the old board while she finished up the O2k. What I didn't notice was that she probably didn't screw the board in correctly. After everything is all done, we walk around to the front, start up the little 486 that operated the power on those things, and tell it to boot. 10 seconds later I get a whiff of smoke and start rushing around the rack to get to the breaker on the back before it gets too badly fried.
As it turns out the other Node boards were fine, but the on the backplane (a far more expensive part) a resister had exploded and burned a finger sized hole through the motherboard and scored the metal underneath. The other Node board might have been fine too, but it had a relatively large amount of soot deposited on it.
Or you could just run the molex extender and a long ATA cable from a table/box/something next to your freezer and just leave the drive in there as you copy the data off of it.
Interesting. I wonder if the on-disk firmware for the drive (yes HDDs run mostly off of code stored on the disk) got corrupted and by holding the arm back you were forcing the drive to run in a minimally functional PIO mode or something.
I had a batch of Maxtors that were terrible about corrupting their on-drive firmware. The problem manifested as the drives silently returning corrupt data too, which was highly annoying. Fortunately it's a dead giveaway when you reboot the machine and see:
...
ad10: 76319MB <MAXTOR 4K080H4/A08.1500> [155061/16/63] at ata5-master UDMA100
ad12: 76319MB <MAXxo`yk.@#l2fv9!..3u> [155061/16/63] at ata6-master UDMA100
ad14: 76319MB <MAXTOR 4K080H4/A08.1500> [155061/16/63] at ata7-master UDMA100 ...
The reason laptops don't get solar cells built into the top of them is because it would encourage people to leave their laptop out in the Sun, which is a generally bad idea. LCD screens are fairly temperature sensitive and can be burned if they get too hot.
Some of us are jealous of the relative ease with which the rest of you fall asleep. (The absolute worst is sharing a hotel room after a long trip, where your traveling companion falls asleep right away, but you don't fall asleep for hours)
Especially if they are heavy snorers. I have a friend like that. He falls asleep in an instant and snores so loud that your ears ring in the morning. Worse, he snores no matter what position he's in. Heck, he'll start snoring a bit when he's awake if he's not paying attention. It's just awful to room together. Fortunatly I got a girlfriend finally and have an excuse to get a seperate room (not adjacent though, because he tends to project through thin motel walls).
Yeah, but I'm not talking about them. They're less than 1% of the population and less than 5% of the gaming population. I'm talking about the guys who stream into Wal*Mart by the millions to pick one up so they can play Madden07: Just Like Last Year.
I look at my computers as providing some heating in the winter in addition to running various services. The summer is a problem though, I really hate the way they fight with the A/C, but you can't exactly run the process in reverse.
It was probably defective. Apparently there had been numerous (32 according to some counts) injuries by the same door but the building owner didn't have it looked at. Apparently there is a law now in Japan mandating a maximum speed of 65cm/second for large revolving doors.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, the biggest things manufacturers could do to make the drives more RAID friendly is to change the name (even with just a v1, v2, etc...) when they change platters.
Nothing is worse than buying a bunch of drives and a couple of spares and building the array and then discovering down the road that in fact one of your spares came from a different production run and has a slightly different (maybe 3 block smaller) geometry and can't be used on your array. Usually there is absolutely no indication on the box or the drive that one of your drives is different unless you decode the cryptic serial number.
For that matter, just printing the exact LBA count on the back of the box would be a huge boon.
This isn't limited to ATA drives either. I've seen it plenty of times in professional SCSI solutions too, especially as the arrays start to get older.
Because that functionality is supposed to be handled by the RAID controller, and if the drive has it enabled you can end up losing performance as the two Command Queue Controllers fight each other. Theoretically you can turn it off (most SCSI based solutions do), but in practice many ATA drives lie to you when you tell them to turn off certain features (like Write Cacheing) and leave them on.
Exactly. I have a Lucent Wavelan Gold PCMCIA card (16 bit!) that still works at almost every internet hotspot in the world. You can tell the card is old because it still calls itself a "Wavelan" and makes a big deal about 802.11b compatability. I actually have no plan to upgrade anytime soon (my access point is an original Apple Airport) because it's still faster than my DSL connection and my friends with G equipment seem to have a lot more trouble with it than I do with mine (nobody ever has trouble with their cards in my house, whereas I've seen access points that repeatedly crash if someone starts up one of those integrated Intel cards in a laptop and stuff like that).
Sure it's terrible when someone wants to transfer a gigabyte sized file to someone else in the network via Windows File Sharing, but that's what the spare (10/100) switch is for.
Worse, in a practial sense many people are limited by the amount of interference on the channel, which MIMO makes worse.
It works because most people don't really know what is good and what isn't, especially when they're young (MTV's target audience). When someone tells them something is good, they tend to belive it, even if they have some personal reservations. Plus, even if you aren't swayed by such media tactics directly, your friends probably are and lots of people pick stuff up just to fit in with their friends (especially with teenagers). This is why Radio monopolies and MTV are so vital to the record industry. If your carefully crafted message about who what to buy is mixed up with independant operators not under your control, you can lose your grip over the target audience.
Stealth will probably still turn a profit. Overseas and DVD sales are a big factor these days. Besides, I know some kids that liked it (stuff exploded).
While I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to "fix" this once you have the HDD pulled and attached to your comptuer, it's already a pretty big step to do that. Also, TiVo has been making it harder and harder to modify the OS in their boxes over time. It's an ordeal to get a simple SSH daemon installed, and you have to do it over every time the OS is updated. Plus, the majority of the TiVo community has a gentelmens agreement to not talk about extracting shows and defeating protections in public. However, as TiVo becomes more and more friendly with Macrovision and less friendly with the hacker community, I can see this gentlemans agreement start to disappear over time and leave us with a dynamic like the outright hostility between DirectTV and their hackers.
I think the lesson is that in the old days the densites were low enough that you could get some high power equipment to read the slop from the heads or do analysis on the residual fields to get the data. These days densites are so high that consumer hard drives are working in the same realm as the high power scientific equipment and there are no machines precise enough to do what you could do in the old days.
Hard drive technology changes extremely fast, but electron force microscope technology changes very slowly. It was only a matter of time before the old techniques were rendered useless. The only hope they have is the fact that hard drives have to be manufactured cheaply and expensive scientific equipment can afford to be made to higher tolerances, but even that margin is slim.
I started out on the GIMP and now find Photoshop's interface infurating at places. There are some things the GIMP just does better, and some of the interfaces just seem to work better.
A lot of the griping probably comes from people who just are expecting Photoshop. OTOH, there are some things you can do in Photoshop that you just can't do in the GIMP, and some of the interface decisions are a result of needing to accomodate additional features.
I got a letter about this back in June, and they offered the same deal to everybody in the letter. There was also an option to opt-out of the suit entirely, but the deadline was pretty soon after I got the letter itself.
I've got bad news for you, everytime someone looks at your data they're going to make a copy of it. Browsers store a copy every time they visit a site. Google is much the same way, they need to store data about your site to index off of.
It's not like Google is going to open up "google: Momoru's site" or something. They're grabbing the data to index. Frankly, if you're that worried that someone make make money (however indirectly) off of your work, you'd better keep it locked up and hidden from the world because you never know when someone might satarize it or use it indirectly somehow and leave you out of the loop. Part of the web is letting go of the 100% control that some people want to exercise over everything they do. It's realizing that not everybody thinks the same way and that what is "illegal use for profit" in your eyes is "part of the most useful and extensive cataloging of the largest collection of data known to man"
Finally, I remind you that no great artist/author/etc... works in a vacuume. All of the greats stole stuff from their contemporaries. Overly restrictive copyright laws hurt society in the long run.
Because the implicit assumption when you POST SOMETHING TO THE WEB is that people can see it whenever they want. This isn't like tacking something up to the wall in your house, it's like putting it up on a billboard. That's why you need to take special measures if you don't want people to do the obivous.
Who is "they" in this case? It seems to me this is being developed for use in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the biggest threat to aircraft is shoulder launched SAMs. One notable thing about these is that they're hard to coordinate, especially if you're spread out and trying to remain hidden. Plus, the news says "cheap" but that's a comparitive thing, especially in places like Afghanistan.
Uh, yeah. I was pointing out that you DID get that stuff at a 4 year college, where you don't necessarily get it at one of those 6 week deals.
The difference is that 4 year institiutions are moving their core CS degree away from something designed to ready you for graduate work so you can go on and be a CS teacher (IE, the traditional course with a gobs of obscure math courses--especially the theories of computation type courses where you spend a lot of time working up mathematical proofing techniques that you're not going to use outside of a college campus) towards a more Engineering based CS course, where the students take the fundimentals of engineering type courses instead.
I don't think the complaint was about the noise at cruising altitudes, but at takeoff and landing, and unfortunatly a LAXLHR has the Concorde doing those things right over downtown LA. It's not like LHR where you can take off over the river.
I've never thought of beach umbrellas as all THAT portable. :)
That a cool sounding gadget, although probably a little bit limited in where you can use it, although a lot of those outdoor coffeeshops have those tables that happen to include the hole for the umbrella. Although it'll look weird that you're the only one there with shade.
You know most Universities have been slowly migrating their CS degrees from their Arts/Science Colleges to the Engineering Colleges. It's really been years in coming at this point too. Most people going to the CS program at 4 year institutions are looking to not only be well rounded, but well adapted at creating large software projects once they graduate. Most of them are far less interested in the 8 different esoteric math courses that spend forever talking about stuff like the Halting Problem (which is something you don't actauly worry about much at all in real life) or proving that some particular configuration of a Turing Machine is optimal. I actaully put the AI course on my schedule in my Senior year because I was interested in game design at the time. It took me two class periods to relize that the class was never going to cover anything close to practical with regards to game design or anything in the mundane world. Looking through the textbook it seemed like the course would be nothing but a long string of arcane proofs that were not going to ever be useful outside of an academic setting.
What they want is the courses that will actually be useful to them in the real world that you're not going to get at DeVry, like determining the upper and lower bounds on an algorithm (the Big O, Big Omega, Big Theta stuff) and some good solid grounding in application design and project management.
Brilliant!
A co-worker and me were co-oping with SGI back in 1997 and we had some Origin 2000s set up for demos. One of the processor boards had gone bad so we did the nominal replacement procedure. This is pretty straightforward, although a little time consuming. As it turns out SGI used these incredibly touchy connecters to attach the Node (CPU) boards to the backplane. Besides the normal mounting bolts on the cards, there were also these two long screws that were attached on either side of the connector. When you installed the board, the proper proceedure for screwing those screws in was to alternate between the two and turn them only one half turn at a time.
:P ) on this and was cateloging the old board while she finished up the O2k. What I didn't notice was that she probably didn't screw the board in correctly. After everything is all done, we walk around to the front, start up the little 486 that operated the power on those things, and tell it to boot. 10 seconds later I get a whiff of smoke and start rushing around the rack to get to the breaker on the back before it gets too badly fried.
Anyway, I was teaching the new co-op (being the senior co-op
As it turns out the other Node boards were fine, but the on the backplane (a far more expensive part) a resister had exploded and burned a finger sized hole through the motherboard and scored the metal underneath. The other Node board might have been fine too, but it had a relatively large amount of soot deposited on it.
Or you could just run the molex extender and a long ATA cable from a table/box/something next to your freezer and just leave the drive in there as you copy the data off of it.
Interesting. I wonder if the on-disk firmware for the drive (yes HDDs run mostly off of code stored on the disk) got corrupted and by holding the arm back you were forcing the drive to run in a minimally functional PIO mode or something. I had a batch of Maxtors that were terrible about corrupting their on-drive firmware. The problem manifested as the drives silently returning corrupt data too, which was highly annoying. Fortunately it's a dead giveaway when you reboot the machine and see:
...
...
ad10: 76319MB <MAXTOR 4K080H4/A08.1500> [155061/16/63] at ata5-master UDMA100
ad12: 76319MB <MAXxo`yk.@#l2fv9!..3u> [155061/16/63] at ata6-master UDMA100
ad14: 76319MB <MAXTOR 4K080H4/A08.1500> [155061/16/63] at ata7-master UDMA100
The reason laptops don't get solar cells built into the top of them is because it would encourage people to leave their laptop out in the Sun, which is a generally bad idea. LCD screens are fairly temperature sensitive and can be burned if they get too hot.
Yeah, but I'm not talking about them. They're less than 1% of the population and less than 5% of the gaming population. I'm talking about the guys who stream into Wal*Mart by the millions to pick one up so they can play Madden07: Just Like Last Year.
I look at my computers as providing some heating in the winter in addition to running various services. The summer is a problem though, I really hate the way they fight with the A/C, but you can't exactly run the process in reverse.
It was probably defective. Apparently there had been numerous (32 according to some counts) injuries by the same door but the building owner didn't have it looked at. Apparently there is a law now in Japan mandating a maximum speed of 65cm/second for large revolving doors.