Dear Muppet, why do you want your warez/pirate vids on solid state drive when even the slowest spinning platter can deliver more than enough bandwidth for full blu-ray rips?
Dear Anonymous Coward, please try reading the thread before responding.
Yeah, I have about a dozen WD drives at home, some with > 20,000 hours use, and they're all working fine. The only drive I've had fail in the last few years was the Toshiba one in my laptop, just after the warranty expired.
I have 80GB and 320GB Western Digital PATA drives in my desktop. It scares me a little. The 80GB and 320GB are nearing 12k and 15k power on hours respectively I think.
Just coming up to 34,000 hours on a pair of Seagate SATA drives here. They've only been power-cycled seventeen times, so that may help.
Intel has a 5 year warranty on their 320 SSDs, longevity/reliability seem pretty good if you believe the data being published by various 3rd parties.
Of course it wasn't so good a few months back when people found their SSD claimed to be an 8MB drive after rebooting. A warranty is nice, but doesn't help much if you just lost all your data.
I'm still waiting for the day I reboot my home server and discover the OS has gone. Hopefully the firmware fix really did fix it.
Really, why buy equipment for your employees when you can just make them buy it on their own?
And get them to work for free in their own time because they're now 'mobile'.
DOUBLE WIN!
One day all those people demanding that the IT department let them connect their phone to the network will be feeling nostalgic for the days when they didn't have to.
Though perhaps it would allow the Slashdot admins to build a site that works; I've had to turn Javascript off because of randomly vanishing 'Reply' buttons that do nothing other than say 'Working' when I press them.
For the advantage comparison. If there were no netbooks in existance at all would you have taken a laptop on your trip abroad?
No. I've carried a laptop on enough trips to know there's no way I want to take one when I don't have to. I just throw the netbook in my carry-on bag and forget out it because it's so small and light in comparison.
And the netbook is coming up to three years and still working fine, which is more than I can say for my last laptop.
The netbook has always struck me as the stupidest computing idea I'd ever heard of. A "machine" with a screen too small to see, a keyboard too small for my fingers, and too little memory or power for anything more complex than browsing a website.
The tablet has always struck me as the stupidest computing idea I'd ever heard of. A "machine" with a screen too small to be useful, no keyboard, unable to run any software I used and with too little memory or power for anything more complex than browsing a web site or playing a video.
Oh, hang on...
The pad is a far more effective form factor for serving that ultra-portable not-a-real-machine market.
Tablets are an expensive way to browse the web, watch videos or play simple games, though they do have a fair number of business uses in areas that don't need keyboards. They're a crappy alternative to a netbook if you want to do actual productive work that needs a keyboard.
Contrast it with me having problems (on SuSe) mounting a drive last week. Yes - it recognized the drive, but "unable to mount". Yes - eventually I got it to work. But if the solution required opening a shell, calling mount command, figuring out where in command line to say "ntfs" and guessing which/dev/sd? matches the actual flash drive, then I say Linux lost already!
Oh, right. Because Windows will just oh so happily mount an ext4-formatted USB drive?
No-one who cares about interoperability would use a proprietary filesystem like NTFS on a USB drive. Or, at least, they wouldn't go whining about how no other computer can read it.
Or do you also think that "not portable at all" versus "portable" is in the same ballpark as "portable" versus "more portable"?
The main advantages of the netbook over the laptop was always that it was 'more portable' than a laptop. I don't know anyone who bought a netbook just because it was cheap, but I know plenty of people who bought one because it was half the size of the laptop and had a much better battery life, so it was 'portable' in many situations where the laptop wasn't 'portable' at all. I bought mine because I was going abroad for a few weeks and wanted a computer which I could afford to lose and which wouldn't be a pain to carry around with me all the time.
A $250 15" laptop is no replacement for that. Nor is a tablet with a crappy touch-screen keyboard.
Next you'll be telling us that 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back' has been done before and no-one should write another story with the same idea.
Anything from Sony is absolutely insane, go with an LG Bluray player, it works, it's easy to use, and it gets regular updates from LG. Hell, it even has an app store, the apps suck, but it has an app store.
I had an LG Blu-Ray player. After six months it stopped playing DVDs, I took it in for warranty repairs, it came back after a month and would play DVDs but no longer played Blu-Rays. I took it back for more warranty repairs and after eighteen months they said they couldn't fix it and couldn't get a replacement, so tough.
Meanwhile I've bought three Chinese Blu-Ray players from Wal-Mart for a total of roughly the same as I paid for the LG, and they all work fine and they're region-free. So no more LG products for me, ever.
It's not just technolgy that politicians are ignorant of, it's pretty much everything outside their political sphere. This is why central planning always collapses eventually; every stupid new law passed by people who don't understand what they're doing without considering the consequences adds more cost and complexity to society until it can no longer sustain itself.
Yeah, well missiles are just targets for even cheaper CIWS rounds and lasers.
As far as I'm aware the US Navy doesn't have anything that can stop $100,000,000 worth of missiles heading toward a vastly more expensive carrier group in one single attack. That's how the soldier playing Iran sank the US fleet in a well-publicised US military war-game exercise a few years back.
One missile? Sure, you can probably stop it unless it's coming down from above at hypersonic speed (e.g. an ICBM). A thousand missiles from all angles? Good luck with that.
Also cell phones are linked to more than one accident. There is plenty of evidence that cell phones are a major cause of driver inattentiveness and accidents.
So why didn't accident rates increase dramatically when cellphones became popular and decrease dramatically when cellphones were banned?
If you're fighting a real enemy who can shoot back, a carrier fleet is just a target-rich environment for cheap missiles. This is the modern equivalent of building battleships before WWII only to see them sunk by cheap aircraft.
1) The raw materials will weigh more than the finished product. Therefore, it's more expensive to launch a block of material than it is to launch the smaller, lighter component made from that material.
Not when a rocket launch costs, say, $50,000,000 whether you send one kilogram of parts or five tons of parts. If something has to be replaced tomorrow and you don't have a spare, then you can't wait until the next scheduled supply flight.
The main advantage would be to reduce the amount of spare parts they need to keep on hand in case they need them in a hurry. Additionally broken parts could possibly be melted down and reused.
I've actually read some old NASA studies for taking the external tanks to a space station, melting them down and using the aluminium to build new structures. Obviously building girders or whatever is rather different to building complex mechanical or life support components.
now cool would be to make 3Dprinters work with materials refine-able from the surface of the moon or mars. instead of sending a new probe every few years, send a "Maker"
Yeah, it always seems cool until it becomes sentient and starts firing rocks at us...
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Muppet, why do you want your warez/pirate vids on solid state drive when even the slowest spinning platter can deliver more than enough bandwidth for full blu-ray rips?
Dear Anonymous Coward, please try reading the thread before responding.
Yeah, I have about a dozen WD drives at home, some with > 20,000 hours use, and they're all working fine. The only drive I've had fail in the last few years was the Toshiba one in my laptop, just after the warranty expired.
I have 80GB and 320GB Western Digital PATA drives in my desktop. It scares me a little. The 80GB and 320GB are nearing 12k and 15k power on hours respectively I think.
Just coming up to 34,000 hours on a pair of Seagate SATA drives here. They've only been power-cycled seventeen times, so that may help.
Intel has a 5 year warranty on their 320 SSDs, longevity/reliability seem pretty good if you believe the data being published by various 3rd parties.
Of course it wasn't so good a few months back when people found their SSD claimed to be an 8MB drive after rebooting. A warranty is nice, but doesn't help much if you just lost all your data.
I'm still waiting for the day I reboot my home server and discover the OS has gone. Hopefully the firmware fix really did fix it.
And the push begins - get the ball rolling in earnest towards removing spindles.
Wake me up when I can buy a 3TB SSD for $250.
Really, why buy equipment for your employees when you can just make them buy it on their own?
And get them to work for free in their own time because they're now 'mobile'.
DOUBLE WIN!
One day all those people demanding that the IT department let them connect their phone to the network will be feeling nostalgic for the days when they didn't have to.
Though perhaps it would allow the Slashdot admins to build a site that works; I've had to turn Javascript off because of randomly vanishing 'Reply' buttons that do nothing other than say 'Working' when I press them.
For the advantage comparison. If there were no netbooks in existance at all would you have taken a laptop on your trip abroad?
No. I've carried a laptop on enough trips to know there's no way I want to take one when I don't have to. I just throw the netbook in my carry-on bag and forget out it because it's so small and light in comparison.
And the netbook is coming up to three years and still working fine, which is more than I can say for my last laptop.
The netbook has always struck me as the stupidest computing idea I'd ever heard of. A "machine" with a screen too small to see, a keyboard too small for my fingers, and too little memory or power for anything more complex than browsing a website.
The tablet has always struck me as the stupidest computing idea I'd ever heard of. A "machine" with a screen too small to be useful, no keyboard, unable to run any software I used and with too little memory or power for anything more complex than browsing a web site or playing a video.
Oh, hang on...
The pad is a far more effective form factor for serving that ultra-portable not-a-real-machine market.
Tablets are an expensive way to browse the web, watch videos or play simple games, though they do have a fair number of business uses in areas that don't need keyboards. They're a crappy alternative to a netbook if you want to do actual productive work that needs a keyboard.
Contrast it with me having problems (on SuSe) mounting a drive last week. Yes - it recognized the drive, but "unable to mount". Yes - eventually I got it to work. But if the solution required opening a shell, calling mount command, figuring out where in command line to say "ntfs" and guessing which /dev/sd? matches the actual flash drive, then I say Linux lost already!
Oh, right. Because Windows will just oh so happily mount an ext4-formatted USB drive?
No-one who cares about interoperability would use a proprietary filesystem like NTFS on a USB drive. Or, at least, they wouldn't go whining about how no other computer can read it.
Or do you also think that "not portable at all" versus "portable" is in the same ballpark as "portable" versus "more portable"?
The main advantages of the netbook over the laptop was always that it was 'more portable' than a laptop. I don't know anyone who bought a netbook just because it was cheap, but I know plenty of people who bought one because it was half the size of the laptop and had a much better battery life, so it was 'portable' in many situations where the laptop wasn't 'portable' at all. I bought mine because I was going abroad for a few weeks and wanted a computer which I could afford to lose and which wouldn't be a pain to carry around with me all the time.
A $250 15" laptop is no replacement for that. Nor is a tablet with a crappy touch-screen keyboard.
... this has been done before.
Next you'll be telling us that 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back' has been done before and no-one should write another story with the same idea.
Anything from Sony is absolutely insane, go with an LG Bluray player, it works, it's easy to use, and it gets regular updates from LG. Hell, it even has an app store, the apps suck, but it has an app store.
I had an LG Blu-Ray player. After six months it stopped playing DVDs, I took it in for warranty repairs, it came back after a month and would play DVDs but no longer played Blu-Rays. I took it back for more warranty repairs and after eighteen months they said they couldn't fix it and couldn't get a replacement, so tough.
Meanwhile I've bought three Chinese Blu-Ray players from Wal-Mart for a total of roughly the same as I paid for the LG, and they all work fine and they're region-free. So no more LG products for me, ever.
Yeah, it's easy, because most games these days are designed for consoles that are about as powerful as a five-year-old PC.
It's not just technolgy that politicians are ignorant of, it's pretty much everything outside their political sphere. This is why central planning always collapses eventually; every stupid new law passed by people who don't understand what they're doing without considering the consequences adds more cost and complexity to society until it can no longer sustain itself.
Britain built a submarine aircraft carrier shortly after WWI. After it sank they decided it was probably a bad idea and didn't build another one.
Yeah, well missiles are just targets for even cheaper CIWS rounds and lasers.
As far as I'm aware the US Navy doesn't have anything that can stop $100,000,000 worth of missiles heading toward a vastly more expensive carrier group in one single attack. That's how the soldier playing Iran sank the US fleet in a well-publicised US military war-game exercise a few years back.
One missile? Sure, you can probably stop it unless it's coming down from above at hypersonic speed (e.g. an ICBM). A thousand missiles from all angles? Good luck with that.
Following too closely will result in a ticket.
Also cell phones are linked to more than one accident. There is plenty of evidence that cell phones are a major cause of driver inattentiveness and accidents.
So why didn't accident rates increase dramatically when cellphones became popular and decrease dramatically when cellphones were banned?
Carriers provide force projection, e.g. intimidation of smaller militaries by sending a capital ship and battle group in their direction.
As I said, they're only of use if the other side can't shoot back. Otherwise they'll be scrap on the sea-bed within a few days.
Even the British carriers in the Falklands only survived because the Argentian Air Force ran out of Exocets.
And nuclear powered mobile military bases are great for rattling
Only if the other guy can't shoot back.
It doesn't seem to be carrying an air wing.
That seems to be the fashion these days: the new British carriers aren't going to have any planes either.
If you're fighting a real enemy who can shoot back, a carrier fleet is just a target-rich environment for cheap missiles. This is the modern equivalent of building battleships before WWII only to see them sunk by cheap aircraft.
I'm continually amazed by how many things from 'Star Trek' appear in everyday life...
You think 'Star Trek' invented the idea of a machine that could assemble things from raw materials?
I'm pretty sure I've read 50s SF stories which incorporated them, if not earlier.
1) The raw materials will weigh more than the finished product. Therefore, it's more expensive to launch a block of material than it is to launch the smaller, lighter component made from that material.
Not when a rocket launch costs, say, $50,000,000 whether you send one kilogram of parts or five tons of parts. If something has to be replaced tomorrow and you don't have a spare, then you can't wait until the next scheduled supply flight.
The main advantage would be to reduce the amount of spare parts they need to keep on hand in case they need them in a hurry. Additionally broken parts could possibly be melted down and reused.
I've actually read some old NASA studies for taking the external tanks to a space station, melting them down and using the aluminium to build new structures. Obviously building girders or whatever is rather different to building complex mechanical or life support components.
now cool would be to make 3Dprinters work with materials refine-able from the surface of the moon or mars.
instead of sending a new probe every few years, send a "Maker"
Yeah, it always seems cool until it becomes sentient and starts firing rocks at us...