I can confirm this bug. A few months back my company macbook started freezing up multiple times a day. I could see from the activity monitor that disk access stopped completely.
The SMART status was OK, and all sorts of other disk tools could not find a problem. The drive is a Crucial M4 256 GB.
After a few weeks of these random failures I realized they seemed to happen pretty consistently every hour, and eventually I found out about this firmware bug.
After doing some calculations, the "5184 hours of Power-on time" matched up very nicely with the date I started using the drive and the almost 24/7 power-on time (I just leave it powered on at my desk).
So I installed the firmware upgrade and the problem went away.
It's a pretty crazy bug - there must be many thousands of these drives out there just waiting to hit this magic power-on time and start failing. How many of those users are going to know about the firmware update?
I don't know much about this stuff, but isn't it possible to analyze the entropy of the hard drive data to find areas that contain encrypted data?
I remember a while back reading about ways to scan a program's memory looking for encryption keys and encrypted data because that data is much more random (or seemingly random) than the surrounding data.
Surely this would also apply to a hard drive? Imagine amongst all the old text files, images, documents, there is suddenly a huge 1GB area of totally random data. That's got to raise suspicions.
In Vista, they have... well, to a certain extent. They're working on something called "Freeze Drying", see this article
Many apps can be patched while they're running, and are replaced at next restart. We have some of that now, but will have more of it in the Vista release.
This isn't just replacing the app on the next reboot though, they can do 'real' hotpatching.
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I can confirm this bug. A few months back my company macbook started freezing up multiple times a day. I could see from the activity monitor that disk access stopped completely. The SMART status was OK, and all sorts of other disk tools could not find a problem. The drive is a Crucial M4 256 GB. After a few weeks of these random failures I realized they seemed to happen pretty consistently every hour, and eventually I found out about this firmware bug. After doing some calculations, the "5184 hours of Power-on time" matched up very nicely with the date I started using the drive and the almost 24/7 power-on time (I just leave it powered on at my desk). So I installed the firmware upgrade and the problem went away. It's a pretty crazy bug - there must be many thousands of these drives out there just waiting to hit this magic power-on time and start failing. How many of those users are going to know about the firmware update?
I don't know much about this stuff, but isn't it possible to analyze the entropy of the hard drive data to find areas that contain encrypted data?
I remember a while back reading about ways to scan a program's memory looking for encryption keys and encrypted data because that data is much more random (or seemingly random) than the surrounding data.
Surely this would also apply to a hard drive? Imagine amongst all the old text files, images, documents, there is suddenly a huge 1GB area of totally random data. That's got to raise suspicions.
Coral cache: http://www.thetechzone.com.nyud.net:8090/photo/dat a//515/1951Keyboard.jpg?8463
FYI, Microsoft did design a few of their own icons - this is all about standardizing, not 'innovation'.
If MS didn't bundle IE with the browser, how the hell are users supposed to get one of these alternatives? telnet to mozilla.org?
This has also been done on .NET but as far as I know there is no downloadable version. See this channel 9 video:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=2048 7
This looks a bit like Microsoft's experimental http://www.start.com/myw3b/ site
I believe code names are randomly generated for development, and then the 'real' name is chosen when it is released.