Yes, but you're failing to observe the point that the users whining about this are the kind who, in your example, would say that the term "oil level" is too confusing. And how do they know if they should really change it or not, just because the light says to?
Terms like "gasoline" and "accellorator" and "yield" confuse the hell out of me. I blame every car geek out there. They should make life simpler for me. I want names like "go juice" and "fast pedal" and "watch out sign".
I didn't even know Star Wars was coming out next month. Nor did (or do) I care.
I hope he doesn't do another three in the series. It would be nice if Star Wars just goes away after this release. There are better and more interesting things to be nuts about. A lame story with lame actors isn't one of them. And really, if star wars evern _was_ good (which I'm unsure of), it was back when it had a bunch of actors who were not known at the time. It was ruined by going with the biggest names in hollywood for the last three movies.
Not that I care. Let it suck. I have yet to see the second star wars movie, either (that's the clone one, right?).
If it's a movie, it just looks like your average videogame cut-scenes. Nothing particularly impressive. Nothing awful, either.
Anyone else bored to death by the bland elven, femme-boys with the muscle-tone of a twelve year old girl that are able to magically weild swords the size of steel girders?
I haven't played Final Fantasy since the original Sega. I tried VIII and found that the game is just too linear. The "game" and "RPG" part is inconsequential and may as well just be done away with so the player can stare at a sequence of cut-scenes, which is all it really was anyway.
But I guess teenage girls like it or whatever. *shrug*
Someone elsewhere here had a link to a test page that would case the problem to occur. I clicked on it. Nothing happened. And yeah, I have Flash installed. And no, I don't have this new popup blocker installed. Just whatever the most recent release of Firefox and Adblock are. *shrug*
I suspect this tends to occur at certain sites of.. *cough*.. questionable content. Which would explain why most probably don't encounter it.
I have always used Firefox and AdBlock and have never come across these "magical" popups/popunders that everyone keeps crying about. The only time I get a popup in Firefox is when it's something I've put in my allow list.
SCSI is much more expensive. You'd end up spending more on the SCSI drives and controllers than you would have if you just bought cheap IDE drives, RAID cards and tossed them into spare PCs running linux.
Also, last time I checked, you can't buy 400gb SCSI drives (which are the latest IDE sizes, I believe). So you'd need far more SCSI drives just to archive the same amount of data that fewer IDEs would have.
For example (pricewatch.com):
EIDE, 250gb, $107 (price break point on EIDE right now - 48.2cents/gb) EIDE, 400gb, $273 (largest EIDE right now - 68.25cents/gb)
SCSI, 50gb, $27 (price break point on SCSI right now - 54cents/gb) SCSI, 181gb, $141 (largest SCSI right now - 77.9cents/gb)
As you can see, if you went with the price-break-point drives, you'd only be paying about 15% more for SCSI than EIDE (not counting controllers, cables, chassis, etc). However, whereas you'd need 10 EIDE drives to store 2.5tb of data (a couple more, if you're talking RAID) - you'd need more than 50 SCSI drives.
I see your point. Though most of my backups are fire and forget... if I lose it, it's no great loss. Only stuff I really care about, tax info, source code, etc, do I doubly backup.
Yes, well, that's fine for thing that don't matter (taxes, source code, medical information, etc). I'm not talking about those insignificant things. I'm talking bout archiving *pr0n*. I wouldn't expect the same standards of pr0n archival to be necessary for such minor things as those!
I haven't looked at the SATA spec since it first came out, but if I recall, the transfer capabilities of the cables are multiples of EIDE. The drives may or may not be faster at the moment. I don't know. But you can't seriously suggest that it's worth the extra cost of SATA - if there is no performance gain - just so you have thinner cables in your chassis?!
Even a TrendMicro Super-Micro tower case can only hold so many drives. You'll run out of drive bays before you run into a major problem finding room to navigate all of the ribbon cables. Hell, if I can fit 4 drives in a 1U rackmount server - each using a 36" ribbon cable (yes, non-standard, I know) then surely people can manage in a great big beast like a SuperMicro full tower.
The issue isn't the cabling. The issue is PCI slots and drive bays (and, to an extent, air-flow in which perhaps the SATA cables would be beneficial but perhaps not worth that much cash).
Most boards have enough PCI slots to fit multiple RAID cards. That's no problem. But few chassis have enough room for more than 4, 6 or possibly 8 drive bays. So, unless you're willing to invest in an expensive SAN or something, you're limited to about half a dozen drives in a single unit. If you're doing RAID-5, that's 5 drives worth of storage.
Now, if you can cram 5 drives worth of storage in your system, what is better? Affordable 250gb drives or affordable 1tb drives? Clearly, since you're limited in drive bays, the bigger affordable drives make you happier than smaller ones.
So I don't see where a desire for continued drive size growth is "meh". The whole point is that the more smaller drives you have, the more infrastructure you have to invest in (chassis, external chassis, RAID cards, motherboards, power supplies, cabling and so on).
Well, I don't need the speed of SATA - nor the cost of those drives. It's easy enough to just pop a hardware RAID (IDE) card into a tall SuperMicro tower case and cram the thing full of 250gb drives at $100/ea. I think the 2.6+ kernels support all the current IDE RAID cars out there now, by default - which is a thing they couldn't do only a couple years ago (so you got the joy of dealing with i2so and various compiling hoops).
However, the point still remains that the more individual drives there are, the greater the power consumption, heat dissipation and general expense will be. I'd rather have one terrabyte drive than half a dozen smaller ones for that reason.
I've always wondered - when a person is undergoing an operation that lasts 4, 6, 8, 12 or more hours, how does the surgeon handle bathroom and lunch breaks? Does the patient just sit there, opened up, while the doc heads down to the local Wendy's? Or is there a backup doctor who takes over during that time? And do surgeons get the same 15 minute break every 4 hours and lunch no later than 5.5 hours that labor laws in most states require ever other employer to provide?
Correct. The article's author is clearly wrong about the "X-Y-Z" aspect, as the data is not stacked on top of each other as the article would have one believe.
Stacking the bits vertically on the platter would consume imperceptibly small space. To the human eye, it would look like any other platter.
And yeah, this isn't really any more 3d than drives have always been. Just a different way of arranging the data. When you place a letter-piece on a scrabble board, it's just as "3d" as it will be when you stick three letters on top of each other on the scrabble board. Same difference.
Still, if it increases performance and storage - more power to 'em.
Personally, I think we should just start using platters the size of frisbees and using gas power generators to rev up the spin.
You already nailed the porn angle, which can absolutely eat up almost unlimited quantitties of storage.
You might be surprised at how much storage people require for their MP3 collections. Why, ripping just my collection of actual physical CDs that I personally own runs a couple hundred gig. Not to mention, if you backup your personal collection of legally owned DVDs to xvid, you could be using up a few hundred gig for a decent home collection.
And aside from those uses, think about the incredible amount of data that builds up over time if you're an avid digital photographer taking medium to high quality photographs. Or if you are scanning the family photo albums. Or if you like to keep your paper records light, so you scan them and shred the physical copies of documents older than three or five years.
Or if you make your own home movies or edit your band's music on your PC. Or if you're backing up the important data from all the machines in your own into a central location frequently.
Damn, even just a handful of videogames will eat up hundreds of gigs after awhile. Act of War, WarCraft, Unreal Tourney 2004, and TotalWar: Rome each take up between about 3gb and 6gb.
Granted, your grandmother and your youngest brother will probably not consume much space at all. But most geeks will - and in fact, as more tech becomes available to the world and actively used (like digital cameras have in the last few years), the average person will find that they need more and more storage.
I really feel we're going to hit a terrabyte sized consumer drive within the next three years. And even that might not be enough. Game manufacturers are only now starting to distribute more games on DVD format. Remember when games used to ship on one CD? Then three, four, five and even six over time? Well, today they can fit it all on a single DVD. Give it a couple of years when they start making games with enormous quantities of animation, live-action, cut-scenes, music... and we start seeing games that come on two, three, four or five DVDs. Imagine a 30gb game!
I might sound crazy, but a decade ago, a game that would take up more than a single 600mb CD seemed absurd.
I wouldn't see why not. You might have to put more logic on the drive to so but, hopefully that wouldn't reduce performance at all. Same idea as your system seeing a half dozen IDE drives as a single large drive with an RAID controller card, I suppose.
And if not, it won't matter anyway. By the time these drives are released, the bugs worked out, better versions released, and then price reduced to an affordable range, they'll be making motherboards with whatever new bus interfaces is required.
All I know is, we've come a long way from punch cards or casette tapes.:)
Hey, I'm all for whatever works to get me these bigger (and eventually cheaper) storage drives. It's all a guy can do to keep track of drawers full of archived 200gb hard drives to organize his 2.5 terrabytes of porn. Hopefully we're only a few years away from being able to cram all of that, and more, into a single affordable consumer drive.
Um... the data is replicated across multiple machines in the datacenter and then again across multiple datacenters, of which they have many globally. Not really a need to backup that data. I'm sure the gmail stuff is done in a similar way.
So, I'm always reading about how unfair the tech world is, because there are so few women joining it. But if you watch the video, the audience is surprisingly full of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but you're failing to observe the point that the users whining about this are the kind who, in your example, would say that the term "oil level" is too confusing. And how do they know if they should really change it or not, just because the light says to?
Terms like "gasoline" and "accellorator" and "yield" confuse the hell out of me. I blame every car geek out there. They should make life simpler for me. I want names like "go juice" and "fast pedal" and "watch out sign".
No kidding.
I didn't even know Star Wars was coming out next month. Nor did (or do) I care.
I hope he doesn't do another three in the series. It would be nice if Star Wars just goes away after this release. There are better and more interesting things to be nuts about. A lame story with lame actors isn't one of them. And really, if star wars evern _was_ good (which I'm unsure of), it was back when it had a bunch of actors who were not known at the time. It was ruined by going with the biggest names in hollywood for the last three movies.
Not that I care. Let it suck. I have yet to see the second star wars movie, either (that's the clone one, right?).
So is this a videogame or a movie?
If it's a movie, it just looks like your average videogame cut-scenes. Nothing particularly impressive. Nothing awful, either.
Anyone else bored to death by the bland elven, femme-boys with the muscle-tone of a twelve year old girl that are able to magically weild swords the size of steel girders?
I haven't played Final Fantasy since the original Sega. I tried VIII and found that the game is just too linear. The "game" and "RPG" part is inconsequential and may as well just be done away with so the player can stare at a sequence of cut-scenes, which is all it really was anyway.
But I guess teenage girls like it or whatever. *shrug*
Every million counts.... yet we they still can't get metric and imperial straight when they build craft and plan missions.
Two popup windows on IE.
Nothing on FireFox 1.02.
Someone elsewhere here had a link to a test page that would case the problem to occur. I clicked on it. Nothing happened. And yeah, I have Flash installed. And no, I don't have this new popup blocker installed. Just whatever the most recent release of Firefox and Adblock are. *shrug*
I suspect this tends to occur at certain sites of.. *cough*.. questionable content. Which would explain why most probably don't encounter it.
I have always used Firefox and AdBlock and have never come across these "magical" popups/popunders that everyone keeps crying about. The only time I get a popup in Firefox is when it's something I've put in my allow list.
SCSI is much more expensive. You'd end up spending more on the SCSI drives and controllers than you would have if you just bought cheap IDE drives, RAID cards and tossed them into spare PCs running linux.
:)
Also, last time I checked, you can't buy 400gb SCSI drives (which are the latest IDE sizes, I believe). So you'd need far more SCSI drives just to archive the same amount of data that fewer IDEs would have.
For example (pricewatch.com):
EIDE, 250gb, $107 (price break point on EIDE right now - 48.2cents/gb)
EIDE, 400gb, $273 (largest EIDE right now - 68.25cents/gb)
SCSI, 50gb, $27 (price break point on SCSI right now - 54cents/gb)
SCSI, 181gb, $141 (largest SCSI right now - 77.9cents/gb)
As you can see, if you went with the price-break-point drives, you'd only be paying about 15% more for SCSI than EIDE (not counting controllers, cables, chassis, etc). However, whereas you'd need 10 EIDE drives to store 2.5tb of data (a couple more, if you're talking RAID) - you'd need more than 50 SCSI drives.
I'd pass, thanks.
I see your point. Though most of my backups are fire and forget... if I lose it, it's no great loss. Only stuff I really care about, tax info, source code, etc, do I doubly backup.
Yes, well, that's fine for thing that don't matter (taxes, source code, medical information, etc). I'm not talking about those insignificant things. I'm talking bout archiving *pr0n*. I wouldn't expect the same standards of pr0n archival to be necessary for such minor things as those!
I haven't looked at the SATA spec since it first came out, but if I recall, the transfer capabilities of the cables are multiples of EIDE. The drives may or may not be faster at the moment. I don't know. But you can't seriously suggest that it's worth the extra cost of SATA - if there is no performance gain - just so you have thinner cables in your chassis?!
Even a TrendMicro Super-Micro tower case can only hold so many drives. You'll run out of drive bays before you run into a major problem finding room to navigate all of the ribbon cables. Hell, if I can fit 4 drives in a 1U rackmount server - each using a 36" ribbon cable (yes, non-standard, I know) then surely people can manage in a great big beast like a SuperMicro full tower.
The issue isn't the cabling. The issue is PCI slots and drive bays (and, to an extent, air-flow in which perhaps the SATA cables would be beneficial but perhaps not worth that much cash).
Most boards have enough PCI slots to fit multiple RAID cards. That's no problem. But few chassis have enough room for more than 4, 6 or possibly 8 drive bays. So, unless you're willing to invest in an expensive SAN or something, you're limited to about half a dozen drives in a single unit. If you're doing RAID-5, that's 5 drives worth of storage.
Now, if you can cram 5 drives worth of storage in your system, what is better? Affordable 250gb drives or affordable 1tb drives? Clearly, since you're limited in drive bays, the bigger affordable drives make you happier than smaller ones.
So I don't see where a desire for continued drive size growth is "meh". The whole point is that the more smaller drives you have, the more infrastructure you have to invest in (chassis, external chassis, RAID cards, motherboards, power supplies, cabling and so on).
Well, I don't need the speed of SATA - nor the cost of those drives. It's easy enough to just pop a hardware RAID (IDE) card into a tall SuperMicro tower case and cram the thing full of 250gb drives at $100/ea. I think the 2.6+ kernels support all the current IDE RAID cars out there now, by default - which is a thing they couldn't do only a couple years ago (so you got the joy of dealing with i2so and various compiling hoops).
However, the point still remains that the more individual drives there are, the greater the power consumption, heat dissipation and general expense will be. I'd rather have one terrabyte drive than half a dozen smaller ones for that reason.
120 decibels worth.
I've always wondered - when a person is undergoing an operation that lasts 4, 6, 8, 12 or more hours, how does the surgeon handle bathroom and lunch breaks? Does the patient just sit there, opened up, while the doc heads down to the local Wendy's? Or is there a backup doctor who takes over during that time? And do surgeons get the same 15 minute break every 4 hours and lunch no later than 5.5 hours that labor laws in most states require ever other employer to provide?
Correct. The article's author is clearly wrong about the "X-Y-Z" aspect, as the data is not stacked on top of each other as the article would have one believe.
Stacking the bits vertically on the platter would consume imperceptibly small space. To the human eye, it would look like any other platter.
And yeah, this isn't really any more 3d than drives have always been. Just a different way of arranging the data. When you place a letter-piece on a scrabble board, it's just as "3d" as it will be when you stick three letters on top of each other on the scrabble board. Same difference.
Still, if it increases performance and storage - more power to 'em.
Personally, I think we should just start using platters the size of frisbees and using gas power generators to rev up the spin.
You already nailed the porn angle, which can absolutely eat up almost unlimited quantitties of storage.
You might be surprised at how much storage people require for their MP3 collections. Why, ripping just my collection of actual physical CDs that I personally own runs a couple hundred gig. Not to mention, if you backup your personal collection of legally owned DVDs to xvid, you could be using up a few hundred gig for a decent home collection.
And aside from those uses, think about the incredible amount of data that builds up over time if you're an avid digital photographer taking medium to high quality photographs. Or if you are scanning the family photo albums. Or if you like to keep your paper records light, so you scan them and shred the physical copies of documents older than three or five years.
Or if you make your own home movies or edit your band's music on your PC. Or if you're backing up the important data from all the machines in your own into a central location frequently.
Damn, even just a handful of videogames will eat up hundreds of gigs after awhile. Act of War, WarCraft, Unreal Tourney 2004, and TotalWar: Rome each take up between about 3gb and 6gb.
Granted, your grandmother and your youngest brother will probably not consume much space at all. But most geeks will - and in fact, as more tech becomes available to the world and actively used (like digital cameras have in the last few years), the average person will find that they need more and more storage.
I really feel we're going to hit a terrabyte sized consumer drive within the next three years. And even that might not be enough. Game manufacturers are only now starting to distribute more games on DVD format. Remember when games used to ship on one CD? Then three, four, five and even six over time? Well, today they can fit it all on a single DVD. Give it a couple of years when they start making games with enormous quantities of animation, live-action, cut-scenes, music... and we start seeing games that come on two, three, four or five DVDs. Imagine a 30gb game!
I might sound crazy, but a decade ago, a game that would take up more than a single 600mb CD seemed absurd.
I wouldn't see why not. You might have to put more logic on the drive to so but, hopefully that wouldn't reduce performance at all. Same idea as your system seeing a half dozen IDE drives as a single large drive with an RAID controller card, I suppose.
:)
And if not, it won't matter anyway. By the time these drives are released, the bugs worked out, better versions released, and then price reduced to an affordable range, they'll be making motherboards with whatever new bus interfaces is required.
All I know is, we've come a long way from punch cards or casette tapes.
Think chickenhead - but horizontal, too.
Hey, I'm all for whatever works to get me these bigger (and eventually cheaper) storage drives. It's all a guy can do to keep track of drawers full of archived 200gb hard drives to organize his 2.5 terrabytes of porn. Hopefully we're only a few years away from being able to cram all of that, and more, into a single affordable consumer drive.
Real men would have identified this as Colossus.
I've never realised that GFS was developed by Google
:P
So what did you think the G stood for?
Um... the data is replicated across multiple machines in the datacenter and then again across multiple datacenters, of which they have many globally. Not really a need to backup that data. I'm sure the gmail stuff is done in a similar way.
So, I'm always reading about how unfair the tech world is, because there are so few women joining it. But if you watch the video, the audience is surprisingly full of them.
By any measure, 215 lawsuits constitutes a legal juggernaut.
I guess you've never heard of a little group known as the RIAA.