My 2013 BMW has a shifter that's the "spring back to rest position" type. But BMW's design hasn't led to any roll-away issues whatsoever that I've heard of. I think there are a few design-related reasons why. The first is how the gears are actually selected - push the lever forwards to select reverse, pull the lever backwards to select drive. This is in contrast with the Chrysler shift where appears to be a pull-back regardless of whether you want to go into Reverse or Drive from Park. Also, the BMW shifter has a push-button that does nothing but tell the car to go into Park, so it's obvious when the Park command has been given. With the Chrysler shifter, the command to go into Park from Drive is to push the lever forward - which is the same motion to put the car into Neutral from Drive, but you have to move the shifter further for the Park function. I can see how this can be very unclear for the driver. Finally, BMW has programmed the car to go into Park if the driver's door is opened, even if it is moving slowly which can be quite jarring I've heard. (I know of nobody who has tested opening the door while at highway speeds.:) ) Mostly, people on the BMW forums have been complaining how difficult it is to get the car into Neutral and keep it there.
So I have fiber broadband provided by my city. Via traceroute I can tell the city uses L-3 to talk to the rest of the world. Is this proposal simply about being able to change the L-3 part of the link? So L-3, AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, Google, etc. would then contact my city to arrange a 10gbps (or 40, or 1, or whatever) pipe to the rest of the 'net then charge us users individually, with the city getting a cut to cover the last-mile costs, and somehow know that my traffic which goes over the same fiber as my neighbor needs to be routed to Gooble while my neighbor's routes to Comcast?
And Slashdotters are going to ignore that because they don't like what he's saying.
In my opinion just as an ad hominem attack against a person's position is wrong, ad hominem support for their position is wrong to. Bad guy who says something good is still a bad guy, and they still said something good. Good buy says something bad is still a good guy, and they still said something bad.
Note: I am neither arguing for or against what Reznor has said, just stating that I think you're committing an argumentum ad hominem logical fallacy by implying Slashdot readers are wrong and should support what Reznor says today because of what he has done yesterday.
Patents Can't Explain What The Invention Is Because They're Full Of Meaningless Jargon
That's my experience, at least. The failing is mine however, as while I can't understand what patents try to say it seems plenty of other people can. I wonder if "Startup Speak" is a similar situation - people who work in that realm understand the language, but just because those of us outside that realm don't grok the language doesn't necessarily mean it's meaningless...?
Here is the text of a Bloomberg article from 2013 (since going to the website itself didn't load for me) discussing "Asia Soaring Wages" where people make USD $226/mo in Indonesia and USD $10/day in Thailand which is apparently a significant increase (or not, depending on who the article author talked to.) China factories outsourcing to Indonesia and Thailannd factories is discussed. The drive to automation is discussed.
Automation is certainly not anything new. Even without minimum wage increases it's still an inevitability.
I recall playing the DOOM beta, which had the best BFG ever. Instead of a single giant shot it spewed a bazillion pulse rifle shots all at once. I think it was removed from the release version due to performance concerns.
This was during university, at an institution that was primarily Mac for student-owned computers. I had a 486DX2/50 which got a lot of attention. For LAN play we went to a lab.
We'd do speed runs of levels and send the screenshots to Romero to taunt him.
Creating levels was a thing. A roommate created "Escape From Detroit" which started at the Joe after the Red Wings lost in the Stanley Cup finals and the fans were rioting.
Yahoo Mail is simply a vehicle that doesn't appear to me to be any more or less secure than most other delivery vehicles. Yesterday we dealt with some ransomware that came in the form of an email from an employee's spouse that had a link to a landscaping company, and that landscaping company's website had a link (probably an ad) to a malicious site that delivered the ransomware. The employee's spouse contacted their IT, who reported not seeing any ransomware, which is why I'm thinking it was an ad on the landscaping company's website rather than the website itself that had the malware.
Telling Congress "don't use Yahoo Mail, it isn't safe, use official email instead" is giving them the wrong idea that they're safe to click on anything they get in the official email, and doesn't do anything to mitigate the danger of malicious websites. Their official mail might or might not be any better about scanning attachments for viruses. Their official mail would hopefully be better about prevent account hacks, though - it seems that's a fairly common thing for Yahoo Mail.
According to this site (I have no idea how accurate it is, sorry) a string of 10 random ASCII characters would take 19.24 years to crack at a rate of 100 billion guesses per second. (I assume that's beyond the capabilities off a P90:) ) A text string like "thequickbrownFox" - 16 characters, just lower and upper alphas - would take 9.27 million centuries to brute force. Of course, using that password in a system that stores in plaintext that is later compromised means the password would be cracked in 0 seconds. And indeed as you say, a 44 character string of just lowercase characters would take much longer than the universe can accommodate.
My city has recently begun rolling out 1gbps fiber to all residents. The city has a 10gbps pipe to the outside world. My ONT's IP address is a L3 address, so I assume the city is using fiber and perhaps even equipment belonging to L3. I think a lot of the fiber being used is from the '90s. (Except the new runs to everybody's house, of course.)
I already had a server, so when I got gigabit fiber Internet and my old router would only give me ~300 mbps with NAT, I fired up a VM, gave that a couple network ports, and installed the free-for-home-use Sophos UTM. I then repurposed my old router to be simply a wifi AP. The Sophos is giving me high 800s, low 900s throughput just doing NAT and firewall, and dips down to 300 mbps or so if I enable IPS (Intrusion Prevention System.) The interface and documentation aren't the best, but work well enough I suppose. The main issue I've found going the VM route is that kicking off a server backup was causing the VM to snapshot which paused its processing for a few moments, dropping some network connections.
I honestly haven't looked at Dell hardware for a very long time, since most of the physical stuff we deploy is outside of the US and they have horrible international warranty service. Their low end consumer PCs are garbage and always have been, but I've heard the business lines of desktops, laptops and servers are still halfway decent.
Warning: anecdote from a Winddows admin incoming.
I started working in a Compaq shop. Which became HP, of course.
Then a heterogeneous shop with IBM, Dell and HP.
Then an all-Dell shop.
Then an all-HP shop.
In my experience, all three brands have had generally the same reliability and performance - but the ease of server management (installing drivers and updates, configuring lights-out management and alerts, etc.) and the experience of tech support have been significantly better with Dell.
(Regarding SANs - I've found that EMC is ridiculously fast yet ridiculously cryptic to manage, EQL is ridiculously easy to manage yet struggles on performance and reliability, and new tech like Nimble so far appears to be both very fast and very easy. It'll be very interesting to see what an EMC/Dell merger would produce. I have zero experience with Compellent.)
Indeed. Having gone to CMU, I see aspects of people I knew there in the BBT characters. I see aspects of *myself* in many of the BBT characters. And I really enjoy watching the show. YMMV of course.
I'm curious if you looked at Windows Update -> Advanced options -> Choose how updates are delivered. I ask because when enabled there are a couple options to download updates either from other machines on your local network, or any machine on the Internet. It sounds like Microsoft is leveraging some peer-to-peer networking for content delivery, and I wonder if that's what you're seeing. It would explain why the destinations kept changing, as other PCs came and went... One implication, if so, is you could possibly have disabled that and gotten updates directly from Microsoft only.
You can compare your list to others to see if you have anything unique, and if you do I guess your options are either publishing your list on your own, or seeing if any of the other list would like to merge in your list. Some of the lists allow sites to remove themselves. Some of the lists appear to only have "recently" spamming addresses. Some lists specifically exclude residential ISP connections. There are probably other methods of addressing your ethical issue too.
An ars article seems to give the clearest view of a rather murky subject. Basically, there appears to have been multiple ways in to the data. Including situations like IT contractors hiring database admins located in places like Argentina and China, at which point it doesn't matter what technical security solutions are put in place since people are explicitly given full access to the data. (I guess technically that falls under the "inside job" scenario?)
Windows overloaded the alternate key for opening menus, which meant that it is no longer a convenient key if you need to enter non-ASCII characters (for example, a Euro symbol or a letter with an accent, which are both easy to enter on a Mac).
I don't know how it works on a Mac, but entering alternate characters is still easy with Windows, even 8.1. (I haven't tried it on 10.) Rather, I consider it pretty easy.:-) Just hold down the ALT key, type in the four-digit code for the character you want, then release the ALT key and your character will show up. A Euro sign is ALT+0128, for example. â. (That would show up as proper Euro, except this is slashdot. -roll eyes-) Doesn't matter if numlock is on or off, doesn't matter what you might be doing with a menu at the time.
An article at TechCrunch looks at some interesting parallels between the current automobile industry and the PC industry of the 1980s. IBM was dominant in 1985, employing four times as many people as its nearest competitor. But as soon as Windows was released, the platform became more important for most end users than the manufacturer.
What an odd claim... The article describes the 80s PC industry as one dominated by a single company, IBM, with over four times as many employees than the second largest PC company. So which automobile company has more than four times as many employees as the second largest? I can't find employment info, but in terms on unit sales, the top three are at 10 million, 9 million and 9 million. Hardly an industry dominated by a single player - it's the 12th ranked manufacturer that the top one is four times the size of (in terms of unit sales, again.) So whatever state the car industry is in, and whatever happens in the future due to in-car entertainment systems, I don't see how it at all resembles the 80s PC industry.
Whatever the computing power (CPU, RAM...) is now, you can expect it to be greater in the future.
Whatever the price is now, you can expect to be less in the future. Ten bucks each (just an illustrative number, I really have no idea) right now because they're made by hand? Could be in 10 or 20 years you'll get 10k units for your ten bucks as they roll off a mass-assembly line.
Moore's Law and all.
Don't think of this as a consumer oriented coin-sized desktop with a popular brand's logon on it that you can carry around in your pocket. Think of this as something you purchase in 40 kg batches, fitted with the sensors you need (light, sound, vibration, chemical, pressure...) that you then scatter about. (Assuming they have wireless connectivity, yes. They'd be useless if you have to run wires to each one to establish communications.) You would simply not care if one is lost forever - you'll just buy another 40 kg batch when these wear out, are damaged, or scattered too widely by the wind. Military, environmental and health monitoring possibilities were mentioned in the article. Vernor Vinge's science fiction novels are the first time I recall encountering the topic, back in the 90s.
In Denver, CO we can choose between Century Link DSL (speeds suck) or Comcast (expensive and service sucks). If the city of Denver jumped in that would at least give us three choices. Competition is good, right?
I've seen ads from Century Link that they plan on offering 1gbs fibre service in Denver. I haven't looked into it, so have no other information (timing, area, cost, etc.) In the meantime, your neighbors to the north in Longmont approved municipal gig a while ago and signup for the service in the first area has begun. Apparently a dark fiber loop was laid a decade or two ago while other work was being done, but state laws - the usual we've heard about here on slashdot - prevented the city from using it to offer service. State law changed, the city voted to utilized the fibre, then again voted to fund it with bonds for a phased but quick rollout over three years instead of using subscriber proceeds for a rollout over decades. The fiber is getting expanded to all parts of the city, absolutely anybody who wants it will be able to get it, from what I understand.
This is what I came to ask. It seems to defy all logic, but it is an official statement - so what did I really expect?
Actually, it's not an official statement. It's something a reporter, Abby Phillip, wrote about something that was allegedly said. What the actual statement by Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson to the reporter was, is unknown.
As part of the November 5 election, Longmont's voters approved funding for the full development of the City's fiber optic broadband network. We would like to thank the community for supporting this move toward a future filled with progress and opportunity. As a true gigabit city, we are and will be positioned to be a leader in digital communications and a global information hub. We are lighting tomorrow, today.
This isn't exactly new. While I don't know how exactly the system works, Honda offered variable gear steering on the S2000 Type V 14 years ago. A while I don't know if any "for the masses" cars has variable gear steering, there are a number of manufacturers who currently offer it. (BMW, for example.)
I don't think you can make valid estimations about the write speed of this new potential format by assuming it'll work at LTO 6 speeds. As density goes up, so does write speed.
Consider LTO 1 through 6:
LTO1 - 4880 bits/mm, 20 MB/sec
LTO2 - 7398 bits/mm, 40 MB/sec
LTO3 - 9638 bits/mm, 80 MB/sec
LTO4 - 13250 bits/mm, 120 MB/sec
LTO5 - 15142 bits/mm, 140 MB/sec
LTO6 - 15143 bits/mm, 160 MB/sec
It seems that doubling storage density yields slightly more than double the speed. (And obviously, like going from LTO5 to LTO6, speed can be increased without any sort of density improvement.) So if we extrapolate that to this new format, at 74 times the density, it perhaps can perform at 74 times the speed, and therefore fill up a tape within a reasonable timeframe. (Which, admittedly, is pure speculation - until actual speed specifications are released for this format, we just don't know.)
But if I was an IT manager, I wouldn't be looking at 185 TB tapes in order to do a full 185 TB local backup every weekend to be sent to an offsite vault. Instead, I'd be looking at 185 TB tapes if I had a remote site, at least 20 miles away, I'm connected to via a fast fiber link, that holds an active replication of my entire 50TB SAN, and I want to store a year's worth of weekly backups, plus a few month's worth of daily backups, in a 40-slot tape library instead of multiple 200-slot tape libraries. Then I could quickly restore almost any file without having to recall tapes, plus have a hot and ready copy of my data in case a flood, fire, earthquake, etc., strikes the primary site. (The logistics of setting up the network, the servers, the SAS connections, etc., not withstanding.:-)
Such a tape isn't for home use or small business use - it's for IBM, Google, Amazon and the like I suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
My 2013 BMW has a shifter that's the "spring back to rest position" type. But BMW's design hasn't led to any roll-away issues whatsoever that I've heard of. I think there are a few design-related reasons why. The first is how the gears are actually selected - push the lever forwards to select reverse, pull the lever backwards to select drive. This is in contrast with the Chrysler shift where appears to be a pull-back regardless of whether you want to go into Reverse or Drive from Park. Also, the BMW shifter has a push-button that does nothing but tell the car to go into Park, so it's obvious when the Park command has been given. With the Chrysler shifter, the command to go into Park from Drive is to push the lever forward - which is the same motion to put the car into Neutral from Drive, but you have to move the shifter further for the Park function. I can see how this can be very unclear for the driver. Finally, BMW has programmed the car to go into Park if the driver's door is opened, even if it is moving slowly which can be quite jarring I've heard. (I know of nobody who has tested opening the door while at highway speeds. :) ) Mostly, people on the BMW forums have been complaining how difficult it is to get the car into Neutral and keep it there.
So I have fiber broadband provided by my city. Via traceroute I can tell the city uses L-3 to talk to the rest of the world. Is this proposal simply about being able to change the L-3 part of the link? So L-3, AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, Google, etc. would then contact my city to arrange a 10gbps (or 40, or 1, or whatever) pipe to the rest of the 'net then charge us users individually, with the city getting a cut to cover the last-mile costs, and somehow know that my traffic which goes over the same fiber as my neighbor needs to be routed to Gooble while my neighbor's routes to Comcast?
And Slashdotters are going to ignore that because they don't like what he's saying.
In my opinion just as an ad hominem attack against a person's position is wrong, ad hominem support for their position is wrong to. Bad guy who says something good is still a bad guy, and they still said something good. Good buy says something bad is still a good guy, and they still said something bad.
Note: I am neither arguing for or against what Reznor has said, just stating that I think you're committing an argumentum ad hominem logical fallacy by implying Slashdot readers are wrong and should support what Reznor says today because of what he has done yesterday.
I don't understand - why pay the ransom when you can just restore from backups? At most, it's less than a single day's worth of userdata lost.
Patents Can't Explain What The Invention Is Because They're Full Of Meaningless Jargon
That's my experience, at least. The failing is mine however, as while I can't understand what patents try to say it seems plenty of other people can. I wonder if "Startup Speak" is a similar situation - people who work in that realm understand the language, but just because those of us outside that realm don't grok the language doesn't necessarily mean it's meaningless...?
Automation At Any Price
Former McDonald's USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour
And in related recent news, Adidas will be moving shoe manufacturing to Germany and the US by replacing USD $1 to 3/hr workers in Asian factories with automation. (Estimated wage - the BLS data is only as recent as 2009.)
Here is the text of a Bloomberg article from 2013 (since going to the website itself didn't load for me) discussing "Asia Soaring Wages" where people make USD $226/mo in Indonesia and USD $10/day in Thailand which is apparently a significant increase (or not, depending on who the article author talked to.) China factories outsourcing to Indonesia and Thailannd factories is discussed. The drive to automation is discussed.
Automation is certainly not anything new. Even without minimum wage increases it's still an inevitability.
I recall playing the DOOM beta, which had the best BFG ever. Instead of a single giant shot it spewed a bazillion pulse rifle shots all at once. I think it was removed from the release version due to performance concerns.
This was during university, at an institution that was primarily Mac for student-owned computers. I had a 486DX2/50 which got a lot of attention. For LAN play we went to a lab.
We'd do speed runs of levels and send the screenshots to Romero to taunt him.
Creating levels was a thing. A roommate created "Escape From Detroit" which started at the Joe after the Red Wings lost in the Stanley Cup finals and the fans were rioting.
Yahoo Mail is simply a vehicle that doesn't appear to me to be any more or less secure than most other delivery vehicles. Yesterday we dealt with some ransomware that came in the form of an email from an employee's spouse that had a link to a landscaping company, and that landscaping company's website had a link (probably an ad) to a malicious site that delivered the ransomware. The employee's spouse contacted their IT, who reported not seeing any ransomware, which is why I'm thinking it was an ad on the landscaping company's website rather than the website itself that had the malware.
Telling Congress "don't use Yahoo Mail, it isn't safe, use official email instead" is giving them the wrong idea that they're safe to click on anything they get in the official email, and doesn't do anything to mitigate the danger of malicious websites. Their official mail might or might not be any better about scanning attachments for viruses. Their official mail would hopefully be better about prevent account hacks, though - it seems that's a fairly common thing for Yahoo Mail.
According to this site (I have no idea how accurate it is, sorry) a string of 10 random ASCII characters would take 19.24 years to crack at a rate of 100 billion guesses per second. (I assume that's beyond the capabilities off a P90 :) ) A text string like "thequickbrownFox" - 16 characters, just lower and upper alphas - would take 9.27 million centuries to brute force. Of course, using that password in a system that stores in plaintext that is later compromised means the password would be cracked in 0 seconds. And indeed as you say, a 44 character string of just lowercase characters would take much longer than the universe can accommodate.
My city has recently begun rolling out 1gbps fiber to all residents. The city has a 10gbps pipe to the outside world. My ONT's IP address is a L3 address, so I assume the city is using fiber and perhaps even equipment belonging to L3. I think a lot of the fiber being used is from the '90s. (Except the new runs to everybody's house, of course.)
I already had a server, so when I got gigabit fiber Internet and my old router would only give me ~300 mbps with NAT, I fired up a VM, gave that a couple network ports, and installed the free-for-home-use Sophos UTM. I then repurposed my old router to be simply a wifi AP. The Sophos is giving me high 800s, low 900s throughput just doing NAT and firewall, and dips down to 300 mbps or so if I enable IPS (Intrusion Prevention System.) The interface and documentation aren't the best, but work well enough I suppose. The main issue I've found going the VM route is that kicking off a server backup was causing the VM to snapshot which paused its processing for a few moments, dropping some network connections.
I honestly haven't looked at Dell hardware for a very long time, since most of the physical stuff we deploy is outside of the US and they have horrible international warranty service. Their low end consumer PCs are garbage and always have been, but I've heard the business lines of desktops, laptops and servers are still halfway decent.
Warning: anecdote from a Winddows admin incoming.
I started working in a Compaq shop. Which became HP, of course.
Then a heterogeneous shop with IBM, Dell and HP.
Then an all-Dell shop.
Then an all-HP shop.
In my experience, all three brands have had generally the same reliability and performance - but the ease of server management (installing drivers and updates, configuring lights-out management and alerts, etc.) and the experience of tech support have been significantly better with Dell.
(Regarding SANs - I've found that EMC is ridiculously fast yet ridiculously cryptic to manage, EQL is ridiculously easy to manage yet struggles on performance and reliability, and new tech like Nimble so far appears to be both very fast and very easy. It'll be very interesting to see what an EMC/Dell merger would produce. I have zero experience with Compellent.)
Indeed. Having gone to CMU, I see aspects of people I knew there in the BBT characters. I see aspects of *myself* in many of the BBT characters. And I really enjoy watching the show. YMMV of course.
I'm curious if you looked at Windows Update -> Advanced options -> Choose how updates are delivered. I ask because when enabled there are a couple options to download updates either from other machines on your local network, or any machine on the Internet. It sounds like Microsoft is leveraging some peer-to-peer networking for content delivery, and I wonder if that's what you're seeing. It would explain why the destinations kept changing, as other PCs came and went... One implication, if so, is you could possibly have disabled that and gotten updates directly from Microsoft only.
There are plenty of such blacklists already published.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You can compare your list to others to see if you have anything unique, and if you do I guess your options are either publishing your list on your own, or seeing if any of the other list would like to merge in your list. Some of the lists allow sites to remove themselves. Some of the lists appear to only have "recently" spamming addresses. Some lists specifically exclude residential ISP connections. There are probably other methods of addressing your ethical issue too.
An ars article seems to give the clearest view of a rather murky subject. Basically, there appears to have been multiple ways in to the data. Including situations like IT contractors hiring database admins located in places like Argentina and China, at which point it doesn't matter what technical security solutions are put in place since people are explicitly given full access to the data. (I guess technically that falls under the "inside job" scenario?)
Windows overloaded the alternate key for opening menus, which meant that it is no longer a convenient key if you need to enter non-ASCII characters (for example, a Euro symbol or a letter with an accent, which are both easy to enter on a Mac).
I don't know how it works on a Mac, but entering alternate characters is still easy with Windows, even 8.1. (I haven't tried it on 10.) Rather, I consider it pretty easy. :-) Just hold down the ALT key, type in the four-digit code for the character you want, then release the ALT key and your character will show up. A Euro sign is ALT+0128, for example. â. (That would show up as proper Euro, except this is slashdot. -roll eyes-) Doesn't matter if numlock is on or off, doesn't matter what you might be doing with a menu at the time.
An article at TechCrunch looks at some interesting parallels between the current automobile industry and the PC industry of the 1980s. IBM was dominant in 1985, employing four times as many people as its nearest competitor. But as soon as Windows was released, the platform became more important for most end users than the manufacturer.
What an odd claim... The article describes the 80s PC industry as one dominated by a single company, IBM, with over four times as many employees than the second largest PC company. So which automobile company has more than four times as many employees as the second largest? I can't find employment info, but in terms on unit sales, the top three are at 10 million, 9 million and 9 million. Hardly an industry dominated by a single player - it's the 12th ranked manufacturer that the top one is four times the size of (in terms of unit sales, again.) So whatever state the car industry is in, and whatever happens in the future due to in-car entertainment systems, I don't see how it at all resembles the 80s PC industry.
Whatever the computing power (CPU, RAM...) is now, you can expect it to be greater in the future.
Whatever the price is now, you can expect to be less in the future. Ten bucks each (just an illustrative number, I really have no idea) right now because they're made by hand? Could be in 10 or 20 years you'll get 10k units for your ten bucks as they roll off a mass-assembly line.
Moore's Law and all.
Don't think of this as a consumer oriented coin-sized desktop with a popular brand's logon on it that you can carry around in your pocket. Think of this as something you purchase in 40 kg batches, fitted with the sensors you need (light, sound, vibration, chemical, pressure...) that you then scatter about. (Assuming they have wireless connectivity, yes. They'd be useless if you have to run wires to each one to establish communications.) You would simply not care if one is lost forever - you'll just buy another 40 kg batch when these wear out, are damaged, or scattered too widely by the wind. Military, environmental and health monitoring possibilities were mentioned in the article. Vernor Vinge's science fiction novels are the first time I recall encountering the topic, back in the 90s.
In Denver, CO we can choose between Century Link DSL (speeds suck) or Comcast (expensive and service sucks). If the city of Denver jumped in that would at least give us three choices. Competition is good, right?
I've seen ads from Century Link that they plan on offering 1gbs fibre service in Denver. I haven't looked into it, so have no other information (timing, area, cost, etc.) In the meantime, your neighbors to the north in Longmont approved municipal gig a while ago and signup for the service in the first area has begun. Apparently a dark fiber loop was laid a decade or two ago while other work was being done, but state laws - the usual we've heard about here on slashdot - prevented the city from using it to offer service. State law changed, the city voted to utilized the fibre, then again voted to fund it with bonds for a phased but quick rollout over three years instead of using subscriber proceeds for a rollout over decades. The fiber is getting expanded to all parts of the city, absolutely anybody who wants it will be able to get it, from what I understand.
http://longmontcolorado.gov/de...
This is what I came to ask. It seems to defy all logic, but it is an official statement - so what did I really expect?
Actually, it's not an official statement. It's something a reporter, Abby Phillip, wrote about something that was allegedly said. What the actual statement by Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson to the reporter was, is unknown.
Not all cities.
http://www.ci.longmont.co.us/lpc/tc/index.htm
As part of the November 5 election, Longmont's voters approved funding for the full development of the City's fiber optic broadband network. We would like to thank the community for supporting this move toward a future filled with progress and opportunity. As a true gigabit city, we are and will be positioned to be a leader in digital communications and a global information hub. We are lighting tomorrow, today.
This isn't exactly new. While I don't know how exactly the system works, Honda offered variable gear steering on the S2000 Type V 14 years ago. A while I don't know if any "for the masses" cars has variable gear steering, there are a number of manufacturers who currently offer it. (BMW, for example.)
I don't think you can make valid estimations about the write speed of this new potential format by assuming it'll work at LTO 6 speeds. As density goes up, so does write speed.
Consider LTO 1 through 6:
It seems that doubling storage density yields slightly more than double the speed. (And obviously, like going from LTO5 to LTO6, speed can be increased without any sort of density improvement.) So if we extrapolate that to this new format, at 74 times the density, it perhaps can perform at 74 times the speed, and therefore fill up a tape within a reasonable timeframe. (Which, admittedly, is pure speculation - until actual speed specifications are released for this format, we just don't know.)
But if I was an IT manager, I wouldn't be looking at 185 TB tapes in order to do a full 185 TB local backup every weekend to be sent to an offsite vault. Instead, I'd be looking at 185 TB tapes if I had a remote site, at least 20 miles away, I'm connected to via a fast fiber link, that holds an active replication of my entire 50TB SAN, and I want to store a year's worth of weekly backups, plus a few month's worth of daily backups, in a 40-slot tape library instead of multiple 200-slot tape libraries. Then I could quickly restore almost any file without having to recall tapes, plus have a hot and ready copy of my data in case a flood, fire, earthquake, etc., strikes the primary site. (The logistics of setting up the network, the servers, the SAS connections, etc., not withstanding. :-)
Such a tape isn't for home use or small business use - it's for IBM, Google, Amazon and the like I suspect.