HDD's usually fail by not spinning up, or just stop answering commands properly, in my experience.
Whereas I've never had any of those happen. Every hard drive failure I've seen has been easily predicted by looking at the SMART data for reallocated blocks.
In fact, no drive has ever actually stopped working, probably because I get them replaced within a few days of the bad sectors appearing. Even my old laptop drive that had been sitting around in a box for a decade still worked when I plugged it in, though it had developed a bunch of bad sectors over that time.
The SSD (x25m 80Gb in my case) has been running happily for over a year - that's a pretty good run for something that makes me safe against basic power failures and is blindingly fast.
I believe that 'basic power failures' were the primary cause of the Intel 320 8MB bug; from what I've read it seemed that when the power went out it didn't update the mapping table properly so the drive was toast when you rebooted.
Byte-by-byte they're about the same price as the 15k SAS drives we use in the RAID on the servers I maintain; and a lot cheaper than those drives were when first installed a few years ago.
So? HDDs also die. They're guaranteed to in fact, since they have plenty moving parts that will wear out eventually. I've had quite a few drives die on me.
HDDs usually fail gracefully starting with a few bad blocks, giving you time to get the data off. SSDs have a marked tendency to fail catastrophically and lose everything.
Fortunately the Intel SSDs come with a 'wear indicator' showing how much life is left. Mine are all showing 99-100% life left, so unless I hit the Intel 320 8MB bug that randomly trashes the drive I don't see failure being a problem before I replace them.
We still don't have enough experience getting people through space in healthy condition. That's why we work on getting back to the moon.
The Moon is about three days away. Mars is months away. That's like saying that walking to the corner store will give you the experience you need to run a marathon.
Also, while the environment-related tech for the moon and for Mars will be drastically different, learning how to deal with the moon's environment will only help learning how to deal with the environment on Mars.
No it won't, because there's almost nothing in common between the two environments. Problems caused by the environment on Mars mostly won't happen on the Moon, and vice-versa.
We can and should test out technology we plan to go to Mars with on the Moon, but we shouldn't build a craft on the moon to go to Mars.
There's very little you can test on the Moon that would be useful on Mars; the environment is far, far too different for lunar experience to be of much use there.
I'm pretty sure they require astronauts to have 20/20 vision, hence the risk of grounding.
Yes, but glasses are acceptable. The uncorrected vision requirements for non-pilot astronauts are pretty low; or were when I looked at the astronaut application process years ago.
If you look at pictures of John Young (first shuttle commander) in space you'll notice he was wearing glasses.
If you are buying a PC because it has a little sticker on the device that says Windows 8, then you are almost guaranteed to be in the group that could care less whether it's enabled or not as you aren't going to be putting Linux, OpenBSD, etc on it.
How many motherboard and hardware manufacturers do you think there are who don't want to be able to put a 'Designed for Windows 8' sticker on the box?
When Microsoft says your hardware must lock out Linux to get that magic sticker, manufacturers will lock out Linux.
It's not impossible. But if it was true it would be a bigger surprise than if the Sun decided to rise in the West tomorrow or I found Natalie Portman naked in my bed when I got home tonight.
I imagine it's really hard to do this with two remote locations unless the clocks were perfectly synced in person and then transported to the different research stations.
I believe GPS should be able to give you a sync to that kind of accuracy level.
when the IBM clones started to hit market all those makers vanished.
But that took years. For quite some time the ST, Amiga and the like were considered to be the home computers to own while PCs were primarily for business use; only when Windows 3.0 came along did the PC really take off for home users because it then offered most of the capabilities of those other computers at a lower price.
UPS from India beat FedEx from New Jersey, and was better wrapped.
Yeah, but with UPS they try to deliver it, you get home, find the card, go to the web site and tell them you'll collect it, but it's too late for them to take if off the truck so you can't collect it the next day, then the next day you go to their office wihch is only open two hours a day and queue up for half an hour and they tell you they forgot to take it off the truck so you'll have to come back again the next day.
I've often had UPS parcels take longer to cover the two miles from their depot to our house than they took to travel half way around the world to the depot. With Fedex I just stop by on the way to work the next day and collect it from them, because they're actually open at sensible times.
Facebook? When it first started, by many accounts sounded a lot like a fly by night company and people were giving them all kinds of personal information.
Yeah, and? A lot of them probably regret it t.
Even today I don't give them any information that I wouldn't want to see plastered all over the Internet.
If the company buying the data at auction is not held to the same privacy standards as the original, this means that shell companies can be formed to gather information under strict nondisclosure, then intentionally fold and provide the information without restriction and in violation of the original disclosure agreement.
And, uh, why were you handing personal information to fly-by-night shell companies?
I miss the old ebay where unique one-of-a-kind items can be found. Maybe they still exist but swamped with too much crap.
Ditto. I used to buy a lot from ebay auctions and got some good deals and weird stuff that I'd never have found elsewhere; I've hardly bought anything from them since they became just another storefront site a few years ago.
I think B&N is asserting the opposite of that, which is Ardeaem's point.
Nope. If Borders bought a hard drive before they went bust, then that would be their property to be auctioned off. Similarly, the data Borders had about you is their property, which is to be auctioned off.
People are acting as though the data Borders collected belongs to them, rather than the company.
Hopefully this may help a few people realise the perils of letting random companies collect data about them.
CEOs are kind of like movie directors. You're going to spend $100,000,000 on a movie, so do you hire the guy who's made a string of flops but also made one movie which made $1,000,000,000 profit, or do you hire the new guy who's never made a movie? If you hire director A and he screws up, you pass the buck onto them, whereas if you hire director B and he screws up, you take the blame.
We live in a society where leaders have been replaced with MBAs and empty-headed politicos who look good on camera, and rule number one is 'Pass The Buck!'. Once you realise that, most of the seemingly insane behaviour of modern 'leaders' makes perfect sense.
If the privacy policy said only Borders would access the data then when Borders ceases to exist than so should the data.
Data doesn't disappear just because the company does. This is why anyone who's interested in privacy should be ensuring that no-one else has their data in the first place.
A 'privacy policy' is not a legally-binding agreement, and even if it was there's no guarantee that it would apply in bankruptcy.
I would actually be surprised if UEFI didn't support this.
Microsoft will presumably refuse to 'Windows certify' motherboards which allow you to turn off 'secure boot'. All for the user's security, of course.
They've wanted a completely locked-in system for a decade or more since they started pushing DRM. They couldn't do that with the old BIOS, but they can now; if not in this generation then they will for 'Windows 9' once the old BIOS-based motherboards are gone.
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HDD's usually fail by not spinning up, or just stop answering commands properly, in my experience.
Whereas I've never had any of those happen. Every hard drive failure I've seen has been easily predicted by looking at the SMART data for reallocated blocks.
In fact, no drive has ever actually stopped working, probably because I get them replaced within a few days of the bad sectors appearing. Even my old laptop drive that had been sitting around in a box for a decade still worked when I plugged it in, though it had developed a bunch of bad sectors over that time.
The SSD (x25m 80Gb in my case) has been running happily for over a year - that's a pretty good run for something that makes me safe against basic power failures and is blindingly fast.
I believe that 'basic power failures' were the primary cause of the Intel 320 8MB bug; from what I've read it seemed that when the power went out it didn't update the mapping table properly so the drive was toast when you rebooted.
SSDs aren't exactly inexpensive, are they?
Byte-by-byte they're about the same price as the 15k SAS drives we use in the RAID on the servers I maintain; and a lot cheaper than those drives were when first installed a few years ago.
So? HDDs also die. They're guaranteed to in fact, since they have plenty moving parts that will wear out eventually. I've had quite a few drives die on me.
HDDs usually fail gracefully starting with a few bad blocks, giving you time to get the data off. SSDs have a marked tendency to fail catastrophically and lose everything.
And the "backup plan" is pretty much the same as for a regular hard drive: duplicates on RAID for reliability and backups for failure recovery.
Mirroring an SSD to another SSD which is likely to fail at almost the same time doesn't seem a great plan to me :).
Fortunately the Intel SSDs come with a 'wear indicator' showing how much life is left. Mine are all showing 99-100% life left, so unless I hit the Intel 320 8MB bug that randomly trashes the drive I don't see failure being a problem before I replace them.
We still don't have enough experience getting people through space in healthy condition. That's why we work on getting back to the moon.
The Moon is about three days away. Mars is months away. That's like saying that walking to the corner store will give you the experience you need to run a marathon.
Also, while the environment-related tech for the moon and for Mars will be drastically different, learning how to deal with the moon's environment will only help learning how to deal with the environment on Mars.
No it won't, because there's almost nothing in common between the two environments. Problems caused by the environment on Mars mostly won't happen on the Moon, and vice-versa.
We can and should test out technology we plan to go to Mars with on the Moon, but we shouldn't build a craft on the moon to go to Mars.
There's very little you can test on the Moon that would be useful on Mars; the environment is far, far too different for lunar experience to be of much use there.
laser eye surgery works, how can instantly improve vision not be on the top of thier to do list.
And is generally frowned upon by NASA due to concerns about pressure change effects. Or was as of a few years ago.
I'm pretty sure they require astronauts to have 20/20 vision, hence the risk of grounding.
Yes, but glasses are acceptable. The uncorrected vision requirements for non-pilot astronauts are pretty low; or were when I looked at the astronaut application process years ago.
If you look at pictures of John Young (first shuttle commander) in space you'll notice he was wearing glasses.
If you are buying a PC because it has a little sticker on the device that says Windows 8, then you are almost guaranteed to be in the group that could care less whether it's enabled or not as you aren't going to be putting Linux, OpenBSD, etc on it.
How many motherboard and hardware manufacturers do you think there are who don't want to be able to put a 'Designed for Windows 8' sticker on the box?
When Microsoft says your hardware must lock out Linux to get that magic sticker, manufacturers will lock out Linux.
Most major OEMs like Dell, HP and Lenovo will allow it.
What's the point of signed boot-loaders if the OEMs release keys allowing anyone to sign their rootkit?
This 'security' only works if it prevents anyone other than 'trusted developers' (i.e. Microsoft) from releasing signed code.
"Visible" light tends not to travel through 'the ground' very well.
Fixed that for you.
When people say 'compared to light taking the same trip' they generally don't mean radio waves or gamma rays.
And why would this result be impossible?
It's not impossible. But if it was true it would be a bigger surprise than if the Sun decided to rise in the West tomorrow or I found Natalie Portman naked in my bed when I got home tonight.
I imagine it's really hard to do this with two remote locations unless the clocks were perfectly synced in person and then transported to the different research stations.
I believe GPS should be able to give you a sync to that kind of accuracy level.
Article says that it's compared to light taking the same trip. That would imply it's the speed of light in whatever medium they're using.
Light tends not to travel through 'the ground' very well.
when the IBM clones started to hit market all those makers vanished.
But that took years. For quite some time the ST, Amiga and the like were considered to be the home computers to own while PCs were primarily for business use; only when Windows 3.0 came along did the PC really take off for home users because it then offered most of the capabilities of those other computers at a lower price.
UPS from India beat FedEx from New Jersey, and was better wrapped.
Yeah, but with UPS they try to deliver it, you get home, find the card, go to the web site and tell them you'll collect it, but it's too late for them to take if off the truck so you can't collect it the next day, then the next day you go to their office wihch is only open two hours a day and queue up for half an hour and they tell you they forgot to take it off the truck so you'll have to come back again the next day.
I've often had UPS parcels take longer to cover the two miles from their depot to our house than they took to travel half way around the world to the depot. With Fedex I just stop by on the way to work the next day and collect it from them, because they're actually open at sensible times.
Facebook? When it first started, by many accounts sounded a lot like a fly by night company and people were giving them all kinds of personal information.
Yeah, and? A lot of them probably regret it t.
Even today I don't give them any information that I wouldn't want to see plastered all over the Internet.
If the company buying the data at auction is not held to the same privacy standards as the original, this means that shell companies can be formed to gather information under strict nondisclosure, then intentionally fold and provide the information without restriction and in violation of the original disclosure agreement.
And, uh, why were you handing personal information to fly-by-night shell companies?
I miss the old ebay where unique one-of-a-kind items can be found. Maybe they still exist but swamped with too much crap.
Ditto. I used to buy a lot from ebay auctions and got some good deals and weird stuff that I'd never have found elsewhere; I've hardly bought anything from them since they became just another storefront site a few years ago.
I think B&N is asserting the opposite of that, which
is Ardeaem's point.
Nope. If Borders bought a hard drive before they went bust, then that would be their property to be auctioned off. Similarly, the data Borders had about you is their property, which is to be auctioned off.
People are acting as though the data Borders collected belongs to them, rather than the company.
Hopefully this may help a few people realise the perils of letting random companies collect data about them.
CEOs are kind of like movie directors. You're going to spend $100,000,000 on a movie, so do you hire the guy who's made a string of flops but also made one movie which made $1,000,000,000 profit, or do you hire the new guy who's never made a movie? If you hire director A and he screws up, you pass the buck onto them, whereas if you hire director B and he screws up, you take the blame.
We live in a society where leaders have been replaced with MBAs and empty-headed politicos who look good on camera, and rule number one is 'Pass The Buck!'. Once you realise that, most of the seemingly insane behaviour of modern 'leaders' makes perfect sense.
If the privacy policy said only Borders would access the data then when Borders ceases to exist than so should the data.
Data doesn't disappear just because the company does. This is why anyone who's interested in privacy should be ensuring that no-one else has their data in the first place.
A 'privacy policy' is not a legally-binding agreement, and even if it was there's no guarantee that it would apply in bankruptcy.
I would actually be surprised if UEFI didn't support this.
Microsoft will presumably refuse to 'Windows certify' motherboards which allow you to turn off 'secure boot'. All for the user's security, of course.
They've wanted a completely locked-in system for a decade or more since they started pushing DRM. They couldn't do that with the old BIOS, but they can now; if not in this generation then they will for 'Windows 9' once the old BIOS-based motherboards are gone.