Granted, it was a two year old article, but one of the companies around where I live would remove platters and attempt recovery for less than $2000 at that time.
Would they do anything beyond putting the platters in a new drive with the same model electronics? For the challenge, you need to do better than what the regular electronics can do.
The kind of service which involves taking the platters out and connecting better electronics is that expensive. I am not sure any of the recovery companies offer that anymore, and the price would probably be at least 5-digit.
The only way I can think of to complete their challenge is to hack the firmware of the drive so the head/track alignment is just a little off so maybe the heads can pick up a residual trace of the data.
Not so long ago you could do it (very slowly) with a good microscope, but these days you would need a resolution around 100nm. A magnetic force microscope could possibly do it, if you had thousands of years for the project.
You also make it cheap for others to purchase the same fuel,
Which means the dubious regimes get less money. If we can reduce oil consumption by 20-30%, oil prices will fall close to the cost of production in the Middle East, somewhere in the region of $30 a barrel. That's a lot of money not going to people like Muammar Ghaddafi (oh wait, he turned into a good guy in episode 21, didn't he?)
Previous flips of the magnetic field aren't correlated with mass extinctions. I find that quite surprising myseld, but it is at least somewhat reassuring.
I don't see why undermining them as a standards organisation means Microsoft win.
ISO is by far the most important standards organisation. We can dream that ISO will just go away in a puff of logic, but it won't happen.
Having OOXML ISO-certified means that the government of my country can require that documents sent to them from my business are in that format. Since OOXML is unimplementable, I will have to actually send the documents as Microsoft Office X XML files. If I care about formatting, I will have to test the document in the particular version of Microsoft Office that the government agency uses.
You're stuck in a rights-based mindset, but rights don't inherently exist either through god or philosophy
I don't feel particularly stuck. Anyway, I believe that "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin says it much better than I ever could. William James certainly does:
"Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?"
The biggest problem with utilitarianism, IMHO, is this case: If there's a transaction that makes me quite a bit happier and you a little less happy, it is ethically good. Taking happiness from people is not something that can be justified so easily.
By my calculations, it ceases to be "reasonable doubt" and veers off into "complete mathematical certainty" when they use phrases like "Reiser's chilling confession,"
Confessions are surprisingly unreliable in the really serious cases. It is really only when you can match details of the confession to the crime scene that you can rely on them. However, it is really hard for a jury not to convict when the suspect confesses, and that has lead to wrongful convictions in the past.
When I used to work for a Perl dev team, not once did we find that the vendor version adequately met our needs.
This is certainly making me reconsider whether Perl is an appropriate language to write anything in. Giving up on vendor-provided updates and going back to compiling my own isn't going to happen. This is 2008, not 1995.
The vendor version in this case has a bug fixed. The bug caused incorrect behaviour. In this case the vendor version is only inferior if you prefer fast but incorrect results. There isn't anything wrong with preferring fast incorrect results over slow correct results, but most people probably want slow and correct to be the default if given the choice.
Fast and correct always wins, and the real Perl hackers are working on that. In the meantime we take what we can get.
but you need to build the wind farms close to load centers.
That is an option until you hit around 1/5 of electricity generated by wind. After that, you run out of good wind spots close to load centers (at least if you don't want to put them near houses, and trust me, you don't.)
You can certainly place the load where the generation is, but not much of the load is willing to move. And some of it depends on having power 24x7, so you need to have backup capacity. Other industries can scale production to available power.
In the end, if you want wind power to seriously contribute, you need to have high capacity long distance power transmission.
Now, drill some holes deep into the ground, and run a network of fluid-filled pipes through them, and you might be in business (figuratively speaking). I suspect this will be expensive.
It is not all that uncommon. It works best if the year-round average temperature is relatively low, of course.
So how does putting a computer in oil solve the heat problem in the server room?
The oil should be much better than air at transporting heat. That makes the cooling problem much easier, e.g. you could pipe the oil outside for cooling. Also it would almost eliminate heat islands, so you could probably get away with having the oil at 40C or even 50C, again making the problem of cooling it much less. Air would likely need to be 15C or even 10C at the AC unit to cool the servers effectively.
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Granted, it was a two year old article, but one of the companies around where I live would remove platters and attempt recovery for less than $2000 at that time.
Would they do anything beyond putting the platters in a new drive with the same model electronics? For the challenge, you need to do better than what the regular electronics can do.
The kind of service which involves taking the platters out and connecting better electronics is that expensive. I am not sure any of the recovery companies offer that anymore, and the price would probably be at least 5-digit.
The only way I can think of to complete their challenge is to hack the firmware of the drive so the head/track alignment is just a little off so maybe the heads can pick up a residual trace of the data.
Not so long ago you could do it (very slowly) with a good microscope, but these days you would need a resolution around 100nm. A magnetic force microscope could possibly do it, if you had thousands of years for the project.
You also make it cheap for others to purchase the same fuel,
Which means the dubious regimes get less money. If we can reduce oil consumption by 20-30%, oil prices will fall close to the cost of production in the Middle East, somewhere in the region of $30 a barrel. That's a lot of money not going to people like Muammar Ghaddafi (oh wait, he turned into a good guy in episode 21, didn't he?)
Previous flips of the magnetic field aren't correlated with mass extinctions. I find that quite surprising myseld, but it is at least somewhat reassuring.
ARM is denser than x86, especially if you use Thumb. Anyway, nothing mainstream has a high-performance FPU these days, apart from x86.
Save me from the delay slots! I don't want hi and lo either.
Let me know if there are any other questions you'd like answers for.
Actually, I could see a market for 3-port hubs at modern specs... or even a two-port with a third "RX only" port.
Pretty much any managed switch has the ability to make one port a "monitor" port. Cisco calls it SPAN.
I don't see why undermining them as a standards organisation means Microsoft win.
ISO is by far the most important standards organisation. We can dream that ISO will just go away in a puff of logic, but it won't happen.
Having OOXML ISO-certified means that the government of my country can require that documents sent to them from my business are in that format. Since OOXML is unimplementable, I will have to actually send the documents as Microsoft Office X XML files. If I care about formatting, I will have to test the document in the particular version of Microsoft Office that the government agency uses.
Why do people still use SMS?
Because it works. Everything else requires both parties to agree on a protocol. SMS is there all the time.
Also, domestic SMS's tend to be cheap. International ones are a rip-off.
Just think of how bad text message spam would be if those tricksy Chineses were able to reach us?
The Western phone companies would love to pass on Chinese spam at a price of 10c or more per SMS...
I doubt the spammers will find that very attractive.
You're stuck in a rights-based mindset, but rights don't inherently exist either through god or philosophy
I don't feel particularly stuck. Anyway, I believe that "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin says it much better than I ever could. William James certainly does:
"Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?"
The biggest problem with utilitarianism, IMHO, is this case: If there's a transaction that makes me quite a bit happier and you a little less happy, it is ethically good. Taking happiness from people is not something that can be justified so easily.
Most slashdotters would probably object to it, since like Economics it's not necessarily intuitive
Non-intuitiveness is certainly not the largest problem with Utilitarianism.
Getting rid of DSL is good for 15ms if the line is really good, and 50-100ms if the line is bad. That should help.
As long as you don't have to cross an ocean, 50ms latency console-to-console should be doable in a few years.
Another down side is that people confess to things they aren't actually guilty of.
Anyway, coming from a country where plea deals aren't used, they seem like a horrible idea.
My rule would also improve the gene pool. If you're dumb enough to confess to a murder...)
Ah yes, eugenics, obviously noone could be against that.
By my calculations, it ceases to be "reasonable doubt" and veers off into "complete mathematical certainty" when they use phrases like "Reiser's chilling confession,"
Confessions are surprisingly unreliable in the really serious cases. It is really only when you can match details of the confession to the crime scene that you can rely on them. However, it is really hard for a jury not to convict when the suspect confesses, and that has lead to wrongful convictions in the past.
and "led authorities to [the body]".
That on the other hand is good reliable evidence.
When I used to work for a Perl dev team, not once did we find that the vendor version adequately met our needs.
This is certainly making me reconsider whether Perl is an appropriate language to write anything in. Giving up on vendor-provided updates and going back to compiling my own isn't going to happen. This is 2008, not 1995.
The vendor version is always inferior.
The vendor version in this case has a bug fixed. The bug caused incorrect behaviour. In this case the vendor version is only inferior if you prefer fast but incorrect results. There isn't anything wrong with preferring fast incorrect results over slow correct results, but most people probably want slow and correct to be the default if given the choice.
Fast and correct always wins, and the real Perl hackers are working on that. In the meantime we take what we can get.
but you need to build the wind farms close to load centers.
That is an option until you hit around 1/5 of electricity generated by wind. After that, you run out of good wind spots close to load centers (at least if you don't want to put them near houses, and trust me, you don't.)
You can certainly place the load where the generation is, but not much of the load is willing to move. And some of it depends on having power 24x7, so you need to have backup capacity. Other industries can scale production to available power.
In the end, if you want wind power to seriously contribute, you need to have high capacity long distance power transmission.
Now, drill some holes deep into the ground, and run a network of fluid-filled pipes through them, and you might be in business (figuratively speaking). I suspect this will be expensive.
It is not all that uncommon. It works best if the year-round average temperature is relatively low, of course.
So how does putting a computer in oil solve the heat problem in the server room?
The oil should be much better than air at transporting heat. That makes the cooling problem much easier, e.g. you could pipe the oil outside for cooling. Also it would almost eliminate heat islands, so you could probably get away with having the oil at 40C or even 50C, again making the problem of cooling it much less. Air would likely need to be 15C or even 10C at the AC unit to cool the servers effectively.
I was, alas, being sarcastic. If you hear of a government which still believes that basic research is important, I'd like to know too.