Let me see if I understand this right... they're getting ready to open up their own video store, at the same time they are starting to deliberately degrade the performance of other content providers their customers are using which are using P2P to distribute?
That's gotta be covered under some anticompetitive law somewhere? "We're going to start selling you a product, while at the same time sabotaging our competition's product, to make sure you buy ours instead."
That an actor gets $100,000 for voicing a single production, in itself, is silly. That he complains for not getting a LOT MORE for it, is just a pathetic statement on the industry as a whole.
People should be getting paid based on the value of their work. I realize it's a free market and supply and demand and all, and ultimately it's the consumers that are causing this to happen, but I still think it's just lacking in all common sense,.
If the public was not gullible enough to pay so much for something that has so little invested in it, this problem would not exist. Not because the actor was only clearing 100 grand, but that because the software retailer wasn't clearing seven figures, making the actor complain not because he was not paid fairly, but because he didn't receive as big of a cut as he thought he was due.
In summary, if something sells 20,000 units, and you are getting paid $20k for your part in it, if that same something instead sells 100,000 units (with the same investment in production, which I understand is not 1:1 but is CLOSE for software) then the correct response is not for you to get $100k for the exact same work, but instead for the cost of the item to go down relatively.
Very few of the people interested in "property" on the moon actually have plans to do anything with it. It's like any resource that for the moment appears to be unclaimed or free. People rarely turn down anything that appears to be free or almost free, regardless of whether or not it currently has value. Look at the people selling stars.
The speculators here are only interested in somehow laying claim to land so that they can sell it. I don't recall the principle that was used to populate the US, but wasn't it homestead or something? You were basically given the land but had to develop it for a certain period of time, after which it was yours. That's how any new land should work. You aren't just given it to sell to someone else, you have to put some value INTO it before it's yours to sell.
how about using NeoOffice or one of the openoffice variants to edit a spreadsheet format such as excel? I use excel for my checkbook and I had to turn off the auto calculate for my complex set of conditional sums after it hit about 4,000 entries, so I don't think performance as a database will be an issue for your uses.
Then if you want to export it to something else later or just to run numbers, CSV or other delimited format is compatible with most other database and spreadsheet apps. We've been testing neooffice for a bit here and it seems to be the best of the openoffice derivatives. I don't know if that particular one has a windows variant, but I'm sure you can find at least a few that work under windows.
how abused and misapplied all those "in the interest of national security" procedures are when there is no oversight in place. When will the legislators ever learn, anything that can be abused or misused, will be abused and misused in the absence of oversight? It's not even "might" or "is very likely". It always happens. It's human nature to take advantage for personal gain without risk. They censor anything that they want to, for any agenda, because they can. And this just exposes that truth.
Now watch how they react to it. Do they straighten up their censorship policies? of course not. They'll simply make the abuse harder to discover.
I don't see apple as highly interested in either the low end market OR the very high end. They have a market presence, but it's not nearly as significant or profitable as their mid to high end market. Still though, if you're turning say 20% profit on one market you're in, and can still turn 5% profit in another market (due to reduced overhead of already being IN a market) why not? 5% more is still 5% more. Just because it's less profitable doesn't mean it's not worth your time.
the mac mini is apple's answer to Dell. want to buy a dell? ok go for it. then when you've had enough, come buy a mini and use your old dell monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Apple generally don't reduce their prices much over time so the deals get less attractive.
If you're looking for apple on the cheap, ether shop used (get one about 2-2.5 yrs old, that still has applecare on it, the 3 yr warranty) or wait for a "refresh" and then go to an apple retailer (not necessarily an apple STORE) because they will have all the older ones on discount after the refresh.
You can also get a refurb from apple if you wait at least 3 weeks after a refresh, at significant savings. Use the money you saved to buy applecare. It's very common to receive a higher spec'd machine than you ordered(/paid for) if you go refurb... more memory, faster processor, larger HD, seen it all. No guarantees, but good odds. One person I know has gone refurb on all three of his machines, and has gotten more ram, faster cpu, or both, all three times.
the problem here is, imagine everywhere you try to buy a car, they all have power windows. (or at least most of them do) That's where you lose your choice. The bundling/tie-in is not the problem, the difficulty they make you go through to avoid it (though it is required to be avoidable by law) is unacceptably high.
That's probably true, and I wonder what will happen if a flood of people demand a refund and they have to pay $200 per? That would make for a net $170 loss per incident.
I'm sure there's some way they'll find to pass the loss back on to Microsoft, though for right now they're probably just eating it because it's small and they're going to have as much hassle with MS as they are presenting to their customers.
I wonder really though just how much of those numbers are "real"? Marketing people are not necessarily geniuses at figuring out what works, but are geniuses at twisting numbers to make it look like it works.
It wouldn't surprise me if parent is right and the actual real numbers show that banners/ads don't generate nearly the revenue that the ad placers claim they do. In that respect, the marketers, not the consumer, may be the bigger cause of the banner/ad nightmare we are in now.
Unfortunately, my daily receipt of email offering discount viagra would seems to indicate that this method works, as there's no middleman and they must somehow be turning a buck. But then I suppose the insanely cheap cost of spamvertising is probably the reason that model really works. I'd be interested to see hard (claimed) numbers for effectiveness for the various marketing methods. Gotta be someone collecting those stats out there...
My point though is not complaining about the actual quality, but to the advertised quality. That image you linked to is a 46 megapixel image. At your recommended 35% scaling to look clear, it's a 5.7m megapixel image. Take that scale image and export it and then open that and zoom it back up to 46 megapixels and smooth it, and it looks about as good as the original 46 megapixel image. That illustrates the point that you can make a higher megapixel image based on a lower megapixel source, but that doesn't improve it, and is somewhat dishonest to describe it at a resolution that clearly exceeds the actual resolution represented in the image.
I don't believe either of those two examples could be described honestly as more than 6 megapixel images.
That gigapixel camera could be modified to just blow up the image to 10 gp, and then smooth it, and try to call it a 10gp image, and I'd cry fraud.
Plus, you only need to eat a lot to *get* fat - maintaining your weight doesn't require eating extra.
Actually, it does. Larger fat cells, more skin, and more body mass in general, it's all alive and it requires a proportionally larger amount of energy to maintain. Obese people have serious cooling issues in the heat also, "sweatin' like a pig" burns a LOT of energy.
Then there's the whole issue of just getting around. An obese person may burn 30% more calories walking from their car to their house than you do, and this makes them require more energy intake on a daily basis. There's a reason fat people get winded walking up a few flights of stairs, they're burning through those twinkies at an astonishing rate.
There are those with medical reasons for being obese, but for the great majority, it's either a choice or a mental issue. (unless you want to classify mental issue as medical)
What really kills me is (A) the people that go in for that "carve the fat out of your body" surgery ("bariatric surgery", iirc?) and (B) the people that get their stomach stapled, and then wind up in the hospital because they gorged and burst their staples. All the surgery in the world can't solve mental causes of obesity.
Sorry for the OT, getting back to the point... you can't look at someone that's obese eating a larger dinner than you and scoff at them for not trying. Their 2,000 calorie meal compared to your 1,700 calorie meal, if you put it in perspective, they may be on a better diet than you are. Any dietitian will tell you that eating too little for your daily needs will put your body in "starvation emergency" mode and you'll pack on pounds at an astonishing rate. The key to dieting is finding the best point where you are getting what your body feels you need, and no more. Medical issues can screw up the body's set point and cause you to be either in overeating or starvation mode with no middleground, and that's unfortunately a no-win situation for the few that are in it.
Add to that exercise, but that IS going to make you require more food, but if you can burn 800 more calories from workout, and as a result your "ideal caloric intake" bumps up 500 calories (hence you eat more) you will lose weight with a net shed of 300 calories for the day.
When you get to the highest resolution the image is terrible. It looks like a muddy smoothing of a blocky jpeg. You can't say this is a gigapixel image much more than you can say a 640x480 tiff expanded to 400,000x250,000 pixels (in its blocky glory) is a gigapixel image.
I was expecting to see good quality all the way down to the highest zoom. something like google-earth quality for the most part. They don't let you just keep zooming in past the point where the resolution has hit the wall like this does.
They have no business calling this a gigapixel image, everyone that reads that is expecting that's the resolution. In reality it speaks more for the pixel count than content.
For those nations that want dual-boot models, running both Windows and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or so to the cost of the machines
just another variation on the chirping, although sure does sound harsher than usual. They're usually a higher frequency, and purer tone, that one's raspy. Either way though, there's probably nothing you personally can do for it. If it's not detecting, you have to solve that problem first. Sometimes freezing it helps. But when it's chirping like that there's usually no saving it at home. Drives that tend to click loudly during access and eventually stop responding seem to have the best odds of saving something from.
The loud noise you are hearing is commonly referred to as "tapping". Several drive/computer manufacturers have a condition they describe as "taps on boot", which is what I tend to see. With some drives though, the tap is periodic while you are using the drive. I had a 23 (yes 23) GB hard drive in my black powerbook (1999) and it started tapping sometimes 2-3 times/hour a few months after I got it. I thought for sure it was going to die, (and seagate offered to replace it for free after hearing it over the phone) but it lasted a good four years before I sold the computer.
The "shims" you're using are probably not really helping the problem. As in, they are allowing it to work but are probably accelerating the problem. It may go like my 23 did and just keep making noise and keep working, but more likely one day it will just get to the point of being unrecoverable and you'll have to replace it or throw it. The top covers on small hard drives are VERY close to the platter, and there are often warnings on them saying "do not press on cover" because it can contact the platter. I can only guess that you have enough shims in place now that the cover is very lightly dragging on the platter, and that adding more shims prevents it from spinning up. Your shims may be causing the platter to spin slower than normal, which may be helping it to access. Sounds very touchy.
The drive I mentioned in my previous post would tap 3-4 times in total before it would stop accessing. Sometimes I'd get only a few seconds between taps or somtimes maybe 20 minutes, but when it hit its limit that ended the session.
I've seen stories on IPTV at least eight years ago. It's hardly a new problem, and certainly hasn't been ignored until now. The fisheries were actually one of the featured issues in the documentary on the zebra mussel "invasion".
But this is just evolution at work. Whenever a species makes a beachhead on a new environment there's an immediate conflict with native species. Whoever is better adapted wins. Because this is so sudden, on an evolutionary timeline, there's no time to adapt - either you're ready for it or you're not.
I consider this somewhat unfortunate, because any extinction reduces the overall variety of life in the world which has taken a long time to develop. But extinction is just one of the many methods by which evolution works.
I'm sure that was not uploaded directly to youtube. With all the TS videos on youtube I'm sure they can't go there at all let alone upload.
For better or for worse, this looks like a cyber cafe, so they likely had knowledgeable people there to find ways around the great firewall, but odds are The State was quick to figure out which cafe that video was taken at and by this point someone's locked up over this hitting youtube.
It'd have been a better watch if the video hadn't been taken so far from the epicenter. That was what, about a 4.5 at the location of the video? If that'd have been a 7 that building probably wouldn't have lasted more than a few seconds before things started coming down, including the camera. (and the fish)
While we don't swap heads/platters, we have had from time to time needed to swap the onboard controller card. We keep ALL removed hard drives that the customers don't request back, in case we can use the card to recover another drive someone else brings in. The quantums were really nice that way, they had a habit of setting a part on the board ON FIRE and not working anymore. Swap cards, poof, working hard drive. Needed to be the same capacity though and same attachment to the hard drive body.
Last week we recovered 26gb of a customer's data, full recovery, in about 10 sessions of using rsync. We'd let rsync run until the drive "hung up" on us, then cancel it and into the freezer to cool back down for 10 min, repeat.
That chirp he heard is a failure of one of the windings (or the driver IC) on the spindle motor. It's a stepper, and so if a winding goes out, it can't step, and it just resonates at the stepping frequency, and makes a very noticeable "chiiirp". (it's trying to move the head, stepping at an audible frequency, which is why you can hear it) This is followed by a loud click as the drive determines it can't read anything and resets itself, one step of which is to move the read head all the way to the parking track. It does this regardless of where it's at currently because it can't read track information to tell, so it moves it the full distance, and slams into the hard stop and makes the loud noise like a free ball in a pinball machine. Most drives will make 3-6 hard reset attempts before shutting down, but some will go forever.
I've dealt with several dozen Seagate 2.5" HDDs lately, and they just give a loud TAK-TAK-TAK...TAK-TAK-TAK and that's it, you can't hear the chirp. Most of the 3.5" drives do the cyclic chiiirpTAK...chiiirpTAK...chiiirpTAK and then power off. Either way, as far as WE are concerned, dead drive. We refer customers to drivesavers, and due to cost, very few send it in, but a few do. (maybe 5%) So far they have had success with all the people we have referred.
TotalRecall is another company that does this sort of work, but I don't have any experience with them. One nice thing with drivesavers is if they can't recover ANYTHING from the drive, you don't get billed. (but shipping I think)
The OP's article was mighty light on details. I think I just provided more info than they did...:P
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Let me see if I understand this right... they're getting ready to open up their own video store, at the same time they are starting to deliberately degrade the performance of other content providers their customers are using which are using P2P to distribute?
That's gotta be covered under some anticompetitive law somewhere? "We're going to start selling you a product, while at the same time sabotaging our competition's product, to make sure you buy ours instead."
That an actor gets $100,000 for voicing a single production, in itself, is silly. That he complains for not getting a LOT MORE for it, is just a pathetic statement on the industry as a whole.
People should be getting paid based on the value of their work. I realize it's a free market and supply and demand and all, and ultimately it's the consumers that are causing this to happen, but I still think it's just lacking in all common sense,.
If the public was not gullible enough to pay so much for something that has so little invested in it, this problem would not exist. Not because the actor was only clearing 100 grand, but that because the software retailer wasn't clearing seven figures, making the actor complain not because he was not paid fairly, but because he didn't receive as big of a cut as he thought he was due.
In summary, if something sells 20,000 units, and you are getting paid $20k for your part in it, if that same something instead sells 100,000 units (with the same investment in production, which I understand is not 1:1 but is CLOSE for software) then the correct response is not for you to get $100k for the exact same work, but instead for the cost of the item to go down relatively.
Very few of the people interested in "property" on the moon actually have plans to do anything with it. It's like any resource that for the moment appears to be unclaimed or free. People rarely turn down anything that appears to be free or almost free, regardless of whether or not it currently has value. Look at the people selling stars.
The speculators here are only interested in somehow laying claim to land so that they can sell it. I don't recall the principle that was used to populate the US, but wasn't it homestead or something? You were basically given the land but had to develop it for a certain period of time, after which it was yours. That's how any new land should work. You aren't just given it to sell to someone else, you have to put some value INTO it before it's yours to sell.
lets call this new invention "secure design".
What a novel idea, we should patent that!
(and why didn't anyone suggest this sooner?)
how about using NeoOffice or one of the openoffice variants to edit a spreadsheet format such as excel? I use excel for my checkbook and I had to turn off the auto calculate for my complex set of conditional sums after it hit about 4,000 entries, so I don't think performance as a database will be an issue for your uses.
Then if you want to export it to something else later or just to run numbers, CSV or other delimited format is compatible with most other database and spreadsheet apps. We've been testing neooffice for a bit here and it seems to be the best of the openoffice derivatives. I don't know if that particular one has a windows variant, but I'm sure you can find at least a few that work under windows.
how abused and misapplied all those "in the interest of national security" procedures are when there is no oversight in place. When will the legislators ever learn, anything that can be abused or misused, will be abused and misused in the absence of oversight? It's not even "might" or "is very likely". It always happens. It's human nature to take advantage for personal gain without risk. They censor anything that they want to, for any agenda, because they can. And this just exposes that truth.
Now watch how they react to it. Do they straighten up their censorship policies? of course not. They'll simply make the abuse harder to discover.
I don't see apple as highly interested in either the low end market OR the very high end. They have a market presence, but it's not nearly as significant or profitable as their mid to high end market. Still though, if you're turning say 20% profit on one market you're in, and can still turn 5% profit in another market (due to reduced overhead of already being IN a market) why not? 5% more is still 5% more. Just because it's less profitable doesn't mean it's not worth your time.
the mac mini is apple's answer to Dell. want to buy a dell? ok go for it. then when you've had enough, come buy a mini and use your old dell monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Apple generally don't reduce their prices much over time so the deals get less attractive.
If you're looking for apple on the cheap, ether shop used (get one about 2-2.5 yrs old, that still has applecare on it, the 3 yr warranty) or wait for a "refresh" and then go to an apple retailer (not necessarily an apple STORE) because they will have all the older ones on discount after the refresh.
You can also get a refurb from apple if you wait at least 3 weeks after a refresh, at significant savings. Use the money you saved to buy applecare. It's very common to receive a higher spec'd machine than you ordered(/paid for) if you go refurb... more memory, faster processor, larger HD, seen it all. No guarantees, but good odds. One person I know has gone refurb on all three of his machines, and has gotten more ram, faster cpu, or both, all three times.
the problem here is, imagine everywhere you try to buy a car, they all have power windows. (or at least most of them do) That's where you lose your choice. The bundling/tie-in is not the problem, the difficulty they make you go through to avoid it (though it is required to be avoidable by law) is unacceptably high.
but won't they still have charged you for windows? (and quite possibly, for the hard drive also?)
That's probably true, and I wonder what will happen if a flood of people demand a refund and they have to pay $200 per? That would make for a net $170 loss per incident.
I'm sure there's some way they'll find to pass the loss back on to Microsoft, though for right now they're probably just eating it because it's small and they're going to have as much hassle with MS as they are presenting to their customers.
Looks like it will be a slow process.
I wonder really though just how much of those numbers are "real"? Marketing people are not necessarily geniuses at figuring out what works, but are geniuses at twisting numbers to make it look like it works.
It wouldn't surprise me if parent is right and the actual real numbers show that banners/ads don't generate nearly the revenue that the ad placers claim they do. In that respect, the marketers, not the consumer, may be the bigger cause of the banner/ad nightmare we are in now.
Unfortunately, my daily receipt of email offering discount viagra would seems to indicate that this method works, as there's no middleman and they must somehow be turning a buck. But then I suppose the insanely cheap cost of spamvertising is probably the reason that model really works. I'd be interested to see hard (claimed) numbers for effectiveness for the various marketing methods. Gotta be someone collecting those stats out there...
My point though is not complaining about the actual quality, but to the advertised quality. That image you linked to is a 46 megapixel image. At your recommended 35% scaling to look clear, it's a 5.7m megapixel image. Take that scale image and export it and then open that and zoom it back up to 46 megapixels and smooth it, and it looks about as good as the original 46 megapixel image. That illustrates the point that you can make a higher megapixel image based on a lower megapixel source, but that doesn't improve it, and is somewhat dishonest to describe it at a resolution that clearly exceeds the actual resolution represented in the image.
I don't believe either of those two examples could be described honestly as more than 6 megapixel images.
That gigapixel camera could be modified to just blow up the image to 10 gp, and then smooth it, and try to call it a 10gp image, and I'd cry fraud.
Fat People Cause Global Warming, Higher Food Prices
If you're going to go that route, how about contributing to
Saying "Cause" gives everyone the impression that it's the sole (or leading) factor, which is just stupid.
Plus, you only need to eat a lot to *get* fat - maintaining your weight doesn't require eating extra.
Actually, it does. Larger fat cells, more skin, and more body mass in general, it's all alive and it requires a proportionally larger amount of energy to maintain. Obese people have serious cooling issues in the heat also, "sweatin' like a pig" burns a LOT of energy.
Then there's the whole issue of just getting around. An obese person may burn 30% more calories walking from their car to their house than you do, and this makes them require more energy intake on a daily basis. There's a reason fat people get winded walking up a few flights of stairs, they're burning through those twinkies at an astonishing rate.
There are those with medical reasons for being obese, but for the great majority, it's either a choice or a mental issue. (unless you want to classify mental issue as medical)
What really kills me is (A) the people that go in for that "carve the fat out of your body" surgery ("bariatric surgery", iirc?) and (B) the people that get their stomach stapled, and then wind up in the hospital because they gorged and burst their staples. All the surgery in the world can't solve mental causes of obesity.
Sorry for the OT, getting back to the point... you can't look at someone that's obese eating a larger dinner than you and scoff at them for not trying. Their 2,000 calorie meal compared to your 1,700 calorie meal, if you put it in perspective, they may be on a better diet than you are. Any dietitian will tell you that eating too little for your daily needs will put your body in "starvation emergency" mode and you'll pack on pounds at an astonishing rate. The key to dieting is finding the best point where you are getting what your body feels you need, and no more. Medical issues can screw up the body's set point and cause you to be either in overeating or starvation mode with no middleground, and that's unfortunately a no-win situation for the few that are in it.
Add to that exercise, but that IS going to make you require more food, but if you can burn 800 more calories from workout, and as a result your "ideal caloric intake" bumps up 500 calories (hence you eat more) you will lose weight with a net shed of 300 calories for the day.
what kind of a printer does it take to print a high res monster like that?
Though most real people are unlikely to afford such a camera, is there any way to borrow/lease/rent one?
When you get to the highest resolution the image is terrible. It looks like a muddy smoothing of a blocky jpeg. You can't say this is a gigapixel image much more than you can say a 640x480 tiff expanded to 400,000x250,000 pixels (in its blocky glory) is a gigapixel image.
I was expecting to see good quality all the way down to the highest zoom. something like google-earth quality for the most part. They don't let you just keep zooming in past the point where the resolution has hit the wall like this does.
They have no business calling this a gigapixel image, everyone that reads that is expecting that's the resolution. In reality it speaks more for the pixel count than content.
For those nations that want dual-boot models, running both Windows and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or so to the cost of the machines
Why does dual boot require extra hardware??
No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).
And this is useful because so many people have 7/8 of their hard drive allocated to a partition containing random numbers.
Making it impossible to confirm what it is isn't very useful when you can quickly rule out 99.5% of the remaining possibilities.
just another variation on the chirping, although sure does sound harsher than usual. They're usually a higher frequency, and purer tone, that one's raspy. Either way though, there's probably nothing you personally can do for it. If it's not detecting, you have to solve that problem first. Sometimes freezing it helps. But when it's chirping like that there's usually no saving it at home. Drives that tend to click loudly during access and eventually stop responding seem to have the best odds of saving something from.
The loud noise you are hearing is commonly referred to as "tapping". Several drive/computer manufacturers have a condition they describe as "taps on boot", which is what I tend to see. With some drives though, the tap is periodic while you are using the drive. I had a 23 (yes 23) GB hard drive in my black powerbook (1999) and it started tapping sometimes 2-3 times/hour a few months after I got it. I thought for sure it was going to die, (and seagate offered to replace it for free after hearing it over the phone) but it lasted a good four years before I sold the computer.
The "shims" you're using are probably not really helping the problem. As in, they are allowing it to work but are probably accelerating the problem. It may go like my 23 did and just keep making noise and keep working, but more likely one day it will just get to the point of being unrecoverable and you'll have to replace it or throw it. The top covers on small hard drives are VERY close to the platter, and there are often warnings on them saying "do not press on cover" because it can contact the platter. I can only guess that you have enough shims in place now that the cover is very lightly dragging on the platter, and that adding more shims prevents it from spinning up. Your shims may be causing the platter to spin slower than normal, which may be helping it to access. Sounds very touchy.
The drive I mentioned in my previous post would tap 3-4 times in total before it would stop accessing. Sometimes I'd get only a few seconds between taps or somtimes maybe 20 minutes, but when it hit its limit that ended the session.
I've seen stories on IPTV at least eight years ago. It's hardly a new problem, and certainly hasn't been ignored until now. The fisheries were actually one of the featured issues in the documentary on the zebra mussel "invasion".
But this is just evolution at work. Whenever a species makes a beachhead on a new environment there's an immediate conflict with native species. Whoever is better adapted wins. Because this is so sudden, on an evolutionary timeline, there's no time to adapt - either you're ready for it or you're not.
I consider this somewhat unfortunate, because any extinction reduces the overall variety of life in the world which has taken a long time to develop. But extinction is just one of the many methods by which evolution works.
I'm sure that was not uploaded directly to youtube. With all the TS videos on youtube I'm sure they can't go there at all let alone upload.
For better or for worse, this looks like a cyber cafe, so they likely had knowledgeable people there to find ways around the great firewall, but odds are The State was quick to figure out which cafe that video was taken at and by this point someone's locked up over this hitting youtube.
It'd have been a better watch if the video hadn't been taken so far from the epicenter. That was what, about a 4.5 at the location of the video? If that'd have been a 7 that building probably wouldn't have lasted more than a few seconds before things started coming down, including the camera. (and the fish)
While we don't swap heads/platters, we have had from time to time needed to swap the onboard controller card. We keep ALL removed hard drives that the customers don't request back, in case we can use the card to recover another drive someone else brings in. The quantums were really nice that way, they had a habit of setting a part on the board ON FIRE and not working anymore. Swap cards, poof, working hard drive. Needed to be the same capacity though and same attachment to the hard drive body.
:P
Last week we recovered 26gb of a customer's data, full recovery, in about 10 sessions of using rsync. We'd let rsync run until the drive "hung up" on us, then cancel it and into the freezer to cool back down for 10 min, repeat.
That chirp he heard is a failure of one of the windings (or the driver IC) on the spindle motor. It's a stepper, and so if a winding goes out, it can't step, and it just resonates at the stepping frequency, and makes a very noticeable "chiiirp". (it's trying to move the head, stepping at an audible frequency, which is why you can hear it) This is followed by a loud click as the drive determines it can't read anything and resets itself, one step of which is to move the read head all the way to the parking track. It does this regardless of where it's at currently because it can't read track information to tell, so it moves it the full distance, and slams into the hard stop and makes the loud noise like a free ball in a pinball machine. Most drives will make 3-6 hard reset attempts before shutting down, but some will go forever.
I've dealt with several dozen Seagate 2.5" HDDs lately, and they just give a loud TAK-TAK-TAK...TAK-TAK-TAK and that's it, you can't hear the chirp. Most of the 3.5" drives do the cyclic chiiirpTAK...chiiirpTAK...chiiirpTAK and then power off. Either way, as far as WE are concerned, dead drive. We refer customers to drivesavers, and due to cost, very few send it in, but a few do. (maybe 5%) So far they have had success with all the people we have referred.
TotalRecall is another company that does this sort of work, but I don't have any experience with them. One nice thing with drivesavers is if they can't recover ANYTHING from the drive, you don't get billed. (but shipping I think)
The OP's article was mighty light on details. I think I just provided more info than they did...