If your children will die of old age before the write limit is hit, why do you make it such an issue? So lonely you come to Slashdot to pick fights so people will talk with you?
What if it just makes them persevere at attempting suicide?
I'm not entirely sure how (if at all) tongue in cheek this was, but I do recall hearing that starting anti-depressants can *increase* the risk of suicide. This is supposedly because one of the first symptoms of depression to improve (before the suicidal feelings have cleared up) is the loss of motivation- and ironically, it was that lack of motivation that was stopping them from carrying out the suicide.
Doctors admit there is always a risk of suicide when treating a severely depressed patient.As patients start to feel better, energy and motivation sometimes return before the suicidal thinking has faded.
"You get patients who are too depressed to commit suicide," says Dr. David Fassler, a trustee of the American Psychiatric Association who is testifying about the antidepressant safety at the FDA hearing."Patients start treatment and then they feel just better enough to go through with it."
Feel free to joke about the disaster you were involved in and anything legitimately related; I wasn't claiming you shouldn't, assuming you genuinely feel it gives you some empathy or involvement in what was being joked about, and isn't just being used as a self-justifying excuse for being a dick about other people's misfortune one doesn't care about.
He needs to get a thicker skin and no he doesn't have any additional entitlement to lecture us.
Are you the original AC that replied to him? The AC was the one that was telling *him* "deal with it", and *I* (not the OP) said that he has less moral authority to lecture people like that than the OP does.
Anyway, as I pointed out, the beef I had was with people quite obviously misinterpreting the "coping mechanism" argument to their own ends, basically using it as an excuse to self-righteously turn the tables and be holier-than-thou to people who call them out on tasteless jokes.
Not sure which direction you're coming from here. Are you the AC who I was replying to, or someone who lives near to the Fukushima plant, or someone else just making a point?
What you say may all be true, but I already acknowledged this:-
We all know that people closely affected by events (or feel themselves likely to be affected) often take solace in black humour- fair enough.
That wasn't what was being argued against.
What I *was* very clearly calling BS on was people who blatantly aren't remotely near, affected by nor even genuinely concerned by the events they're "joking" about- quite the opposite- making sick or insensitive jokes (i.e. the "asshole" bit you refer to) then intentionally misinterpreting the "non-PC coping mechanism" argument to justify their assholery and divert attention from it onto the other person.
Humour is a coping strategy. If people are not allowed to make jokes about stuff that scares them it gets much scarier for them.
Oh, fuck off.
Most of the time I see that argument parrotted on Slashdot, it's being intentionally misused some borderline sociopathic asshole that's just made an insensitive joke about something that happened on the other side of the world and been called out on it.
Sure, we all know that you made that sick joke about that tragedy in the Philippines/China/wherever that'll never affect your home in Buttfuck, Illinois (which you'll have forgotten about by the time you move on to the next news item) as a "coping strategy". It's because you were scared by it.
Bullshit.
We all know that people closely affected by events (or feel themselves likely to be affected) often take solace in black humour- fair enough. We also know that many people are just dicks that like to make sick jokes about stuff that doesn't affect them personally. Anyone in the latter group trying to justify themselves and place themselves *above* their critics with a self-righteous appropriation of the "non-PC coping mechanism" argument is full of it.
Live with it.
He's 90 miles from the site, he's closer to living with it than you are. Unless you're actually living in the bloody reactor, I think he's more entitled to lecture people like you than vice versa.
"But officer! My knife was only in his kidney for one second!"
As analogies go, that's both stupidly contrived (*) and downright misleading- possibly by intent? (**)
You've chosen to compare a case where the length of time of the offence has little bearing on the effect and compared it to one where it obviously does.
Sorry, but you go out in the first round of the "Attempting to Win an Argument by Cod-Intellectual Smartassery 2013" contest. Feel free to enter again next year!
(*) Not that contrived analogies are uncommon on Slashdot, but two wrongs^w halfwits don't make a right^w genius...
(**) This criticism refers specifically to the stupidity of your analogy, and does not imply support for or against the situation described in the article. Just in case you were thinking of saying "OMG!!! you suport hackers doing what they like in every case!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111":-)
When you have a bad driver even a tricycle can become deadly.
Indeed it can as this informative, er... public information film shows.
Fun fact; when I first saw The Omen, I realised that tricycle was the same as the one me and my brother had when we were growing up. (*) It didn't cause me any harm other than turning me into the Antichrist, though...
(*) Not that spooky really- the spray-stencilled pattern screams "mass produced", and I'm guessing the fact we actually had *two* secondhand (though the other was blue) from entirely different people was less a strange coincidence and more likely that they sold in their millions. Didn't stop me getting a photo of my nephew on an "Omen" trike though!;-)
Fuck you, I cancelled my last programming tour because I was offered less than $1m a night and no guarantee of red-haired groupies with a proclivity for red snappers...
I'm pretty sure I said this before at some point, but that plugin isn't half as clever as it likes to think it is, and gives a dangerously false sense of security. How hard do you think it will be for someone to note the behaviour of the plugin, spot *any* patterns or discrepancies in the pseudo-randomised "false queries" that make them relatively easy to filter out, or at least flag as dubious?
If that's possible- and it quite probably is, unless the writers were *very* good at what they did- your past history will then be readable- and mineable- just as if you'd been surfing the web without it active.
In addition, even if the weakness of the plugin is spotted and the algorithm subsequently improved, your behaviour from before that point is still very probably on record, and can still be checked.
Afaik there are connectors "Parallel port -> USB". You can get one of those.
I can't remember if it related to "parallel to USB" or to "serial to USB" adaptors- or to both- but IIRC there can be problems related to timing et al when using one of those devices.
At any rate, it probably isn't the straightforward panacea you think it is...
Your shunning of the SF controllers, simply due to low OCZ product quality, is unwarranted. They're one of the two best
I agree that component manufacturers shouldn't generally be held responsible for misuse of their products by other companies, but the fact was that Sandforce were complicit in that case. Okay, so perhaps I would consider a Sandforce-based device, after all, but even so Sandforce can't complain that their reputation was the entirely innocent victim of OCZ's corner-cutting- they brought it upon themselves.
More seriously, has it escaped the reader's attention that however huge 17" crts used to be, nowadays it's not even on the table?
Since the industry stopped caring for miniaturization, they just pumped up the sizes to satisfy the artificial demand for a larger amount of pixels. Thus 19" is the smallest widescreen LCD you can buy.
Bear in mind that the old 17" CRT monitors you refer to were (presumably) the non-widescreen 4:3 type and that diagonals cease to be an accurate reflection of relative screen size when the aspect ratios are different.
A 4:3 display with a given diagonal size will have an area 12.4% larger than a 16:9 widescreen display with the same diagonal. So that 17" CRT you mention has roughly the same area as a 19.1" widescreen!
(Admittedly, this does assume that 17" refers to the viewable size, which isn't necessarily the case with a CRT).
In reference to the "ugly hack", you'll likely find ugly hacks in any SSD controller.
True, but although the poster clearly had disdain for it (*), the "ugly hack" wasn't the target of his criticism per se.
What he *was* criticising was the fact that OCZ (with Sandforce's collusion) wanted to cheap out and not use the cap, but weren't prepared to accept the performance hit required to use it reliably under those circumstances, so blatantly ignored reliability to get performance on the cheap.
In other words, they had the old choice of "fast, cheap, reliable- pick any two", did so, and ended up with unreliable crap.
(*) Understandably, since the design was obviously meant to be used with the capacitor, and the "hack" was clearly a workaround intended for cheapskate companies who want to use it safely while cutting corners on the necessary parts.
Yes, everyone is assuming that OCZ went under because their drives were rubbish. I'd say that was the most likely cause too, but it's still (a) an assumption and (b) won't be the reason they went under in itself. No-one so far has actually answered that question!
What I mean is that companies don't go bankrupt because they sell rubbish- they go bankrupt because of the *financial consequences* of selling rubbish. (*) In particular, I'd like to know...
(i) Was OCZ's bankruptcy due to losses caused by a very high level of returns?
(ii) Or was it down to their bad reputation spreading and people not buying OCZ drives?
(iii) Was it because the market became too competitive and their strategy of being cheaper *and* faster than their rivals forced them to cut profits too close to the bone? (Which *might* have nothing to do with their drives being crap).
(iv) Was it a combination of all three... or was it something else altogether?
I would actually like to know because AFAICT, none of the linked stories or comments here have actually answered it per se! I doubt at this stage OCZ or the administrators will be giving out an official cause, but there must have been some publicly-visible signs as to the source of their financial distress in recent months.
(*) In this case there are two distinctly different potential consequences, i.e. reasons (i) and (ii)
Was that the type of dream where you're in an exam and someone comes in and steals your pencils and you chase him down the corridor, but the corridor is the one from the office where you had your first job except that when you leave at one end you realised you've re-entered at the other side and there's no exit and the person who stole your pencils is now chasing *you* and you run and run and run, then you realise that the person chasing you looks like Guy Pearce when he used to play Mike in Neighbours and by waving your hands you get your pencils back, but you only have 15 minutes of the two hour exam left and it's for Portuguese Literature which you never studied in your life and also your OCZ SSD drive keeps failing and corrupting your data?
Yeah, I guess one could say it works like a dream. (^_^)
For example, Sandforce's engineers came up with an ugly, performance-killing hack that allowed the drive to avoid corruption if it were powered-down mid-write so they could officially claim that the ultracapacitor (*) was "optional" in "cost-sensitive applications". OCZ built drives without the ultracap, then had Sandforce furnish them with firmware that DISABLED THAT SAFETY MEASURE to avoid killing their drives' write performance in benchmarks.
To be blunt, Sandforce probably deserve to be tarred with the OCZ brush since they were actively complicit in that, but the fact remains that the problem here was caused by overriding the safety measures built into the controller rather than the controller itself...?
That said, the association has still put me off buying any Sandforce-based SSD.
(*) Which I assume was intended to provide enough power to complete the write normally. I'm also assuming that this "ultracapacitor" must be significantly more expensive than the bog standard types we're familiar with, whose cost would be negligible.
That's funny, the 2600 cartridges didn't/don't always connect properly either.
No-one claimed that they were perfect, only that the NES-style mechanism suffered from the flaw to a much greater (and technically unnecessary) extent.
I still do that quite a lot myself to represent bold text, and it has more to do with the fact that I started using the Internet circa 1993 when most discussion still took place over BBSs accessed via telnet, or via Usenet, both of which were text only and didn't offer markup. Nowadays, I'll often use HTML markup where available, but even then I sometimes use asterisks out of habit and/or laziness.
That said, dual asterisks *and* capitalisation are **WAY** over the top;-)
Or some bizarre ultra-libertarian performance art.
Still wouldn't be as bizarre or outlandish as the time in 2006 that Loyalist Michael Stone attempted to enter the Stormont Assembly in Northern Ireland and assassinate the leaders of Sinn Fein, then claimed that it was "performance art".
Slashdot Mirror
If your children will die of old age before the write limit is hit, why do you make it such an issue? So lonely you come to Slashdot to pick fights so people will talk with you?
Whoooooosh!
So: for all practical purposes, the magnetic medium of a mechanical hard drive platter does not degrade at all.
Basically, even though it degrades slightly, I can pretend that it doesn't?
This would mean that, ohhh yes, I'm degrade pretender (ooh-ooh).
Also, does it matter how many Platters the drive has?
What if it just makes them persevere at attempting suicide?
I'm not entirely sure how (if at all) tongue in cheek this was, but I do recall hearing that starting anti-depressants can *increase* the risk of suicide. This is supposedly because one of the first symptoms of depression to improve (before the suicidal feelings have cleared up) is the loss of motivation- and ironically, it was that lack of motivation that was stopping them from carrying out the suicide.
Typical result from a quick Googling to confirm my memory:-
Doctors admit there is always a risk of suicide when treating a severely depressed patient.As patients start to feel better, energy and motivation sometimes return before the suicidal thinking has faded.
"You get patients who are too depressed to commit suicide," says Dr. David Fassler, a trustee of the American Psychiatric Association who is testifying about the antidepressant safety at the FDA hearing."Patients start treatment and then they feel just better enough to go through with it."
He needs to get a thicker skin and no he doesn't have any additional entitlement to lecture us.
Are you the original AC that replied to him? The AC was the one that was telling *him* "deal with it", and *I* (not the OP) said that he has less moral authority to lecture people like that than the OP does.
Anyway, as I pointed out, the beef I had was with people quite obviously misinterpreting the "coping mechanism" argument to their own ends, basically using it as an excuse to self-righteously turn the tables and be holier-than-thou to people who call them out on tasteless jokes.
What you say may all be true, but I already acknowledged this:-
We all know that people closely affected by events (or feel themselves likely to be affected) often take solace in black humour- fair enough.
That wasn't what was being argued against.
What I *was* very clearly calling BS on was people who blatantly aren't remotely near, affected by nor even genuinely concerned by the events they're "joking" about- quite the opposite- making sick or insensitive jokes (i.e. the "asshole" bit you refer to) then intentionally misinterpreting the "non-PC coping mechanism" argument to justify their assholery and divert attention from it onto the other person.
Humour is a coping strategy. If people are not allowed to make jokes about stuff that scares them it gets much scarier for them.
Oh, fuck off.
Most of the time I see that argument parrotted on Slashdot, it's being intentionally misused some borderline sociopathic asshole that's just made an insensitive joke about something that happened on the other side of the world and been called out on it.
Sure, we all know that you made that sick joke about that tragedy in the Philippines/China/wherever that'll never affect your home in Buttfuck, Illinois (which you'll have forgotten about by the time you move on to the next news item) as a "coping strategy". It's because you were scared by it.
Bullshit.
We all know that people closely affected by events (or feel themselves likely to be affected) often take solace in black humour- fair enough. We also know that many people are just dicks that like to make sick jokes about stuff that doesn't affect them personally. Anyone in the latter group trying to justify themselves and place themselves *above* their critics with a self-righteous appropriation of the "non-PC coping mechanism" argument is full of it.
Live with it.
He's 90 miles from the site, he's closer to living with it than you are. Unless you're actually living in the bloody reactor, I think he's more entitled to lecture people like you than vice versa.
"But officer! My knife was only in his kidney for one second!"
As analogies go, that's both stupidly contrived (*) and downright misleading- possibly by intent? (**)
:-)
You've chosen to compare a case where the length of time of the offence has little bearing on the effect and compared it to one where it obviously does.
Sorry, but you go out in the first round of the "Attempting to Win an Argument by Cod-Intellectual Smartassery 2013" contest. Feel free to enter again next year!
(*) Not that contrived analogies are uncommon on Slashdot, but two wrongs^w halfwits don't make a right^w genius...
(**) This criticism refers specifically to the stupidity of your analogy, and does not imply support for or against the situation described in the article. Just in case you were thinking of saying "OMG!!! you suport hackers doing what they like in every case!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111"
If I had $450,000 to drop on a supper car
Isn't that the carriage on a train where they serve the evening meal?
When you have a bad driver even a tricycle can become deadly.
Indeed it can as this informative, er... public information film shows.
;-)
Fun fact; when I first saw The Omen, I realised that tricycle was the same as the one me and my brother had when we were growing up. (*) It didn't cause me any harm other than turning me into the Antichrist, though...
(*) Not that spooky really- the spray-stencilled pattern screams "mass produced", and I'm guessing the fact we actually had *two* secondhand (though the other was blue) from entirely different people was less a strange coincidence and more likely that they sold in their millions. Didn't stop me getting a photo of my nephew on an "Omen" trike though!
I'm looking for a rockstar developer!!!
Great stuff, I have fantastic "rockstar" developer credentials:-
.
* Regular user of both cocaine and heroin
* Drink Jack Daniels pretty much 24/7 (got a drip hooked up for when I need to sleep), can't remember the last time I was sober
* Throw 60" monitors out of boardroom windows
* Once sexually pleasured a lower-ranking female colleague with a red snapper fish (probably Not Safe For Work unless you Work with Rockstars like me)
Was that what you were looking for?
And you need to be very cheap.
Fuck you, I cancelled my last programming tour because I was offered less than $1m a night and no guarantee of red-haired groupies with a proclivity for red snappers...
Hrm ... wouldn't it still be Better Than Nothing (tm), though?
No, not- as I said- if it gives people a false sense of security.
I'm pretty sure I said this before at some point, but that plugin isn't half as clever as it likes to think it is, and gives a dangerously false sense of security. How hard do you think it will be for someone to note the behaviour of the plugin, spot *any* patterns or discrepancies in the pseudo-randomised "false queries" that make them relatively easy to filter out, or at least flag as dubious?
If that's possible- and it quite probably is, unless the writers were *very* good at what they did- your past history will then be readable- and mineable- just as if you'd been surfing the web without it active.
In addition, even if the weakness of the plugin is spotted and the algorithm subsequently improved, your behaviour from before that point is still very probably on record, and can still be checked.
Afaik there are connectors "Parallel port -> USB". You can get one of those.
I can't remember if it related to "parallel to USB" or to "serial to USB" adaptors- or to both- but IIRC there can be problems related to timing et al when using one of those devices.
At any rate, it probably isn't the straightforward panacea you think it is...
Where are my mod points when I need them?...
Your shunning of the SF controllers, simply due to low OCZ product quality, is unwarranted. They're one of the two best
I agree that component manufacturers shouldn't generally be held responsible for misuse of their products by other companies, but the fact was that Sandforce were complicit in that case. Okay, so perhaps I would consider a Sandforce-based device, after all, but even so Sandforce can't complain that their reputation was the entirely innocent victim of OCZ's corner-cutting- they brought it upon themselves.
More seriously, has it escaped the reader's attention that however huge 17" crts used to be, nowadays it's not even on the table? Since the industry stopped caring for miniaturization, they just pumped up the sizes to satisfy the artificial demand for a larger amount of pixels. Thus 19" is the smallest widescreen LCD you can buy.
Bear in mind that the old 17" CRT monitors you refer to were (presumably) the non-widescreen 4:3 type and that diagonals cease to be an accurate reflection of relative screen size when the aspect ratios are different.
A 4:3 display with a given diagonal size will have an area 12.4% larger than a 16:9 widescreen display with the same diagonal. So that 17" CRT you mention has roughly the same area as a 19.1" widescreen!
(Admittedly, this does assume that 17" refers to the viewable size, which isn't necessarily the case with a CRT).
In reference to the "ugly hack", you'll likely find ugly hacks in any SSD controller.
True, but although the poster clearly had disdain for it (*), the "ugly hack" wasn't the target of his criticism per se.
What he *was* criticising was the fact that OCZ (with Sandforce's collusion) wanted to cheap out and not use the cap, but weren't prepared to accept the performance hit required to use it reliably under those circumstances, so blatantly ignored reliability to get performance on the cheap.
In other words, they had the old choice of "fast, cheap, reliable- pick any two", did so, and ended up with unreliable crap.
(*) Understandably, since the design was obviously meant to be used with the capacitor, and the "hack" was clearly a workaround intended for cheapskate companies who want to use it safely while cutting corners on the necessary parts.
...and not a single customer was surprised.
Yes, everyone is assuming that OCZ went under because their drives were rubbish. I'd say that was the most likely cause too, but it's still (a) an assumption and (b) won't be the reason they went under in itself. No-one so far has actually answered that question!
What I mean is that companies don't go bankrupt because they sell rubbish- they go bankrupt because of the *financial consequences* of selling rubbish. (*) In particular, I'd like to know...
(i) Was OCZ's bankruptcy due to losses caused by a very high level of returns?
(ii) Or was it down to their bad reputation spreading and people not buying OCZ drives?
(iii) Was it because the market became too competitive and their strategy of being cheaper *and* faster than their rivals forced them to cut profits too close to the bone? (Which *might* have nothing to do with their drives being crap).
(iv) Was it a combination of all three... or was it something else altogether?
I would actually like to know because AFAICT, none of the linked stories or comments here have actually answered it per se! I doubt at this stage OCZ or the administrators will be giving out an official cause, but there must have been some publicly-visible signs as to the source of their financial distress in recent months.
(*) In this case there are two distinctly different potential consequences, i.e. reasons (i) and (ii)
...their business model wasn't that solid, after all.
Some dark glasses and a "Yeeeeeaaaaaaaah" as requested, sir.
Fuck you. My OCZ Vertex 4 works like a dream.
Was that the type of dream where you're in an exam and someone comes in and steals your pencils and you chase him down the corridor, but the corridor is the one from the office where you had your first job except that when you leave at one end you realised you've re-entered at the other side and there's no exit and the person who stole your pencils is now chasing *you* and you run and run and run, then you realise that the person chasing you looks like Guy Pearce when he used to play Mike in Neighbours and by waving your hands you get your pencils back, but you only have 15 minutes of the two hour exam left and it's for Portuguese Literature which you never studied in your life and also your OCZ SSD drive keeps failing and corrupting your data?
Yeah, I guess one could say it works like a dream. (^_^)
For example, Sandforce's engineers came up with an ugly, performance-killing hack that allowed the drive to avoid corruption if it were powered-down mid-write so they could officially claim that the ultracapacitor (*) was "optional" in "cost-sensitive applications". OCZ built drives without the ultracap, then had Sandforce furnish them with firmware that DISABLED THAT SAFETY MEASURE to avoid killing their drives' write performance in benchmarks.
To be blunt, Sandforce probably deserve to be tarred with the OCZ brush since they were actively complicit in that, but the fact remains that the problem here was caused by overriding the safety measures built into the controller rather than the controller itself...?
That said, the association has still put me off buying any Sandforce-based SSD.
(*) Which I assume was intended to provide enough power to complete the write normally. I'm also assuming that this "ultracapacitor" must be significantly more expensive than the bog standard types we're familiar with, whose cost would be negligible.
"Virgin Galactic Now Taking Bitcoin For Suborbital Flights"
That's very nice, and I hope that Bitcoin enjoyed all those suborbital flights.
Though it seems a trifle unfair that it's already been up more than once and the people who paid in advance haven't been at all yet.
That's funny, the 2600 cartridges didn't/don't always connect properly either.
No-one claimed that they were perfect, only that the NES-style mechanism suffered from the flaw to a much greater (and technically unnecessary) extent.
I still do that quite a lot myself to represent bold text, and it has more to do with the fact that I started using the Internet circa 1993 when most discussion still took place over BBSs accessed via telnet, or via Usenet, both of which were text only and didn't offer markup. Nowadays, I'll often use HTML markup where available, but even then I sometimes use asterisks out of habit and/or laziness.
;-)
That said, dual asterisks *and* capitalisation are **WAY** over the top
Or it's simply a honeypot.
Or some bizarre ultra-libertarian performance art.
Still wouldn't be as bizarre or outlandish as the time in 2006 that Loyalist Michael Stone attempted to enter the Stormont Assembly in Northern Ireland and assassinate the leaders of Sinn Fein, then claimed that it was "performance art".