This wierd stuff may fly in Croatia, but the rest of the civilized (I'm guessing Europeans, Australians, Asian countries won't get it any more then this American did) world...
Ummm... You do realize that Croatia is actually smack in the middle of Europe? Furthermore, Croatia was civilised 100s of years before US of A even came to be.
It seems that Curb Your Enthusiasm (another HBO show) is recieving the same treatment.
But, the scheme is not that effective, once you learn to look out for it. If there's just one seed, and a bunch (hundreds) of clients, all with the same downloaded percentage, don't bother trying, it's a fake.
Sorry, if you need to use a bleeding edge browser to view a public web site then that site is essentially broken - you need to provide support to browsers at least a year or so old if you want the site reachable to the masses.
So, what you're essentially saying is that web designers should stick to developing sites for IE only?
Well, apparently by the same rigorous screening process that, just in the last couple of days, brought us this and this.
Lately, I've been wondering why I keep coming back for more... All I seem to be getting is stuff that doesn't matter, and hoaxes for nerds. How the mighty have fallen...
May dreams such as these take wing and I'd be happy just to watch: (link)
Now, if only they didn't make the worlds only 'web-link-as-an-java-applet' page, which crashes my Opera (and looks beyond-butt-ugly), I might have learned something...
Corridor Systems has developed signal launchers and repeater systems to allow them to transform each line on a pole into a 10+ Mbit segment using 802.11 technology.
Yes, but they provide a solution that works on medium-voltage electric lines, meaning a few thousand volts. And, from what I can gather at their site, the technology works only on elevated power lines, not on underground lines. I think that's not something that can carry a signal up to your doorstep, which is what BPL is supposed to solve in the first place.
This is the first harddrive that has ever died on me in 15+ years of owning my own personal computer(s).
You lucky bastard. I've had at least a dozen drives die on me over the years (just this week a 30GB Maxtor, data retrieval attempt scheduled for next week:-)).
Does anyone know anything about resurrecting data from a dead Maxtor?
It heavily depends on the actual problem with the disk. If it's only bad sectors, you can trivially extract everything but the damaged sectors (in other words, save 99.9% of the data). Fried electronics or spin-up problem could be corrected (board replacement and drive freezing). If the head or the motor is damaged, data can still be retrieved, but that usually costs an arm and a leg per GB, so that's not quite feasible for lost porn.:-)
Anyways, whatever OS you run, find a SMART utility that will monitor drives health. Modern drives internally monitor dozens of parameters during boot and operation, and will usually show warning signs months in advance of the actual failure. Running a check at each boot will give you plenty of time to prepare for impending disaster.
"... all your eggs in one basket" and all that... rassinfrassin....:-(
Exactly. Hardware RAID card, 3 or 4 drives in RAID-5 and SMART monitoring should be baseline for data security nowadays. Who can afford to lose 200-300GB of data?
This is ridiculous. Russia's e-commerce volume is so low that anyone peddling penis enlargement pills is likely to retire with a fortune of 10 dollars US after few years of hard work.
You may have failed to notice this, but e-mail can be sent from every country with an internet connection to every other country with an internet connection. Even from countries without any e-commerce to speak of.
Furthermore, I believe you also failed to notice that the spammers themselves are not selling anything. They provide a service for bussinesses that sell something. Bussinesses that may be in countries that have huge e-commerce volumes.
Aaah... CygnusEd... How I miss thee... Even on a multi-GHz PCs I am yet to find an editor that starts up quicker than a memory resident CED. Crtl-shift-enter and it's there, instantly.
It's really hard to believe that with only 512/1024KB of RAM, you had the spare memory to keep a few resident programs, and have a RAM disk with often used stuff. And still have a perfectly usable multitasking machine. And there was _no_ virtual memory.:-)
Really funny, 1meg Amigas used spare RAM as a disk. 1gig PCs use spare disk as RAM.
The 68000, running in user mode cannot write to memory addresses below $8000 or above $ffff8000. The exception/interrupt tables are all held below $140. An illegal write attempt will trigger an address exception.
Yup, but I was coding graphic demos in assembler. The first thing _every_ demo program did was bump itself up into supervsor mode and take over the interrupt vector table from the OS.:-)
We needed that crucial VBI (vertical blank interrupt) to get silky smooth animation, a trick PCs managed a good decade later.
Those were fun imes. Once while coding a demo, I somehow managed to kill he RTC (which was on a memory expansion card) in one of my Amigas. A stray routine had written who knows what who knows where before a crash. After a reboot - poof, the clock was no more.:-)
Did the Amiga only run in supervisor mode?!?
The exec run in supervisor mode, user programs did not. But every program had access to other programs' memory, as well as the OS'. And, IIRC every program had a trivial way of going into supervisor mode. I could be wrong, though, most of my programming was pure hardware banging. You cannot afford to through the OS when you need every CPU cycle available.:-)
IIRC, that was SCA (Scandinavian Cracking Asociation) virus, the first one on the Amiga. Lived in floppy boot sectors and was completely harmless (except for popping up that message from time to time)...
Nice writeup, but I'll have to correct you/expand on a few points... Not to nitpick, but I spent my teen years hacking the Amiga, and who knows when will the next opportunity to show off my Amiga knowledge pop up...;-)
The OS was the first desktop computer to use a microkernel approach where all the components of the OS were independent objects which communicated via message passing.
Actually, you didn't pass the message, you passed the pointer to the message. That was, of course, possible by the fact that there was no memory protection, every program could read & write from any memory location, the ROM, the OS private parts, other programs memory.
This was a double-edged sword. It was beneficial because pointer passing was largely responsible for the great snappines of the OS (running on a 7MHz machine, the OS was faaast). On the other side, this method of communication is what ultimately kept Amiga from ever having a decent memory protection, and was responsible for the fact that a single program/device/object could bring the machine into a Guru Meditation (actually present as such only up to Kickstart V1.3).
because it didn't have a "smart" scheduler, the system could still be brought to its knees with busy-loops.
Actually, nope. You could safely start a program that just looped forever (god knows I made my fair share of those). The scheduler would give it only its alotted time slice, and then yank it off of CPU. The other programs would be unaffected.
It's the lack of memory protection that did the OS in. Since the first KB of memory held the most important data (jump tables for interrupts, ROM location and such) writing to a NULL pointer brought the machine to its knees within the first few written bytes. That made debugging the programs... well, interesting.;-)
Device I/O was asynchronous. You passed and received messages to the hardware while your code could go off and do other things.
And was the cause for 'the most missed AmigaOS feature ever'. You copy something to a disk. Disk fills up. What options does the OS present? Cancel and, wait for it... RETRY! Disk fills up, the alert pops up. You switch over to a file manager (FileMaster was my weapon of choice), delete a few files, switch over and click retry. Copying resumes where it stopped. No re-selecting the files, no finding out what was copied and what wasn't, no hassle, no worries. Life was good.
I was at an ATM in a convenience store last summer during a thunderstorm. The power went out and when it came back on, I watched the ATM boot. Guess what? OS/2.
A couple of weeks ago I saw an automatic railway ticket teller at the train station in Florence, Italy, being serviced. Behind the cover was an IBM machine, running OS/2.
Too bad they don't actually pay attention to what is really going on.
Or maybe you don't know what you're talking about.
To combat this, the 3GPP specification that defines what a 3G phone should be and do has a specific section on SAR, Specific Absorption Rate.
This is a parameter used in design of and tested for every mobile phone, 3G or not. Look through a manual of your mobile, it's there in the specs. It couldn't get an FCC approval without one.
Start multiplying handsets in any limited-space area, and the SAR maximum threshold is exceeded relatively quickly.
Bullshit. Phone on standby is emitting a couple of orders of magnitude less radiation than phone used for conversation. So, unless all of those people are talking at the same time, it doesn't matter. Furthermore, the intensity of radio signal weakens with the square of the distance (twice as far, four times as weak). Thus, the only phone you should be concerned about is your own, when you're holding it within an inch distance to your brain, while talking. The possible effects of the other phones (even while used for talking), compared to that, are thousands of times weaker and can be safely ignored.
As far as 802.11 devices are concerned, they also have a limit on the power they are allowed to emit. Guess what it is? Some 20 times lower than the peak output power of mobile phones (which, again, you hold next to your brain when at peak power output).
And, while we're at it, you might want to look up the differences between ionisation and non ionisation radiation. Mobile phones, microwave owens and 802.11 equipment emit the latter. Which means that its effect is nothing more than heating up the tissue that absorbs it. You move the phone away for your ear, you cool down, and that's it. The effects are not cumulative and there are no residual effects whatsoever.
So, in conclusion, just take a chill pill and remember to switch the phone from one ear to the other if you're talking for a while.
did you completely miss the grandparent posters references to a poor educational system and rampant nepotism, or does your vision of heaven include those?
Well, poor educational system can be an opportunity. Situation like that means that maybe starting a computer education centre could be a lucrative bussiness.
As far as nepotism goes, I'm not looking for a government job.:-) Outright corruption would be a problem. Having to bribe officials to get the necessary permits, for example, would be a definite show-stopper. But that's not the impression of the place I got. Having never been there, that is.:-)
I know it's not all milk and honey, I don't honestly expect it to be. That's why I'm asking for clarifications.
he even said that it makes him think twice about working there, obviously it's not shangri-la
Of course not. He would probably much rather find work in the US or somewhere in Europe, if possible. Which is exactly what I'm looking to get out of. Different people, different perpectives.
Funny thing is, a couple of years ago a few of my buddies and I seriously contemplatied moving over there and starting a bussiness. And we had this exact idea (wi-fi over Mauritius) for a startup.
Obviously, now we'll have to come up with something else, but, as a local, could you give me some pointers as to how difficult would such a thing be? You know, immigration, starting a bussiness as a foreigner, and making a living over there. I know the government has declared the vision of Mauritius becoming a 'knowledge based economy', and was supposedly making active steps in achieving that. But, is it practically doable?
You know, Mauritius sounds like the place to be. A country that has no army to speak of (with $12.5 million annualy military budget, 0.2% of GDP), one jail, no ethnic troubles (everyone's a immigrant) and vision of bright IT future... Heaven, if there's such a thing in the world.
The reason most "major" cinema houses don't play more independent films is because more sheep^H^H^H people are interested in seeing the lastest Vin Deisel film
No it's not. It's just that the audience for a independent film is small. And a brick-and-mortar cinema cannot afford to show such movies, because they won't earn any money on it.
But, when you have digital, internet-based movie distribution, that in fact means that _any_ audience is a profitable audience. Enter Long Tail economics, and the whole picture changes. People who might have watched latest Vin Diesel bullshit might now opt for something different. An Extreme-BMX video. BBS documentary. Osbscure french movie. Whatever. Movie 'theatres' won't depend on hits to make money anymore.
What happens when something goes wrong? If this thing isn't built to have some human control when things are out of the ordinary, no one in his right mind would go up in one of these things.
This thing, apparently, travels along a ballistic trajectory. Meaning that it's basically a powered crate flung into space. No manouvering capabilities. In other words, the 'pilot' would have nothing to do.
Almost every cognitive function is grounded in some kind of physicality. It may be impossible to create a conscious "brain in a vat"....
It probably is impossible to create a _human_ brain in a vat. But, I wouldn't expect it's impossible to create any kind of consciousness. Provide input and output pathways to the vat, give it enough 'neurons' and enough processing power to those neurons and who knows what might happen.
Remember, consciousness is an emergent quality. One neuron can't develop it. Thousand neurons either. Nor millions. But, billions might, although there is no fundamental difference between one thousand and one billion neurons, they basically behave and operate the same.
If you manage to properly emulate one neuron (and its connections to the others), that's it, you have _all_ the ingredients you need for an artificial brain. After that, it's only a question of scale.
Do you ever get tired of the same old comments on the same old jokes getting modded 'Funny', which themselves get modded 'Insighful' or even 'Informative'?
I know I do. At least the 'Jokers' do their thing honestly, without a thought of karma reward. Unlike the astute 'observers' that berate them.
Most of the drive failures happen predictably, and that's what SMART technology is for. Install a monitor of some sort (losta free & not-so-free solutions around), and you'll get a warning when your drive is about to die (unless, of course, it's a violent death, electrocution or such), usually weeks to months in advance.
On another note, DiamonMax 9s come with a 3 year guarantee. It should be valid, so get a replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
This wierd stuff may fly in Croatia, but the rest of the civilized (I'm guessing Europeans, Australians, Asian countries won't get it any more then this American did) world...
Ummm... You do realize that Croatia is actually smack in the middle of Europe? Furthermore, Croatia was civilised 100s of years before US of A even came to be.
But, hey, being American, you probably did not.
It seems that Curb Your Enthusiasm (another HBO show) is recieving the same treatment.
But, the scheme is not that effective, once you learn to look out for it. If there's just one seed, and a bunch (hundreds) of clients, all with the same downloaded percentage, don't bother trying, it's a fake.
Sorry, if you need to use a bleeding edge browser to view a public web site then that site is essentially broken - you need to provide support to browsers at least a year or so old if you want the site reachable to the masses.
So, what you're essentially saying is that web designers should stick to developing sites for IE only?
How the hell did this get posted?
:-)
Well, apparently by the same rigorous screening process that, just in the last couple of days, brought us this and this.
Lately, I've been wondering why I keep coming back for more... All I seem to be getting is stuff that doesn't matter, and hoaxes for nerds. How the mighty have fallen...
But, hey, we'll be getting CSS soon!
I've tried BOINC, and other than the fact that it's a piece of buggy crap, I hate it, and won't have it on my computer.
:-)
Same here. But, old client (V3.08) works fine, at least at 4-5 computers that I have S@H running.
BTW, ~2800 units, ~28k hours.
May dreams such as these take wing and I'd be happy just to watch: (link)
Now, if only they didn't make the worlds only 'web-link-as-an-java-applet' page, which crashes my Opera (and looks beyond-butt-ugly), I might have learned something...
Corridor Systems has developed signal launchers and repeater systems to allow them to transform each line on a pole into a 10+ Mbit segment using 802.11 technology.
Yes, but they provide a solution that works on medium-voltage electric lines, meaning a few thousand volts. And, from what I can gather at their site, the technology works only on elevated power lines, not on underground lines. I think that's not something that can carry a signal up to your doorstep, which is what BPL is supposed to solve in the first place.
This is the first harddrive that has ever died on me in 15+ years of owning my own personal computer(s).
:-)).
:-)
:-(
You lucky bastard. I've had at least a dozen drives die on me over the years (just this week a 30GB Maxtor, data retrieval attempt scheduled for next week
Does anyone know anything about resurrecting data from a dead Maxtor?
It heavily depends on the actual problem with the disk. If it's only bad sectors, you can trivially extract everything but the damaged sectors (in other words, save 99.9% of the data). Fried electronics or spin-up problem could be corrected (board replacement and drive freezing). If the head or the motor is damaged, data can still be retrieved, but that usually costs an arm and a leg per GB, so that's not quite feasible for lost porn.
Anyways, whatever OS you run, find a SMART utility that will monitor drives health. Modern drives internally monitor dozens of parameters during boot and operation, and will usually show warning signs months in advance of the actual failure. Running a check at each boot will give you plenty of time to prepare for impending disaster.
"... all your eggs in one basket" and all that... rassinfrassin....
Exactly. Hardware RAID card, 3 or 4 drives in RAID-5 and SMART monitoring should be baseline for data security nowadays. Who can afford to lose 200-300GB of data?
This is ridiculous. Russia's e-commerce volume is so low that anyone peddling penis enlargement pills is likely to retire with a fortune of 10 dollars US after few years of hard work.
You may have failed to notice this, but e-mail can be sent from every country with an internet connection to every other country with an internet connection. Even from countries without any e-commerce to speak of.
Furthermore, I believe you also failed to notice that the spammers themselves are not selling anything. They provide a service for bussinesses that sell something. Bussinesses that may be in countries that have huge e-commerce volumes.
Getting the picture?
using overwrite mode in cygnused, naturally
:-)
Aaah... CygnusEd... How I miss thee... Even on a multi-GHz PCs I am yet to find an editor that starts up quicker than a memory resident CED. Crtl-shift-enter and it's there, instantly.
It's really hard to believe that with only 512/1024KB of RAM, you had the spare memory to keep a few resident programs, and have a RAM disk with often used stuff. And still have a perfectly usable multitasking machine. And there was _no_ virtual memory.
Really funny, 1meg Amigas used spare RAM as a disk. 1gig PCs use spare disk as RAM.
The 68000, running in user mode cannot write to memory addresses below $8000 or above $ffff8000. The exception/interrupt tables are all held below $140. An illegal write attempt will trigger an address exception.
:-)
:-)
:-)
Yup, but I was coding graphic demos in assembler. The first thing _every_ demo program did was bump itself up into supervsor mode and take over the interrupt vector table from the OS.
We needed that crucial VBI (vertical blank interrupt) to get silky smooth animation, a trick PCs managed a good decade later.
Those were fun imes. Once while coding a demo, I somehow managed to kill he RTC (which was on a memory expansion card) in one of my Amigas. A stray routine had written who knows what who knows where before a crash. After a reboot - poof, the clock was no more.
Did the Amiga only run in supervisor mode?!?
The exec run in supervisor mode, user programs did not. But every program had access to other programs' memory, as well as the OS'. And, IIRC every program had a trivial way of going into supervisor mode. I could be wrong, though, most of my programming was pure hardware banging. You cannot afford to through the OS when you need every CPU cycle available.
Something wonderful is happening
Your Amiga has come alive!
IIRC, that was SCA (Scandinavian Cracking Asociation) virus, the first one on the Amiga. Lived in floppy boot sectors and was completely harmless (except for popping up that message from time to time)...
Nice writeup, but I'll have to correct you/expand on a few points... Not to nitpick, but I spent my teen years hacking the Amiga, and who knows when will the next opportunity to show off my Amiga knowledge pop up... ;-)
;-)
The OS was the first desktop computer to use a microkernel approach where all the components of the OS were independent objects which communicated via message passing.
Actually, you didn't pass the message, you passed the pointer to the message. That was, of course, possible by the fact that there was no memory protection, every program could read & write from any memory location, the ROM, the OS private parts, other programs memory.
This was a double-edged sword. It was beneficial because pointer passing was largely responsible for the great snappines of the OS (running on a 7MHz machine, the OS was faaast). On the other side, this method of communication is what ultimately kept Amiga from ever having a decent memory protection, and was responsible for the fact that a single program/device/object could bring the machine into a Guru Meditation (actually present as such only up to Kickstart V1.3).
because it didn't have a "smart" scheduler, the system could still be brought to its knees with busy-loops.
Actually, nope. You could safely start a program that just looped forever (god knows I made my fair share of those). The scheduler would give it only its alotted time slice, and then yank it off of CPU. The other programs would be unaffected.
It's the lack of memory protection that did the OS in. Since the first KB of memory held the most important data (jump tables for interrupts, ROM location and such) writing to a NULL pointer brought the machine to its knees within the first few written bytes. That made debugging the programs... well, interesting.
Device I/O was asynchronous. You passed and received messages to the hardware while your code could go off and do other things.
And was the cause for 'the most missed AmigaOS feature ever'. You copy something to a disk. Disk fills up. What options does the OS present? Cancel and, wait for it... RETRY! Disk fills up, the alert pops up. You switch over to a file manager (FileMaster was my weapon of choice), delete a few files, switch over and click retry. Copying resumes where it stopped. No re-selecting the files, no finding out what was copied and what wasn't, no hassle, no worries. Life was good.
I was at an ATM in a convenience store last summer during a thunderstorm. The power went out and when it came back on, I watched the ATM boot. Guess what? OS/2.
A couple of weeks ago I saw an automatic railway ticket teller at the train station in Florence, Italy, being serviced. Behind the cover was an IBM machine, running OS/2.
I guess there are a lot of them around.
I've never been impressed with the militant technologism of Kurzweil.
I believe you're confusing Ray for a Futurist.
If there is a future for fascism, its going to come from the makers of machines.
Futurists philosophically paved the way for fascism, but that all played out about a century ago. And, yeah, it didn't work all that well.
Too bad they don't actually pay attention to what is really going on.
Or maybe you don't know what you're talking about.
To combat this, the 3GPP specification that defines what a 3G phone should be and do has a specific section on SAR, Specific Absorption Rate.
This is a parameter used in design of and tested for every mobile phone, 3G or not. Look through a manual of your mobile, it's there in the specs. It couldn't get an FCC approval without one.
Start multiplying handsets in any limited-space area, and the SAR maximum threshold is exceeded relatively quickly.
Bullshit. Phone on standby is emitting a couple of orders of magnitude less radiation than phone used for conversation. So, unless all of those people are talking at the same time, it doesn't matter. Furthermore, the intensity of radio signal weakens with the square of the distance (twice as far, four times as weak). Thus, the only phone you should be concerned about is your own, when you're holding it within an inch distance to your brain, while talking. The possible effects of the other phones (even while used for talking), compared to that, are thousands of times weaker and can be safely ignored.
As far as 802.11 devices are concerned, they also have a limit on the power they are allowed to emit. Guess what it is? Some 20 times lower than the peak output power of mobile phones (which, again, you hold next to your brain when at peak power output).
And, while we're at it, you might want to look up the differences between ionisation and non ionisation radiation. Mobile phones, microwave owens and 802.11 equipment emit the latter. Which means that its effect is nothing more than heating up the tissue that absorbs it. You move the phone away for your ear, you cool down, and that's it. The effects are not cumulative and there are no residual effects whatsoever.
So, in conclusion, just take a chill pill and remember to switch the phone from one ear to the other if you're talking for a while.
did you completely miss the grandparent posters references to a poor educational system and rampant nepotism, or does your vision of heaven include those?
:-) Outright corruption would be a problem. Having to bribe officials to get the necessary permits, for example, would be a definite show-stopper. But that's not the impression of the place I got. Having never been there, that is. :-)
Well, poor educational system can be an opportunity. Situation like that means that maybe starting a computer education centre could be a lucrative bussiness.
As far as nepotism goes, I'm not looking for a government job.
I know it's not all milk and honey, I don't honestly expect it to be. That's why I'm asking for clarifications.
he even said that it makes him think twice about working there, obviously it's not shangri-la
Of course not. He would probably much rather find work in the US or somewhere in Europe, if possible. Which is exactly what I'm looking to get out of. Different people, different perpectives.
Funny thing is, a couple of years ago a few of my buddies and I seriously contemplatied moving over there and starting a bussiness. And we had this exact idea (wi-fi over Mauritius) for a startup.
Obviously, now we'll have to come up with something else, but, as a local, could you give me some pointers as to how difficult would such a thing be? You know, immigration, starting a bussiness as a foreigner, and making a living over there. I know the government has declared the vision of Mauritius becoming a 'knowledge based economy', and was supposedly making active steps in achieving that. But, is it practically doable?
You know, Mauritius sounds like the place to be. A country that has no army to speak of (with $12.5 million annualy military budget, 0.2% of GDP), one jail, no ethnic troubles (everyone's a immigrant) and vision of bright IT future... Heaven, if there's such a thing in the world.
The reason most "major" cinema houses don't play more independent films is because more sheep^H^H^H people are interested in seeing the lastest Vin Deisel film
No it's not. It's just that the audience for a independent film is small. And a brick-and-mortar cinema cannot afford to show such movies, because they won't earn any money on it.
But, when you have digital, internet-based movie distribution, that in fact means that _any_ audience is a profitable audience. Enter Long Tail economics, and the whole picture changes. People who might have watched latest Vin Diesel bullshit might now opt for something different. An Extreme-BMX video. BBS documentary. Osbscure french movie. Whatever. Movie 'theatres' won't depend on hits to make money anymore.
This is definitely a step in the right direction.
What happens when something goes wrong? If this thing isn't built to have some human control when things are out of the ordinary, no one in his right mind would go up in one of these things.
This thing, apparently, travels along a ballistic trajectory. Meaning that it's basically a powered crate flung into space. No manouvering capabilities. In other words, the 'pilot' would have nothing to do.
The real brain has content
How about newborn babies?
Almost every cognitive function is grounded in some kind of physicality. It may be impossible to create a conscious "brain in a vat"....
It probably is impossible to create a _human_ brain in a vat. But, I wouldn't expect it's impossible to create any kind of consciousness. Provide input and output pathways to the vat, give it enough 'neurons' and enough processing power to those neurons and who knows what might happen.
Remember, consciousness is an emergent quality. One neuron can't develop it. Thousand neurons either. Nor millions. But, billions might, although there is no fundamental difference between one thousand and one billion neurons, they basically behave and operate the same.
If you manage to properly emulate one neuron (and its connections to the others), that's it, you have _all_ the ingredients you need for an artificial brain. After that, it's only a question of scale.
Do you ever get tired of the same old comments on the same old jokes getting modded 'Funny', which themselves get modded 'Insighful' or even 'Informative'?
I know I do. At least the 'Jokers' do their thing honestly, without a thought of karma reward. Unlike the astute 'observers' that berate them.
I was with you all the way up to:
Microsoft is waiting for a credible threat until they release Longhorn. The threat is not here yet.
Right. You saw right through their scheme. Real insighful.
Most of the drive failures happen predictably, and that's what SMART technology is for. Install a monitor of some sort (losta free & not-so-free solutions around), and you'll get a warning when your drive is about to die (unless, of course, it's a violent death, electrocution or such), usually weeks to months in advance.
On another note, DiamonMax 9s come with a 3 year guarantee. It should be valid, so get a replacement.