The earthquakes here and in Ohio happened near injection wells built to hold waste water from fracking. There was no gas there, else they'd be extracting it, rather than burying their waste there.
I worked for a place once where the owner was lamenting his inability to motivate his people to put in 60+ hours consistently. My greatest contribution (IMHO) to that organization was to argue as forcefully as I could that the problem wasn't that he couldn't motivate them to work 60+ hours/week, rather it was that he couldn't figure out how to run his business in a way that didn't require his employees to work 60+ hours for many, many months at a stretch.
If you're going to give up a year of your life, wreck your relationships, ruin your health, and sap your own creative outlets so that the owner of your business can make a fortune, he'd better be offering you a very juicy slice. For the same level of effort, you can do your own thing, and make your own fortune. Look after yourself, not someone who gives you a pep talk and vague promises.
It was James Agate who defined a professional as, "a man who can do his job even when he doesn't feel like it."
p. 98, _A Jacques Barzun Reader_, ed. by Michael Murray. Harper Collins, 2002.
When I read this, it went on the top of my white board at work and stayed there for a year.
I'm working on a project that's evolved over several years and there's been high turnover among the developers. We use a product called Understand for C++. It has a lot of great reverse engineering, metric generation, and source browsing features that make it pretty useful.
From their marketing blurb...
Understand, our flagship product, helps thousands of companies maintain impossibly large or complex amounts of source code. It parses source code for reverse engineering, automatic documentation, and calculating code metrics. We have versions for Ada 83, Ada 95, FORTRAN 77, FORTRAN 90, FORTRAN 95, Jovial, K&R C, ANSI C and C++, Delphi, and Java. Multi-million SLOC projects are common with our users.
It's an interesting discussion, but doesn't look like it's going to happen. The article they're referring to is just some German auto club that says the thing maybe it could happen when the war starts. Hardly authoritative.
The official sites to monitor if you're worried:
www.igeb.gov: The IGEB is a senior-level policy making body chaired jointly by the Departments of Defense and Transportation. Its membership includes the Departments of State, Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, and Justice, as well as NASA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Right after 9/11/01, they posted (still there) this: "GPS Selective Availability (SA) has not been used since its deactivation by the President on May 1, 2000. At that time, the United States Government stated that it has no intent to ever use SA again. There has been no change in this policy."
http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/gps/default.htm is the official source for notices to civilian GPS users about schedule satellite outages, etc. They have nothing related to S/A being turned back on, and they certainly would if it were going to happen.
We can jam or dither the civilian code over the theater if we need to.
The reason we chose SD/MMC cards in the first place was that it's cheap, ahem 'reliable', widely available, and easy to write to from a user's PC in the field with no hardware or software development effort on our part.
It's supposed to be the commodity part of the project were we just buy something that works.
The whole issue of '...if you are going to use flash, please treat it like it is flash', as you suggest, is -- I think -- a clear view of the problem, but the heart of it is that Windows only supports FAT on these cards, so that's what I'm stuck with if I want these to work on Windows without a lot of extra expense in time.
SanDisk offerred to replace the cards (still waiting for the RMA), but ignored my question. Lexar still hasn't replied.
I agree that my usage pattern is atypical, but since SanDisk is now marketing their Cruzer [sic] 256MB MMC USB plug as a PC file backup device, I'm guessing they'll see a whole bunch of these cards fail before their 'expected' lifetime.
The least they could do if they realized this were a problem is stick a note in their FAQ about filesystem support. The internet is FULL of Pocket PC and Palm users' complaints about getting these cards to last, perform well, and work cross-platform. Seems like it's not too much to ask for them to stick a couple paragraphs on their web site for the moderately technical user.
Since we'd like the convenience of the separate files, and since we'd like bozo users in the field to be able to update the cards (without us writing or distributing any software to accomplish the update), the FAT16 option is most appealing to me. These considerations aside, file consolidation is the best idea so far, and we've discussed it in the group.
The problem is that I'm not 100% sure that all the varieties of Windows really update the FSInfoSec once for each file rather than once for each cluster added during the file write. This would be stupid, but not out of the question. I spent some time with a a free USB snooper I found on sourceforge.org (thanks!), and it looks like the update is once per file on Win2K pro, but I didn't want to repeat the experiment on '95, '98, ME, XP, and the other flavors of 2K.
It might work to glob all these files into one massive file, and just seek around in it at runtime in the embedded system. That might take some extra work in the filesystem to be efficient, but if it gets back 26MB of wasted space from the cards it's worth considering.
I suspect they're all the same since most seem
to be made by SanDisk, Toshiba, or Panasonic and the others are just 'branded' versions of one of these. With that said...
SanDisk MultiMediaCards have an endurance specification for each sector of 300,000 writes...With typical applications the endurance limit is not of any practical concern to the vast majority of users.
1.5.4 Wear Leveling
SanDisk MultiMediaCards do not require or perform a Wear Level operation.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe I'm the first to remind everyone of this: http://xkcd.com/936
The earthquakes here and in Ohio happened near injection wells built to hold waste water from fracking. There was no gas there, else they'd be extracting it, rather than burying their waste there.
I worked for a place once where the owner was lamenting his inability to motivate his people to put in 60+ hours consistently. My greatest contribution (IMHO) to that organization was to argue as forcefully as I could that the problem wasn't that he couldn't motivate them to work 60+ hours/week, rather it was that he couldn't figure out how to run his business in a way that didn't require his employees to work 60+ hours for many, many months at a stretch.
If you're going to give up a year of your life, wreck your relationships, ruin your health, and sap your own creative outlets so that the owner of your business can make a fortune, he'd better be offering you a very juicy slice. For the same level of effort, you can do your own thing, and make your own fortune. Look after yourself, not someone who gives you a pep talk and vague promises.
It was James Agate who defined a professional as, "a man who can do his job even when he doesn't feel like it." p. 98, _A Jacques Barzun Reader_, ed. by Michael Murray. Harper Collins, 2002. When I read this, it went on the top of my white board at work and stayed there for a year.
From their marketing blurb...
Understand, our flagship product, helps thousands of companies maintain impossibly large or complex amounts of source code. It parses source code for reverse engineering, automatic documentation, and calculating code metrics. We have versions for Ada 83, Ada 95, FORTRAN 77, FORTRAN 90, FORTRAN 95, Jovial, K&R C, ANSI C and C++, Delphi, and Java. Multi-million SLOC projects are common with our users.
The official sites to monitor if you're worried:
www.igeb.gov: The IGEB is a senior-level policy making body chaired jointly by the Departments of Defense and Transportation. Its membership includes the Departments of State, Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, and Justice, as well as NASA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Right after 9/11/01, they posted (still there) this: "GPS Selective Availability (SA) has not been used since its deactivation by the President on May 1, 2000. At that time, the United States Government stated that it has no intent to ever use SA again. There has been no change in this policy."
http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/gps/default.htm is the official source for notices to civilian GPS users about schedule satellite outages, etc. They have nothing related to S/A being turned back on, and they certainly would if it were going to happen.
We can jam or dither the civilian code over the theater if we need to.
It's supposed to be the commodity part of the project were we just buy something that works.
The whole issue of '...if you are going to use flash, please treat it like it is flash', as you suggest, is -- I think -- a clear view of the problem, but the heart of it is that Windows only supports FAT on these cards, so that's what I'm stuck with if I want these to work on Windows without a lot of extra expense in time.
I agree that my usage pattern is atypical, but since SanDisk is now marketing their Cruzer [sic] 256MB MMC USB plug as a PC file backup device, I'm guessing they'll see a whole bunch of these cards fail before their 'expected' lifetime.
The least they could do if they realized this were a problem is stick a note in their FAQ about filesystem support. The internet is FULL of Pocket PC and Palm users' complaints about getting these cards to last, perform well, and work cross-platform. Seems like it's not too much to ask for them to stick a couple paragraphs on their web site for the moderately technical user.
Since we'd like the convenience of the separate files, and since we'd like bozo users in the field to be able to update the cards (without us writing or distributing any software to accomplish the update), the FAT16 option is most appealing to me. These considerations aside, file consolidation is the best idea so far, and we've discussed it in the group.
The problem is that I'm not 100% sure that all the varieties of Windows really update the FSInfoSec once for each file rather than once for each cluster added during the file write. This would be stupid, but not out of the question. I spent some time with a a free USB snooper I found on sourceforge.org (thanks!), and it looks like the update is once per file on Win2K pro, but I didn't want to repeat the experiment on '95, '98, ME, XP, and the other flavors of 2K.
It might work to glob all these files into one massive file, and just seek around in it at runtime in the embedded system. That might take some extra work in the filesystem to be efficient, but if it gets back 26MB of wasted space from the cards it's worth considering.
From the "MultiMediaCard Product Manual" (© 2000 SanDisk Corporation):
1.5.3 Endurance
SanDisk MultiMediaCards have an endurance specification for each sector of 300,000 writes ...With typical applications the endurance limit is not of any practical concern to the vast majority of users.
1.5.4 Wear Leveling
SanDisk MultiMediaCards do not require or perform a Wear Level operation.