The single global government idea, while with merit, goes against the grain of the fact that we all consider ourselves tribes, a heritage of our nature as animals. If you don't believe we're tribes, look at the denominational list for churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship in your town/city.
The real problem with global government is that it's being forced upon us little bit by little bit, gradually, over years and years, by deception and propaganda. It is not going to be the result of reasoned debate, democratic choice, grassroots demand, or any of those things. Rather, it's the province of a wealthy elite who view national sovereignty as an obstacle to their goals. The international corporation that is able to easily influence local governments has long since rendered national borders a thing of little significance.
You may not give a damn but I'm willing to bet the workers do. The problem is they're either not aware (very likely) or they're forced to choose between that and eating.
The fact that you're too much of a chicken shit to post your opinion with a name suggests that you do in fact give a damn, enough at least to not associate your own handle with your own oxygen wasting stupidity.
The root of the problem is the same blissful, ignorant indifference that is causing the USA to become a soft-tyranny style police state. The products' marketing don't mention the working conditions that made it available at that price, just like the politicians' campaigns don't mention that the removal of freedom is how many of their goals are accomplished. No one really wants to take a look beneath the surface. It's out of sight, out of mind as though there are no externalities, as though there are no secondary and tertiary effects.
About 1/3 to 1/2 of the TSA people I run into at LAX are friendly and courteous (I go through there about 5-10 times a year).
The rest? As you say . ..
In a non-broken system the thug element would be damned near unheard-of. Not 2/3 to 1/2. Most importantly, the non-thugs would have no tolerance whatsoever for their co-workers who just want to push people around.
Neah, that was just because you're american. Pretty much everywhere in the world americans are despised.
I can understand why. The rest of the world thinks that our government represents us and is acting on our behalf. If only they knew the truth, they'd have a lot of compassion for us.
If you're asking why they would stand out and be more prominent and thus, catch a disporportionately high amount of the flak.. that's easy. I'd say that has something to do with controlling over 90% of desktop operating systems. That might make someone stand out and get noticed.
Yeah, I would call it courage to go onto a plane where people can bring basically anything they want, but I wouldn't call it wise.. Dumb ass..
Yeah, because EVERYONE KNOWS that there is no reasonable amount of security that is not just security theater. No, Mr. AC, it's either completely overdo it or have no security at all. Since I argue against completely overdoing it, OBVIOUSLY I must want no security at all in your little black-and-white world. Bravo, sir, bravo.
i hope this is the beginning of rationalizing security threats. people are starting to realize that the knee jerk reaction from 9/11 may have been a bad idea.
Unfortunately all of the hindsight in the world is no substitute for having the wisdom and the courage to cherish freedom more than security.
Finally, a voice with power pointing out the obvious.
Will anyone get on the bandwagon, will it go any further?
That's no progress. We won't have made progress and risen out of (what future historians will call) the Dark Age of Unenlightenment under which we currently live until we listen to what is obvious, reasonable, and demonstrably true no matter who points it out. Until then, it's money and power against money and power, or specifically in this case nation arguing against nation, same as it's always been.
It is when it comes to buffer overflows vs. using a language that doesn't even allow them.
An education worthy of the name would include a discussion about choice of language and how to choose one that is most appropriate for a given task. It would include the possibility of buffer overflows and similar bugs as a disadvantage of low-level languages like C or C++. As in, "if you really think you need a lower-level language, then you must be prepared to take responsibility for this danger because the compiler won't do it for you."
Taking responsibility for that danger might or might not include using tools like this new extension to Java. It may mean abstracting dangerous functions into a library that has been thoroughly audited. It could mean any number of things less extreme than "these languages are now on the NEVER-USE-FOR-ANY-PURPOSE list".
Expanding a bit on the problem with rushing software out the door, there is one big component that makes this possible. There is a market for insecure software. Large numbers of people who don't know better will buy it and then think that the problems with it are just a "normal" aspect of owning a computer. It is not just the programmers who need to be educated. There would be a lot more secure software if nothing else would sell.
the EU stupidly went after a 10 year old issue and fined them for it
If by "stupidly" you mean "went after someone who broke their laws" then okay, they're a bunch of morons. Meanwhile, I expect a corporation to obey the laws of a country in which it has decided to operate. If those laws are completely unreasonable, my advice would be to not do business there.
Incidentally the USA is not known for making sure that the law applies to corporations, particularly not large US corporations with huge cash reserves who can afford lots of lobbyists, lawyers, and PR specialists. The only thing that surprises me is that the EU hasn't completely adopted this method (yet).
Besides, your last paragraph describe Apple to a tee.
I don't understand why anyone feels the need to insert things like this.
If I say that President Obama is doing something that is bad for the country, inevitably several people pipe up with "oh yeah, well, Bush is a Republican and did this other bad thing!" as though that mitigates my concern. Truth is, I don't want anybody in power making decisions that are demonstrably and objectively bad for the country. It doesn't make me feel better to know that some fanboy is relieved that "the other guy" is just as bad. While they're busy wasting time and energy bickering about that, we're losing our freedom.
All you've really addressed is why I use neither Apple products nor Microsoft products, and why anyone else who recognizes their business practices as a problem would do likewise. That still isn't germane to a discussion about whether there are objective reasons to dislike and distrust Microsoft. Microsoft was, after all, the topic of this particular discussion.
This is/. any anti MS stuff gets a horde of comments in seconds.
The underhanded, questionably ethical, and sometimes downright illegal (as determined by courts of law around the world) actions Microsoft has repeatedly taken have earned them the disdain they now experience. I don't like fanboys either, but there are perfectly objective non-fanboy reasons to dislike Microsoft.
Their love of vendorlock and their embrace-extend-extinguish practices are among the biggest. They avoid open standards and easy interoperability because that would mean having to compete on the merits of their implementation. Why should I support a company that has so little faith in their own products that they avoid letting them compete on merit alone whenever possible? If the vendor (whom you can expect to be biased in favor of its products) feels this way about its offerings, why would I argue with them?
because while he didn't say perfect, your message about "trusting" the programmers and educating them is part of the same old message from C programmers that these mistakes can be eliminated with sufficiently educated/good programmers. To prevent all buffer overflows, programmers need to be perfect.
If I understand one of your previous posts correctly (where you said education was a "band-aid"), you advocate continuing to educate programmers while also equiping them with better tools that make it easier to write more secure software. That's what I advocate myself. I don't view "education" and "better tools" as mutually exclusive. Software security is in a fairly sorry state. Anything likely to constructively improve it is welcome in my mind.
I do disagree that educating programmers about security is a band-aid. In fact you would probably need programmers who are educated about security in order to appreciate and utilize the security measures available. As other posters have pointed out, you can have the very best security mechanism in the world but it will be defeated by people who use "ALLOW: ALL" as the policy.
There is, of course, a third factor that neither education nor language support seems to account for. I believe many of the problems with software quality, including security, are from the "rush to get it out the door" mentality at many software companies. You may have the best, brightest, most security-conscious programmer in the world and equip him with the best tools in the world. Yet if the boss absolutely insists that he do three weeks of work in ten day's time, to get that first-to-market advantage, then he's going to cut corners someplace. It probably won't be on the shiny features promoted by marketing. Other than making companies face liability for damages done by exploitable bugs, I don't see how you would change this.
And even then, they can be offered tasty incentives for when they leave public life, so you'd need restrictions on that, too.
Delayed bribery is still bribery. Make it a felony that ignores any "corporate veil" to attempt to make such a bribe to a politician. Double that penalty for any politician who accepts such a bribe. Oh, and eliminate this special status of public office. When an elected official breaks a criminal law there is no good reason why, following a grand-jury indictment, the cops can't march right into his or her office and slap the cuffs on them.
I sometimes wonder if it really wouldn't be better to just elect politicians at random, by lottery.
That's what Athens did. It's an interesting idea. Every citizen was, at any time, expected to be capable of taking a position of responsibility within their community. Their system was quite a bit more participatory.
We could do that here and treat it a lot like jury duty. It would work well if each lottery selected candidate served only a single short term. The point is to eliminate the corruption, money, power and groupthink that comes with political parties and campaigns. The point is also to eliminate the concept of the career politician and with it, the ruling class of well-monied well-connected individuals who hold most of the power year after year.
Getting rid of the ruling elite is such a great thing that any inconvenience or disadvantage of this system should be negligible.
I said "improving or hiring perfect programmers", because while you didn't say perfect
Two things. One, you admit he didn't say "perfect". Two, perfect programmers don't exist. What then was the purpose of immediately going to the most extreme opposite of "flawed" when only "better" was proposed?
Reductio ad absurdem doesn't work when used with a false dichotomy.
But many Slashdot commentors second guess police (and really, everybody), and I can tell you there is no sound legal advice or police procedures advice that can be found on Slashdot. So, get off your horse.
Clearly all concerned citizens who question authority need to get off their high horses. Right?
She only looked embarrassed for a moment, then you will observe the training kicked in.
Not sure what you mean by "training kicked in", so I watched it again. At first, the female officer is smiling. Then OB threatens the girl with arrest if a bubble hits him. Then it cuts back to the female officer looking embarrassed. Then we cut back to the girl and OB. Then it cuts back to the female officer, and she's smirking. That's the last we see of her in this video, and even if my reading of her facial expression is subjective, the fact that shows no other physical or verbal reaction is not.
She obviously does not react in the same way that OB does, and I'm puzzled as to what you think shows that her "training kicked in" (meaning that she would react in a similar way to OB since they would have similar training).
Well, she didn't contradict him, call him out, ask him what the hell he was thinking, or otherwise lift a finger to stop him. So she gave her silent consent to his actions. Sounds like similar training to me. She just has a little more internal conflict then he does about the wrong in it, so she did show some embarassment while he embraced it as normal.
Are you trying to dehumanise them by constantly referring to machines?
No. They are trying to dehumanize us by constantly referring to us as criminals. So long as they do that, they are machines carrying out a specific function, as any human reasoning process would show them why this is wrong.
He described his personal experience ("I have had the opposite experience"). He made no claim that it was a representative sample. He did not claim to have proven anything.
I know that some people make claims they have no ability to back up and pretend they are universal truths. But the GP didn't do that. So... sheesh. Trigger-happy much?
Read the subject of the GGP's post and try again.
Better yet, read my follow-up post (posted 26 minutes before you submitted your post -- more than ample time for you to have seen it) to a very similar question and don't try again.
I know that some people make claims they have no ability to back up and pretend they are universal truths. But the GP didn't do that.
Did you completely miss the subject of this thread?
(Perhaps the awful application of apostrophes caused your brain to redact it).
I interpreted it within the context of the actual post. To hold my nose and use an old cliche, I didn't judge the book by its cover.
Perhaps in that AC's personal experience, SSDs do in fact die more than HDs.
Perhaps after hitting "Submit" he wished he could go back and edit the subject to better reflect his intent. I have done that, and imagine most or maybe even all Slashdotters who regularly post have done that at least once.
I still don't see where a claim was made that this is a representative sample that applies to anyone other than that AC. Personally, that's something I would want to be more certain about before I sarcastically object to something.
Incidentally, you're right that the misuse of apostrophes was awful.
I tend to hold on to my tech for years. With the finite number of read/writes to flash memory, I don't want to be forced to part with a computer because it uses a proprietary flash storage system or be forced to purchase a proprietary replacement storage module.
Things like iPods, smart phones, and PDAs are cheaper and easily replaced in whole, but I wouldn't want to face a replacement cost for a laptop.
I admit I have never owned an SSD and therefore I might be ignorant. Having said that, to the best of my knowledge SSDs use the same standard connectors (SATA) as spinning hard drives. If/when an SSD fails you should be able to buy either another SSD or a spinning hard drive as a drop-in replacement. This situation is no different and no more proprietary than mechanical drives.
When a question like that is so immediate and obvious, it does occur to me that I have probably misunderstood you. I don't know if maybe laptops are a special case. Can you explain this for me?
I would cringe to do secure erases (writing zeroes) to a flash memory drive (solid state drives or Apple's flash "drive" module in the new Airs), knowing I was prematurely killing my storage life. Platter-based disks with sudden motion sensors will still be my huckleberry for a few more years...
That really would be an issue. I'll note that usually a secure erase is more thorough than merely overwriting a file with zeroes. It often involves multiple passes that overwrite it with random data, either exclusively or in conjunction with overwriting it with zeroes. What I don't know is whether that's necessary for an SSD, though I do know it's often done that way for spinning hard drives.
On a desktop you could balance wear-and-tear and the need for secure deletion by having two drives. You could have an SSD with the operating system and applications installed on it for performance and then a larger mechanical drive for data storage. For a laptop that doesn't sound so practical, unfortunately. Perhaps on a laptop you'd want to have a small partition for sensitive data that uses filesystem encryption. That way sensitive data is never written to the device in plaintext and wouldn't need to be overwritten just to protect your data from someone who obtains the drive.
So from a sample size of 1, you can conclusively prove that SSDs are less reliable than hard drives?
He described his personal experience ("I have had the opposite experience"). He made no claim that it was a representative sample. He did not claim to have proven anything.
I know that some people make claims they have no ability to back up and pretend they are universal truths. But the GP didn't do that. So... sheesh. Trigger-happy much?
Occasionally manufacturers do make defective products. It's just not possible to have quality control that is 100% perfect on all counts. Assuming his personal experience was not a quality-control issue, it's not possible to ensure that no damage occurred during shipping after the drive left the factory. In other words, shit happens and what he's saying is not some terribly unbelievable story. I would hope that such a product which fails after only 2 months would be covered by warranty. That's the only relevant information the GP did not share with us.
If the manufacturer of his failing SSD offers no reasonable warranty because they are unwilling to stand behind the quality of its products, I'd like to know what company it is so I can avoid buying from them.
I was using paranoid in the layman, common usage sense. I'm certainly not saying that someone worried about their Facebook settings has a clinical mental disorder. In fact, I was only using the word because LBArrettAnderson used it in his post responding to my original post. If you'd rather use the phrase "security-conscious", that's fine by me.
It really takes a big man to admit that there may be a better way, or even an alternate way for that matter.
The thing is that "paranoid" really does have a definite meaning. That meaning has become blurred due to over-usage. This is like a hypnotic state of suggestibility. Common usage makes something accetpable, while acceptability makes something take on a fuller and fuller connotation. It so happens that all of this works in favor of the anti-privacy side of things. The very best thing about human beings is that they can get used to almost anything. That's adaptation. The very worst thing about human beings is that they can get used to almost anything. That's complacency. When intrusion becomes the norm, this is what you find.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem with global government is that it's being forced upon us little bit by little bit, gradually, over years and years, by deception and propaganda. It is not going to be the result of reasoned debate, democratic choice, grassroots demand, or any of those things. Rather, it's the province of a wealthy elite who view national sovereignty as an obstacle to their goals. The international corporation that is able to easily influence local governments has long since rendered national borders a thing of little significance.
You may not give a damn but I'm willing to bet the workers do. The problem is they're either not aware (very likely) or they're forced to choose between that and eating.
The fact that you're too much of a chicken shit to post your opinion with a name suggests that you do in fact give a damn, enough at least to not associate your own handle with your own oxygen wasting stupidity.
The root of the problem is the same blissful, ignorant indifference that is causing the USA to become a soft-tyranny style police state. The products' marketing don't mention the working conditions that made it available at that price, just like the politicians' campaigns don't mention that the removal of freedom is how many of their goals are accomplished. No one really wants to take a look beneath the surface. It's out of sight, out of mind as though there are no externalities, as though there are no secondary and tertiary effects.
About 1/3 to 1/2 of the TSA people I run into at LAX are friendly and courteous (I go through there about 5-10 times a year).
The rest? As you say . . .
In a non-broken system the thug element would be damned near unheard-of. Not 2/3 to 1/2. Most importantly, the non-thugs would have no tolerance whatsoever for their co-workers who just want to push people around.
Neah, that was just because you're american. Pretty much everywhere in the world americans are despised.
I can understand why. The rest of the world thinks that our government represents us and is acting on our behalf. If only they knew the truth, they'd have a lot of compassion for us.
True, there are a lot of reasons to dislike MS, and just about every major player. It just seems MS have a dispropotional amount of bad press like this: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/10/28/0113244/Microsoft-Charging-Royalties-For-Linux which if you Read TFA you can see it totally un-true.
If you're asking why they would stand out and be more prominent and thus, catch a disporportionately high amount of the flak.. that's easy. I'd say that has something to do with controlling over 90% of desktop operating systems. That might make someone stand out and get noticed.
Yeah, I would call it courage to go onto a plane where people can bring basically anything they want, but I wouldn't call it wise.. Dumb ass..
Yeah, because EVERYONE KNOWS that there is no reasonable amount of security that is not just security theater. No, Mr. AC, it's either completely overdo it or have no security at all. Since I argue against completely overdoing it, OBVIOUSLY I must want no security at all in your little black-and-white world. Bravo, sir, bravo.
i hope this is the beginning of rationalizing security threats. people are starting to realize that the knee jerk reaction from 9/11 may have been a bad idea.
Unfortunately all of the hindsight in the world is no substitute for having the wisdom and the courage to cherish freedom more than security.
Finally, a voice with power pointing out the obvious.
Will anyone get on the bandwagon, will it go any further?
That's no progress. We won't have made progress and risen out of (what future historians will call) the Dark Age of Unenlightenment under which we currently live until we listen to what is obvious, reasonable, and demonstrably true no matter who points it out. Until then, it's money and power against money and power, or specifically in this case nation arguing against nation, same as it's always been.
I mean, what language is that?
I'm sure that the Queen doesn't use such word.
It means caving in to pressure or bending over backwards to accommodate something that isn't really reasonable.
Incidentally, TSA stands for Thugs Standing Around.
An education worthy of the name would include a discussion about choice of language and how to choose one that is most appropriate for a given task. It would include the possibility of buffer overflows and similar bugs as a disadvantage of low-level languages like C or C++. As in, "if you really think you need a lower-level language, then you must be prepared to take responsibility for this danger because the compiler won't do it for you."
Taking responsibility for that danger might or might not include using tools like this new extension to Java. It may mean abstracting dangerous functions into a library that has been thoroughly audited. It could mean any number of things less extreme than "these languages are now on the NEVER-USE-FOR-ANY-PURPOSE list".
Expanding a bit on the problem with rushing software out the door, there is one big component that makes this possible. There is a market for insecure software. Large numbers of people who don't know better will buy it and then think that the problems with it are just a "normal" aspect of owning a computer. It is not just the programmers who need to be educated. There would be a lot more secure software if nothing else would sell.
If by "stupidly" you mean "went after someone who broke their laws" then okay, they're a bunch of morons. Meanwhile, I expect a corporation to obey the laws of a country in which it has decided to operate. If those laws are completely unreasonable, my advice would be to not do business there.
Incidentally the USA is not known for making sure that the law applies to corporations, particularly not large US corporations with huge cash reserves who can afford lots of lobbyists, lawyers, and PR specialists. The only thing that surprises me is that the EU hasn't completely adopted this method (yet).
I don't understand why anyone feels the need to insert things like this.
If I say that President Obama is doing something that is bad for the country, inevitably several people pipe up with "oh yeah, well, Bush is a Republican and did this other bad thing!" as though that mitigates my concern. Truth is, I don't want anybody in power making decisions that are demonstrably and objectively bad for the country. It doesn't make me feel better to know that some fanboy is relieved that "the other guy" is just as bad. While they're busy wasting time and energy bickering about that, we're losing our freedom.
All you've really addressed is why I use neither Apple products nor Microsoft products, and why anyone else who recognizes their business practices as a problem would do likewise. That still isn't germane to a discussion about whether there are objective reasons to dislike and distrust Microsoft. Microsoft was, after all, the topic of this particular discussion.
This is /. any anti MS stuff gets a horde of comments in seconds.
The underhanded, questionably ethical, and sometimes downright illegal (as determined by courts of law around the world) actions Microsoft has repeatedly taken have earned them the disdain they now experience. I don't like fanboys either, but there are perfectly objective non-fanboy reasons to dislike Microsoft.
Their love of vendorlock and their embrace-extend-extinguish practices are among the biggest. They avoid open standards and easy interoperability because that would mean having to compete on the merits of their implementation. Why should I support a company that has so little faith in their own products that they avoid letting them compete on merit alone whenever possible? If the vendor (whom you can expect to be biased in favor of its products) feels this way about its offerings, why would I argue with them?
because while he didn't say perfect, your message about "trusting" the programmers and educating them is part of the same old message from C programmers that these mistakes can be eliminated with sufficiently educated/good programmers. To prevent all buffer overflows, programmers need to be perfect.
If I understand one of your previous posts correctly (where you said education was a "band-aid"), you advocate continuing to educate programmers while also equiping them with better tools that make it easier to write more secure software. That's what I advocate myself. I don't view "education" and "better tools" as mutually exclusive. Software security is in a fairly sorry state. Anything likely to constructively improve it is welcome in my mind.
I do disagree that educating programmers about security is a band-aid. In fact you would probably need programmers who are educated about security in order to appreciate and utilize the security measures available. As other posters have pointed out, you can have the very best security mechanism in the world but it will be defeated by people who use "ALLOW: ALL" as the policy.
There is, of course, a third factor that neither education nor language support seems to account for. I believe many of the problems with software quality, including security, are from the "rush to get it out the door" mentality at many software companies. You may have the best, brightest, most security-conscious programmer in the world and equip him with the best tools in the world. Yet if the boss absolutely insists that he do three weeks of work in ten day's time, to get that first-to-market advantage, then he's going to cut corners someplace. It probably won't be on the shiny features promoted by marketing. Other than making companies face liability for damages done by exploitable bugs, I don't see how you would change this.
Delayed bribery is still bribery. Make it a felony that ignores any "corporate veil" to attempt to make such a bribe to a politician. Double that penalty for any politician who accepts such a bribe. Oh, and eliminate this special status of public office. When an elected official breaks a criminal law there is no good reason why, following a grand-jury indictment, the cops can't march right into his or her office and slap the cuffs on them.
That's what Athens did. It's an interesting idea. Every citizen was, at any time, expected to be capable of taking a position of responsibility within their community. Their system was quite a bit more participatory.
We could do that here and treat it a lot like jury duty. It would work well if each lottery selected candidate served only a single short term. The point is to eliminate the corruption, money, power and groupthink that comes with political parties and campaigns. The point is also to eliminate the concept of the career politician and with it, the ruling class of well-monied well-connected individuals who hold most of the power year after year.
Getting rid of the ruling elite is such a great thing that any inconvenience or disadvantage of this system should be negligible.
Two things. One, you admit he didn't say "perfect". Two, perfect programmers don't exist. What then was the purpose of immediately going to the most extreme opposite of "flawed" when only "better" was proposed?
Reductio ad absurdem doesn't work when used with a false dichotomy.
Clearly all concerned citizens who question authority need to get off their high horses. Right?
She only looked embarrassed for a moment, then you will observe the training kicked in.
Not sure what you mean by "training kicked in", so I watched it again. At first, the female officer is smiling. Then OB threatens the girl with arrest if a bubble hits him. Then it cuts back to the female officer looking embarrassed. Then we cut back to the girl and OB. Then it cuts back to the female officer, and she's smirking. That's the last we see of her in this video, and even if my reading of her facial expression is subjective, the fact that shows no other physical or verbal reaction is not.
She obviously does not react in the same way that OB does, and I'm puzzled as to what you think shows that her "training kicked in" (meaning that she would react in a similar way to OB since they would have similar training).
Well, she didn't contradict him, call him out, ask him what the hell he was thinking, or otherwise lift a finger to stop him. So she gave her silent consent to his actions. Sounds like similar training to me. She just has a little more internal conflict then he does about the wrong in it, so she did show some embarassment while he embraced it as normal.
It's really that simple.
Are you trying to dehumanise them by constantly referring to machines?
No. They are trying to dehumanize us by constantly referring to us as criminals. So long as they do that, they are machines carrying out a specific function, as any human reasoning process would show them why this is wrong.
Well..it's good to see that it's not only cops in the US that are douches...
Uh, it is? If all the douchebag cops were confined to a single country that would be one hell of an improvement.
The sad fact is, dickheads who love to push people around are strongly attracted to positions like that. This is a global phenomenon.
"Men will never be free until the last policeman is strangled with the entrails of the last banker" -- Diderot, or so.
Where do the lawyers fit into that scenario?
In this fictional scenario, the lawyers go out of business after the bankers and cops go away.
He described his personal experience ("I have had the opposite experience"). He made no claim that it was a representative sample. He did not claim to have proven anything.
I know that some people make claims they have no ability to back up and pretend they are universal truths. But the GP didn't do that. So ... sheesh. Trigger-happy much?
Read the subject of the GGP's post and try again.
Better yet, read my follow-up post (posted 26 minutes before you submitted your post -- more than ample time for you to have seen it) to a very similar question and don't try again.
Did you completely miss the subject of this thread? (Perhaps the awful application of apostrophes caused your brain to redact it).
I interpreted it within the context of the actual post. To hold my nose and use an old cliche, I didn't judge the book by its cover.
Perhaps in that AC's personal experience, SSDs do in fact die more than HDs.
Perhaps after hitting "Submit" he wished he could go back and edit the subject to better reflect his intent. I have done that, and imagine most or maybe even all Slashdotters who regularly post have done that at least once.
I still don't see where a claim was made that this is a representative sample that applies to anyone other than that AC. Personally, that's something I would want to be more certain about before I sarcastically object to something.
Incidentally, you're right that the misuse of apostrophes was awful.
I admit I have never owned an SSD and therefore I might be ignorant. Having said that, to the best of my knowledge SSDs use the same standard connectors (SATA) as spinning hard drives. If/when an SSD fails you should be able to buy either another SSD or a spinning hard drive as a drop-in replacement. This situation is no different and no more proprietary than mechanical drives.
When a question like that is so immediate and obvious, it does occur to me that I have probably misunderstood you. I don't know if maybe laptops are a special case. Can you explain this for me?
That really would be an issue. I'll note that usually a secure erase is more thorough than merely overwriting a file with zeroes. It often involves multiple passes that overwrite it with random data, either exclusively or in conjunction with overwriting it with zeroes. What I don't know is whether that's necessary for an SSD, though I do know it's often done that way for spinning hard drives.
On a desktop you could balance wear-and-tear and the need for secure deletion by having two drives. You could have an SSD with the operating system and applications installed on it for performance and then a larger mechanical drive for data storage. For a laptop that doesn't sound so practical, unfortunately. Perhaps on a laptop you'd want to have a small partition for sensitive data that uses filesystem encryption. That way sensitive data is never written to the device in plaintext and wouldn't need to be overwritten just to protect your data from someone who obtains the drive.
So from a sample size of 1, you can conclusively prove that SSDs are less reliable than hard drives?
He described his personal experience ("I have had the opposite experience"). He made no claim that it was a representative sample. He did not claim to have proven anything.
... sheesh. Trigger-happy much?
I know that some people make claims they have no ability to back up and pretend they are universal truths. But the GP didn't do that. So
Occasionally manufacturers do make defective products. It's just not possible to have quality control that is 100% perfect on all counts. Assuming his personal experience was not a quality-control issue, it's not possible to ensure that no damage occurred during shipping after the drive left the factory. In other words, shit happens and what he's saying is not some terribly unbelievable story. I would hope that such a product which fails after only 2 months would be covered by warranty. That's the only relevant information the GP did not share with us.
If the manufacturer of his failing SSD offers no reasonable warranty because they are unwilling to stand behind the quality of its products, I'd like to know what company it is so I can avoid buying from them.
I was using paranoid in the layman, common usage sense. I'm certainly not saying that someone worried about their Facebook settings has a clinical mental disorder. In fact, I was only using the word because LBArrettAnderson used it in his post responding to my original post. If you'd rather use the phrase "security-conscious", that's fine by me.
It really takes a big man to admit that there may be a better way, or even an alternate way for that matter.
The thing is that "paranoid" really does have a definite meaning. That meaning has become blurred due to over-usage. This is like a hypnotic state of suggestibility. Common usage makes something accetpable, while acceptability makes something take on a fuller and fuller connotation. It so happens that all of this works in favor of the anti-privacy side of things. The very best thing about human beings is that they can get used to almost anything. That's adaptation. The very worst thing about human beings is that they can get used to almost anything. That's complacency. When intrusion becomes the norm, this is what you find.