Ok, so HD is out (didn't know about the lubrication, thanks for the info). What breakdown process is involved with the CD/DVD? I know the -R format of both of those suffers from dye breakdown, but I thought the only danger pressed optical media faced was oxidation which should be possible to avoid by storing it in Nitrogen. Is there some other process that degrades pressed media I'm not aware of? Also for the HDD/data center solution, shouldn't you be able to reduce the overhead by just using mirroring hot-swapable HDD RAIDs and just having a tech swap out the drives as needed? I suppose the danger there is that with the rate HDD are updated the entire array could quickly go out of date, but maybe a networked cluster could offer some sort of solution. Instead of worrying about the particular hardware you just need software to make the system a node on the cluster and mirror data. As nodes die they could be replaced by newer hardware and you just update/port the client software as needed. Networking tech evolves at a much slower pace than HD or CPU so that should provide a little longevity.
As for formats, that's rather easily gotten around by storing everything in a well defined format that's recorded as well. So long as the codec documents are kept in a reasonably current format there should be no danger of losing the old data as converters could be written to update it to the latest formats.
Actually I said DVD or HD. There are also 2 different kinds of DVD, pressed DVD, and DVD-R. DVD-R do have problems with breakdown, but as far as I know the only problem with pressed DVDs is oxidation. In a pure Nitrogen environment, oxidation shouldn't be possible, so I see no reason why a pressed DVD in nitrogen would suffer any sort of degradation.
Are you talking DVD-Rs, or pressed DVDs, and what sorts of storage conditions? I would think a pressed DVD inside a nitrogen filled hermetically-sealed safe should be good for a very long time indeed.
Then comes the problem of codecs? Will anyone be able to play a VC-1 file 50 or 100 years from now? They will if you also store the algorithm the codec uses. You can always re-write a codec in the future, so long as you know how it's algorithm and data structures work.
Aside from the fact that this story is a dupe as pointed out by pretty much everyone, where the hell are they coming up with these costs? Put the damn things on DVDs, or better yet, plain old HDs and stick them in a hermetically sealed safe. Problem solved, they're good for at least 10 years. If you want even longer storage replace the air in the safe with something like pure Nitrogen and it should be good for well past 25 years (depending on the chemical breakdown of the materials in the DVDs used, there's some evidence that the dye used in DVD-Rs and CD-Rs might breakdown in relatively short periods of time).
You forgot that the Wine and Samba guys had good developers and somewhat limited goals, where as MS has corporate slaves^Wdevelopers (for the record I'm a corporate developer, but not a MS one) and has always attempted to maintain backwards compatibility (which means implementing not only the old API, but all the old bugs as well). From the stories I've heard this is also a side-effect of the way teams are broken out at MS. Where as in the OSS world the goal is on co-operation in large corporations like MS middle managers are often more interested in carving out their own domains and will even go as far as sabotaging other projects to make theirs look better. It's this mentality that has led developers at MS to put hidden optimized backdoors and function calls all over the place that allows them to write software that doesn't follow the API, but performs better than code that does follow the API. This also tends to lead to a sort of NIHS where developers unaware of the hidden functions others created recreate the same functions.
Ok, I'm tired of arguing with you. My point was, there are a lot of facts about Christmas that the majority of people aren't aware of and may find interesting. It doesn't matter much for celebration because people are doing just that, celebrating, it doesn't matter why. Since you brought them up, my friends and family are all over the board, as I would guess is the case with most Americans, some of them are very religious, others not at all. Does it make any difference at all how they celebrate Christmas? Nope, the same no matter where you go, and maybe that should tell you something.
It's independent of filesystems as the wear leveling happens at a much lower level. It keeps track of writes per cell, which are physical locations, not logical (not to be confused with physical and logical as is used when programming, this is lower then that) and maintains logical mappings at the PATA/SATA interface. It doesn't know anything about the data, just that the data is being written, so it finds a chunk with low write count and writes the data marking the physical location as being mapped to the logical one requested. What interests me of course is how the physical/logical mapping is maintained, as obviously some sort of storage must be used which itself should have a MTBF. Who knows, maybe the logical mapping is stored in the cell itself, which would be interesting but I think would also create a "seek time" as it would require a scan (or cache) of the cells to find a particular logical address.
Well, it may not entirely negate the effectiveness of wear leveling, but it definitely makes the calculations a bit more complicated. Lets look at the theoretical example of a 32G disk with 31G used and a 512M write about to happen. It decides that the free space already has too many writes, and it needs to write the data to a used section of the disk instead, so it finds a 512M chunk of data that has the lowest write count and copies that to the free space (with a high write count, further increasing it's write count). It then takes the new chunk of data and overwrites the old chunk of data (once more increasing a 512M blocks write count). Now, there's only two issues here. First, even though you've moved some data which you hope is going to be semi-permanent (as it had low write counts) to a high count section, there's no guarantee that the user won't turn around and delete those files in the next couple minutes making it pointless to have copied the data there. Second, to write 512M of data, you've just had to perform 2 512M writes thus using twice the cells to store the actual content. Yes, following this strategy should increase the time till you see a failure, but it also invalidates the simplistic calculation used to come up with the 50+ years till failure figures some people have proposed. Now, I'm not saying the performance won't still be a long time, just that it's not as cut and dry as it might seem.
Most top out at 20mb/s. Well, if the metrics quoted in the article are to be believed the actual performance on the drive they tested averaged 25mb/s with burst speeds of 30mb/s rather than the manufacturer quoted speed of 100mb/s, so if you can actually get 20mb/s out of a CF card, that's not much of a performance hit. Happen to know what the actual mean and burst read speeds are on a traditional HD (more concerned with reading then I am with writing, would be using the CF drive mostly for app/OS storage with media and data on a traditional HD)?
That's almost the exact same setup I had been considering. If I can scrape together the money I was also looking at maybe getting a small form factor box to setup next to one of my TVs. Going to put a CF card for the OS/Apps, with either an internal or external large HD for media storage and load MythTV on it. Could then use the desktop as a client to the TV box and watch TV at my desk.
Thank you for posting this. This is a really great link and is going in my reference documents bookmarks. I'd call for others to mod you up, but they already have.
Before someone points it out, yes I know the article quotes some mean time till failure for the drive, but I'm wondering if anyone has any actual experience with these, not what the marketing department says the performance should be.
I'm really interested in the SSD drives as high performance replacements (particularly for holding OS images where boot times should be nicely reduced), but I've got to wonder how the mean time to failure of one of these compares to a traditional magnetic disk. I know they use write leveling, but that just means everything will have a tendency to fail around the some time later, rather than a spot or two now and then. Anyone have any actual reports on these? I can usually make it 2 or 3 years before I start to see errors crop up on magnetic disks (sometimes more or less depending on how much thrashing the disk is subjected to). Might it be cheaper to simply buy a decent sized CF or SD card and an ide/sata adapter rather then paying for an actual disk, or is there some inherit advantage to one of these you'd be missing out on?
I think most everyone who celebrates Christmas knows they are celebrating the birth of Christ. I think most people that celebrate christmas are celebrating being with friends and family and exchanging gifts. The fact that the Christian churches co-opted the holiday to give it a religious spin after they couldn't convince people not to celebrate it doesn't really change that. Until the mid 1800s most of the major christian religions even tried to eliminate christmas as they didn't feel it was a proper thing to celebrate the birth of any religious figure let alone their most important one, and particularly not with feasting and presents. The fact is, few people really honestly care much about the religious angle, they just want an excuse to spend time with family and take a few days off from their busy work schedules.
Seems to be the contrary. The sex industry has always been one of the early adopters of new tech. It's because it's such a cut-throat industry, they constantly have to innovate to try to out do their competition. Anyone trying to cling to old tech quickly goes under, and anything new that's released only gives them a small lead before it's copied by everyone else. I would be very interested to see a timeline of when the first streaming video porn sites came out as compared to non-porn sites like youtube. I'd be willing to bet youtube came out after or around the same time as the porn sites.
Not that it matters but I'm agnostic, not neo-pagan. I just find it interesting to look at the history of our various holidays (religious or otherwise), and I'm trying to point out that most people don't understand anything about the holiday they're celebrating.
After Yusaku commented I went back and read the article he mentioned. The title of the article is actually somewhat misleading though as it's not a ban on incandescent bulbs, but a ban on selling non-energy-efficient incandescent bulbs after 2012. Going back to look over the article again it looks like the title has been amended as well to insert a "(most)" into it.
Unfortunately I think a lot of that stems from the particular breakout of users on this site. Out in general public most of those that have some non-traditional religious views (just about anything but Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or maybe even one of the eastern religions) are constantly reminded of the various religions opinions about virtually everything. Furthermore they often must censor themselves around certain individuals (such as extended family they still wish to remain on speaking terms with) and go along with many things during public events that they would rather not. It's also somewhat scary to see powerful business and political leaders giving speeches in which they attribute far reaching actions and opinions to personal religious beliefs rather then sound reasoning. As a result of this I think they tend to lash out at people on/. which is one of the few venues in which we're all free to speak our minds. No, it isn't fair to those that are Christian or otherwise, but all I can say is try to reason with them as best you can and hopefully the mods will balance things out. If they get enough -1 flamebait or -1 troll mods maybe they'll learn to back down and act more reasonably, and if you provide reasoned and articulate responses it might help to counter some of the prevailing view of the religious as being militant and out of touch with reality. Ultimately of course if the discussion comes down to religion there is no way to "win" that argument, if you disagree on it. Religion by its very nature cannot be logically argued, so everyone just needs to accept that their views are different and there's nothing to be done about.
Yes, almost the entire holiday is still true to its pagan roots, but the reason for it has been lost and replaced with "celebration of the rebirth of Jesus".
It always amazes me to see that the ones who least embody what the Christians claim to stand for are almost always the ones professing to be the most devout followers. I've met some very nice Christians who feel very strongly about their religion, but are still respectful of others, but sadly I've met many more who are practically militant about their particular flavor of Kool-Aid. I generally of course don't care what people happen to believe in so long as they don't break a few simple rules. First, I don't want to hear about it. Second, I don't want my tax dollars funding it. And Third it has no place in our legal process. So, I don't care if they have some message in their lights, they're their lights, they can put whatever they want in them, just so long as they leave me alone and don't expect me to do anything, or put up anything specific in my lights.
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Ok, so HD is out (didn't know about the lubrication, thanks for the info). What breakdown process is involved with the CD/DVD? I know the -R format of both of those suffers from dye breakdown, but I thought the only danger pressed optical media faced was oxidation which should be possible to avoid by storing it in Nitrogen. Is there some other process that degrades pressed media I'm not aware of? Also for the HDD/data center solution, shouldn't you be able to reduce the overhead by just using mirroring hot-swapable HDD RAIDs and just having a tech swap out the drives as needed? I suppose the danger there is that with the rate HDD are updated the entire array could quickly go out of date, but maybe a networked cluster could offer some sort of solution. Instead of worrying about the particular hardware you just need software to make the system a node on the cluster and mirror data. As nodes die they could be replaced by newer hardware and you just update/port the client software as needed. Networking tech evolves at a much slower pace than HD or CPU so that should provide a little longevity.
As for formats, that's rather easily gotten around by storing everything in a well defined format that's recorded as well. So long as the codec documents are kept in a reasonably current format there should be no danger of losing the old data as converters could be written to update it to the latest formats.
Actually I said DVD or HD. There are also 2 different kinds of DVD, pressed DVD, and DVD-R. DVD-R do have problems with breakdown, but as far as I know the only problem with pressed DVDs is oxidation. In a pure Nitrogen environment, oxidation shouldn't be possible, so I see no reason why a pressed DVD in nitrogen would suffer any sort of degradation.
Are you talking DVD-Rs, or pressed DVDs, and what sorts of storage conditions? I would think a pressed DVD inside a nitrogen filled hermetically-sealed safe should be good for a very long time indeed.
Aside from the fact that this story is a dupe as pointed out by pretty much everyone, where the hell are they coming up with these costs? Put the damn things on DVDs, or better yet, plain old HDs and stick them in a hermetically sealed safe. Problem solved, they're good for at least 10 years. If you want even longer storage replace the air in the safe with something like pure Nitrogen and it should be good for well past 25 years (depending on the chemical breakdown of the materials in the DVDs used, there's some evidence that the dye used in DVD-Rs and CD-Rs might breakdown in relatively short periods of time).
You forgot that the Wine and Samba guys had good developers and somewhat limited goals, where as MS has corporate slaves^Wdevelopers (for the record I'm a corporate developer, but not a MS one) and has always attempted to maintain backwards compatibility (which means implementing not only the old API, but all the old bugs as well). From the stories I've heard this is also a side-effect of the way teams are broken out at MS. Where as in the OSS world the goal is on co-operation in large corporations like MS middle managers are often more interested in carving out their own domains and will even go as far as sabotaging other projects to make theirs look better. It's this mentality that has led developers at MS to put hidden optimized backdoors and function calls all over the place that allows them to write software that doesn't follow the API, but performs better than code that does follow the API. This also tends to lead to a sort of NIHS where developers unaware of the hidden functions others created recreate the same functions.
Ok, I'm tired of arguing with you. My point was, there are a lot of facts about Christmas that the majority of people aren't aware of and may find interesting. It doesn't matter much for celebration because people are doing just that, celebrating, it doesn't matter why. Since you brought them up, my friends and family are all over the board, as I would guess is the case with most Americans, some of them are very religious, others not at all. Does it make any difference at all how they celebrate Christmas? Nope, the same no matter where you go, and maybe that should tell you something.
It's independent of filesystems as the wear leveling happens at a much lower level. It keeps track of writes per cell, which are physical locations, not logical (not to be confused with physical and logical as is used when programming, this is lower then that) and maintains logical mappings at the PATA/SATA interface. It doesn't know anything about the data, just that the data is being written, so it finds a chunk with low write count and writes the data marking the physical location as being mapped to the logical one requested. What interests me of course is how the physical/logical mapping is maintained, as obviously some sort of storage must be used which itself should have a MTBF. Who knows, maybe the logical mapping is stored in the cell itself, which would be interesting but I think would also create a "seek time" as it would require a scan (or cache) of the cells to find a particular logical address.
Well, it may not entirely negate the effectiveness of wear leveling, but it definitely makes the calculations a bit more complicated. Lets look at the theoretical example of a 32G disk with 31G used and a 512M write about to happen. It decides that the free space already has too many writes, and it needs to write the data to a used section of the disk instead, so it finds a 512M chunk of data that has the lowest write count and copies that to the free space (with a high write count, further increasing it's write count). It then takes the new chunk of data and overwrites the old chunk of data (once more increasing a 512M blocks write count). Now, there's only two issues here. First, even though you've moved some data which you hope is going to be semi-permanent (as it had low write counts) to a high count section, there's no guarantee that the user won't turn around and delete those files in the next couple minutes making it pointless to have copied the data there. Second, to write 512M of data, you've just had to perform 2 512M writes thus using twice the cells to store the actual content. Yes, following this strategy should increase the time till you see a failure, but it also invalidates the simplistic calculation used to come up with the 50+ years till failure figures some people have proposed. Now, I'm not saying the performance won't still be a long time, just that it's not as cut and dry as it might seem.
Anyone else notice the little confidential text in the corner of all the slides in the linked PDF?
That's almost the exact same setup I had been considering. If I can scrape together the money I was also looking at maybe getting a small form factor box to setup next to one of my TVs. Going to put a CF card for the OS/Apps, with either an internal or external large HD for media storage and load MythTV on it. Could then use the desktop as a client to the TV box and watch TV at my desk.
Thank you for posting this. This is a really great link and is going in my reference documents bookmarks. I'd call for others to mod you up, but they already have.
Please see this post.
Before someone points it out, yes I know the article quotes some mean time till failure for the drive, but I'm wondering if anyone has any actual experience with these, not what the marketing department says the performance should be.
I'm really interested in the SSD drives as high performance replacements (particularly for holding OS images where boot times should be nicely reduced), but I've got to wonder how the mean time to failure of one of these compares to a traditional magnetic disk. I know they use write leveling, but that just means everything will have a tendency to fail around the some time later, rather than a spot or two now and then. Anyone have any actual reports on these? I can usually make it 2 or 3 years before I start to see errors crop up on magnetic disks (sometimes more or less depending on how much thrashing the disk is subjected to). Might it be cheaper to simply buy a decent sized CF or SD card and an ide/sata adapter rather then paying for an actual disk, or is there some inherit advantage to one of these you'd be missing out on?
Just found this, seemed appropriate.
Seems to be the contrary. The sex industry has always been one of the early adopters of new tech. It's because it's such a cut-throat industry, they constantly have to innovate to try to out do their competition. Anyone trying to cling to old tech quickly goes under, and anything new that's released only gives them a small lead before it's copied by everyone else. I would be very interested to see a timeline of when the first streaming video porn sites came out as compared to non-porn sites like youtube. I'd be willing to bet youtube came out after or around the same time as the porn sites.
Not that it matters but I'm agnostic, not neo-pagan. I just find it interesting to look at the history of our various holidays (religious or otherwise), and I'm trying to point out that most people don't understand anything about the holiday they're celebrating.
After Yusaku commented I went back and read the article he mentioned. The title of the article is actually somewhat misleading though as it's not a ban on incandescent bulbs, but a ban on selling non-energy-efficient incandescent bulbs after 2012. Going back to look over the article again it looks like the title has been amended as well to insert a "(most)" into it.
Unfortunately I think a lot of that stems from the particular breakout of users on this site. Out in general public most of those that have some non-traditional religious views (just about anything but Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or maybe even one of the eastern religions) are constantly reminded of the various religions opinions about virtually everything. Furthermore they often must censor themselves around certain individuals (such as extended family they still wish to remain on speaking terms with) and go along with many things during public events that they would rather not. It's also somewhat scary to see powerful business and political leaders giving speeches in which they attribute far reaching actions and opinions to personal religious beliefs rather then sound reasoning. As a result of this I think they tend to lash out at people on /. which is one of the few venues in which we're all free to speak our minds. No, it isn't fair to those that are Christian or otherwise, but all I can say is try to reason with them as best you can and hopefully the mods will balance things out. If they get enough -1 flamebait or -1 troll mods maybe they'll learn to back down and act more reasonably, and if you provide reasoned and articulate responses it might help to counter some of the prevailing view of the religious as being militant and out of touch with reality. Ultimately of course if the discussion comes down to religion there is no way to "win" that argument, if you disagree on it. Religion by its very nature cannot be logically argued, so everyone just needs to accept that their views are different and there's nothing to be done about.
Yes, almost the entire holiday is still true to its pagan roots, but the reason for it has been lost and replaced with "celebration of the rebirth of Jesus".
Yes, lilomar already pointed that out for me.
It always amazes me to see that the ones who least embody what the Christians claim to stand for are almost always the ones professing to be the most devout followers. I've met some very nice Christians who feel very strongly about their religion, but are still respectful of others, but sadly I've met many more who are practically militant about their particular flavor of Kool-Aid. I generally of course don't care what people happen to believe in so long as they don't break a few simple rules. First, I don't want to hear about it. Second, I don't want my tax dollars funding it. And Third it has no place in our legal process. So, I don't care if they have some message in their lights, they're their lights, they can put whatever they want in them, just so long as they leave me alone and don't expect me to do anything, or put up anything specific in my lights.