Sound nuts? Yes... but they do. Large clusters of many inexpensive machines set up in a redundant manner...
It doesn't sound nuts since most databases also run their index from RAM. The index is far smaller than the actual data, and if you put it down on a disk, some of the advantage of having index in the first place is killed.
AFAIK Google doesn't use off-the-shelf database, but same logic and laws of physics apply to making indexes.
I really wish they put Ubuntu next to latest XP, latest Vista and latest OSX (ok I guess they could wait few days for Leopard to get out).
As an XP user, two Ubuntu tests don't give me a clear picture of how this relates to the OS I use right now. I do suspect Ubuntu will have lower power consumption than XP, and for Vista the margin will be pretty wide.
So the solution is that we get total bloatware and zero innovation. While I have not used Office 2007 yet, I suppose that like 2000, XP and 2003 there is little innovation over 97, which was actually quite a good piece of software.
My advice is don't assume lots of things before testing. I gotta say, Office 2007 is the greatest advancement in Office since 97, and it's amazing.
It truly makes the job of OO much harder since now OO suffers on four fronts:
- not fully compatible with the majority of document files (MS Office, unfair I know, but a fact) - no good integration between the apps in the OO suite, no Exchange alternative, no OneNote or Visio alternative etc. - the features in the existing apps often pale in comparison with *needed* and *used* functionality in MS Office - (2007 adds:) OO has now compared to 2007, an outdated and harder to use interface, even more essential features missing, and outdated graphics engine which makes documents look like something made in a 16-bit app.
Basically, I was involved in maintaining my statusquo as the richest man in the world until August (2007), when a Mexican bilionaire called Carlos Slim surpassed my wealthy in (1) billion american dolars. He (Carlos Slim) did not stop at that; he also went on to afirm that his monopoly would be larger than mine.
Month ago it was proven Carlos' claim was unfounded. Bill Gates still *is* the richest man on Earth.
An organization saw their trademark being used without their permission in an advertisement, and asked that it be taken down.
Indeed, biz as usual I guess. And I'm not sure it's a good idea to have "anti something" ads in the first place.
I just had a big revelation around this non-story though. Look at Google's news stories. It's 90% ads, and 10% google apps trivia (up the disk space here, add a site tool there, boring).
What happened to innovation in the search technology, Google? All we hear is ads, ads, ads, ads.
Expansion and innovation in Google is coming up only with more effective ways to shovel ads down our throats, and not with better ways for us to find our site.
And the field is full of ideas. Hell, Microsoft's live.com had some fresh ideas recently even (UI-wise).
Should I start thinking of Google simply as a giant ads shoveler, and not as the industry-turning innovator they were in the beginning? Nothing good lasts forever.
What is so bad about Vista? I have not used it yet. I've seen it, and I know some people that are using it and they don't complain about it. What's the deal? Is it just that it's new?
The reason isn't simple. Anyone giving you one single reason so many people reject Vista would be silly. Here are few:
- yes it's new, means back compat issues with software hardware - eats lots of resources and delivers little for it (comparable Linus/OSX interfaces run on lesser GFX chips and deliver faster responce... why this is, no clue, let's hope Vista SP2 fixes it) - no direction, GUI chaos, feature chaos
The latter is a bigger problem than one can imagine, since it's not one that solves itself with bugfixes and time.
Vista clearly lacks focus and lacks central philosophy behind its GUI. We see that a huge team worked on this OS, but no one gave them a single set of rules to work behind. Everyone just had its own idea how to change the Windows experience and simply went for it without regard to the rest of the OS.
Last time we talked someone said "but typing to find apps is so much faster than menus! I hate the whiners that don't like vista's start menu".
Right. So if typing is so much better, how come they converted the Explorer address bar from *hinted typing* to *menus* in vista (you need to right-click, then deselect, and then you can finally double-click a segment to retype).
Or maybe the Start menu exists in a universe of its own from Explorer.
The Control Panel is entirely unpredictable. It starts like a web page, but half of the features pop-up the old XP control panel applets, with the other tabs disabled (or not disabled.. again, all this is random).
Unhiding hidden files, which is what many people do, causes two "desktop.ini" files on the Desktop (they had the sense not to show those in XP and before!).
So, basically stuff like that. It's not crucial, you can do your work, but it's a *lesser* experience, it's a pain, and goes against you, for no good reason than "I'm new, buy me". And why go for the lesser experience, when you can go for the better experience, which is XP?
So there. Now Microsoft will have to weight both sides: can they admit failure and fix Vista, or keep demanding it's just fine, but we need to get used to it?
I really wish they fix Vista, but they don't give a sign of doing this so far though. SP1 will build on performance and stability features, which is great, but they only fix couple of UI issues.
If you want the voiceover then get the 5 disc set. [amazon.com] It will contain all the released cuts of the movie, plus some extras.
Nice, I can finally put this to the 62 DVD set of Star Wars releases and the 536 DVD set of all Star Trek series, movies, cut, and uncut, in all languages it was ever dubbed in.
Boycott Microsoft for... er... Microsoft. That'll show them!
Right, very funny, but they never said they want to boycott Microsoft.
I know, it's all confusing since part of normal people's agenda for once matches Slashdotters' agenda. But the reasons are different, the details are different, and the goal is different.
All the eye-candy is performed on the GPU, and the talk about it being DRM-with-a-GUI is nonsense - it performs perfectly as a media player, with astounding video quality (thanks to everything being rendered through Direct3D, and real emphasis placed on media quality).
When you call your opposition's opinion nonsense, it pays not to spew out nonsense yourself.
Pray tell, how on Earth does rendering through Direct3D improve video quality? I use media player classic which has all modes of rendering, ranging from overlay through Direct 2D, 3D, Open GL and so on.
It's impossible to tell which one you're using without peeking in the settings.
Oh wait, I know, it's the soft shadow behind the player. Makes the explosion sequences that much better, just like that flames sticker made your computer faster.
Not quite. When XP came out, all the geeks thought it was terrible and wanted to use Windows 2000 instead, because chances are they were already using it. The people that didn't care about computers loved Windows XP, because they were coming from Windows 98/ME.
Right, that's how it was. And do you know what's the subtle difference here? People that don't care about computers don't like Vista. Pure and simple.
Grasp the difference, for it's crucial when you make silly parallels like these.
Problem? On the contrary! This is great. It's competition at work, improving things for users. Google offered lots of storage. Now it's competitors offer more. In response, Google will offer more. Whichever of these services you are using, you will get a better deal. The only problem here is how you can put all that space to good use.
Oh right, it's great, until the competitors start lying to make their offer look better. Happened with ISP-s, happened with cheap hosting providers (check dreamhost.com - 500 GB space and 5 TB traffic for 6 bucks! weeee).
Users will be stumbling onto unspoken limits and various oddities written with tiny print in the ever changing ToS of the providers.
And since most people do not hit the limits, but just want it in case they ever need it (which is again, never), the minority who cries for suffering from this will be never heard of.
I can see how you can hide it easily but that doesn't mean you're not supposed to pay the tax on it, just like in a lot of states you're supposed to remit sales tax for out-of-state purchases. So in practice the tax isn't collected but it's not that a tax isn't levied.
I suspect that after the death of RIAA and MPAA in about 5 years, the biggest enemy of your typical nerd would be governments trying to tax their OSS apps.
And you know nerds don't like doing things because someone above says you have to.
I agree that it's stupid but could you explain again how Skype is untaxable?
I could go on and on, but let's say it's somewhat similar to why P2P networks are hard to control.
What we'll end with is offshore hosted VoIP apps running encrypted traffic on a random port. Then you need to tax all encrypted traffic. But you can't, at least until 2011.
What's the point of taxing voip when there's untaxable free voip like Skype out there (and not just).
It just makes business harder for those entrepreneurs trying to offer voip as a solid alternative to land phone lines, you know "voip for the rest of us".
So basically let's bash Toshiba and Microsoft from trying to make an actual implementation of some obvious vagueness Apple patented. The basic idea is so obvious, even I came up with it few times when holding a touchscreen portable ("hmmm if the touch was on the back, I could hold it better").
They should come up with some stronger word than "bias" to describe the typical anti-MS slashdot post. I bet my money that you wouldn't spin it like this if Toshiba worked on this alone. Pathetic.
Ehmm... wrong. Since Firefox is an open source project, ANYONE has the option to contribute patches, a [...] Though I can't think of a reason why Microsoft would WANT to fix a problem in Firefox
So uhmm what was the point of this post at all? Anyone in Microsoft's position wouldn't want to fix their competitors' software, it being OSS or not.
Firefox isn't just a browser competing to IE on Windows. It's a browser on Windows that works the same on Mac and Linux. That's horrible for MS as the browser becomes the most important application ever to be had on an OS.
There are plenty of people who criticise Vista but, from the way they talk about it, have obviously never used it properly themselves. You seem to be one of these people.
You're fighting the wrong windmill. I didn't say a word about my personal Vista experience. I commented I've met an incredible amount of people, average people, who believe Vista is bad.
You can run bullet lists and numbered items by me and tell me "see, the analysis shows it's great", but guess what. Your analysis is worth dick, if the average people out there think Vista is bad.
What I think I'll keep to myself for another discussion.
XP was not finished when it came out and now it is the flagship operating system. This happens everytime, there are problems cause some old POS hardware doesn't have a driver for Vista yet (or at all) and there are bugs here and there in the OS. Time will change it, whether the anti-MS crowd likes it or not, and MS will stay rich another day.
No, that's why I said this supposedly happens with every release, but that'll be a false positive hit in your analysis. As is your assumption I'm part of some "anti-MS" crowd. I eagerly expected Vista, and had every pre-release Longhorn bit tested, amazed at the new technologies inside.
I saw it's inconsistent, instable, slow, and a resource hog. But I ignored all this. I thought "sure, it's alpha/beta, they'll get it working on release!". But no. Release candidate 1, 2. Still same problems. Release, still same problems.
And this is where users get pissed off since they can see it too.
Yes, previous OS-es had hints of this problem, but in Vista it's much worse. People know Vista is bad. Whether it's bad or not, and what the anti-MS crowd thinks matters not. If people think it's bad, it's bad.
Ballmer's comment seems really prick-like to me. It probably wasn't meant as such, but still.
He was doing damage control. He couldn't really say "ok I admit, Vista kinda sucks and we know it".
But I *do* think this was important for him to hear face to face. Sometimes all the statistics and focus groups can't tell you what a mom can tell you in a direct conversation.
The more "normal" folks tell Ballmer where Microsoft went wrong with Vista, the better the chance is they figure out what to do and get their act together.
According to our web stats, about 8% of our viewers are using Vista.
That's not an insubstantial share, especially since most of our viewers are probably corporate users and it's a bigger PITA for them to upgrade than a home user.
I didn't say Vista adoption is poor. Although it's worse than Microsoft projected, which should tell you something.
Microsoft is in a position to drive adoption when people are neutral to Windows. Mostly since people run Windows software, and exclusive OEM deals. That's not bad, I mean, good job of Microsoft for doing so well.
Microsoft is in a position to drive adoption even when people are somewhat negative to Windows Vista. I suppose many companies that have signed up for the MS Software Assurance moved to Vista to explain the insane money they paid to their shareholders (see? we have Vista! yei!).
It'll be interesting to watch how far can Vista adoption go with such poor word of mouth. And also I hope SP1 is really good.
I don't *want* Vista to fail. It's just, the world can't care less what I *want*, I just report observations.
That's it. I've never seen the public react this way to a Windows release before. Not Linux geeks, but the average Windows users. Yea, yea, every new release faces nostalgia of the previous release blah blah. It's way worse here. Average people call Vista shit. Businesses run away from it.
The Vista brand is ruined. Now even if they fix Vista, the brand will never recover.
I hope Microsoft learns something from this. First impression lasts forever. Don't release software unfinished.
--Testing. Government agencies and military often test their new equipment in more 'predictable' scenarios such as protests. If it were proven technology, it would already be deployed in those high-priority areas like in the Middle East, China, etc..--
What makes you think they haven't, hmmm?
What makes me personally think so is that no one in Middle East, China etc. reported flying robot flies. If a bunch of protesters could easily spot them, why no one else did.
I gotta admit I'm pretty 50/50 on whether the protesters are nuts or those are real.
Didn't anyone snap a photo of those with their camera equipped cellphone? At least a very very smudgy, motion-blurred, out of focus, UFO-photo-style one? Such a shame.
Most flash controllers remap the sectors on the fly to ensure that the memory is not worn down prematurely. So if you rewrite the same logical sector 5 times over, a chance exists that you'll get 5 different physical sectors.
Yup, it also means, if one single sector is faulty, the controller will keep putting more and more different information on it and getting it wrong, potentially ruining a big chunk of your data:)
Slashdot Mirror
Google runs its index from RAM.
Sound nuts? Yes... but they do. Large clusters of many inexpensive machines set up in a redundant manner...
It doesn't sound nuts since most databases also run their index from RAM. The index is far smaller than the actual data, and if you put it down on a disk, some of the advantage of having index in the first place is killed.
AFAIK Google doesn't use off-the-shelf database, but same logic and laws of physics apply to making indexes.
I really wish they put Ubuntu next to latest XP, latest Vista and latest OSX (ok I guess they could wait few days for Leopard to get out).
As an XP user, two Ubuntu tests don't give me a clear picture of how this relates to the OS I use right now. I do suspect Ubuntu will have lower power consumption than XP, and for Vista the margin will be pretty wide.
But how much exactly..?
So the solution is that we get total bloatware and zero innovation. While I have not used Office 2007 yet, I suppose that like 2000, XP and 2003 there is little innovation over 97, which was actually quite a good piece of software.
My advice is don't assume lots of things before testing. I gotta say, Office 2007 is the greatest advancement in Office since 97, and it's amazing.
It truly makes the job of OO much harder since now OO suffers on four fronts:
- not fully compatible with the majority of document files (MS Office, unfair I know, but a fact)
- no good integration between the apps in the OO suite, no Exchange alternative, no OneNote or Visio alternative etc.
- the features in the existing apps often pale in comparison with *needed* and *used* functionality in MS Office
- (2007 adds:) OO has now compared to 2007, an outdated and harder to use interface, even more essential features missing, and outdated graphics engine which makes documents look like something made in a 16-bit app.
Basically, I was involved in maintaining my statusquo as the richest
man in the world until August (2007), when a Mexican bilionaire called
Carlos Slim surpassed my wealthy in (1) billion american
dolars. He (Carlos Slim) did not stop at that; he also went on to
afirm that his monopoly would be larger than mine.
Month ago it was proven Carlos' claim was unfounded. Bill Gates still *is* the richest man on Earth.
An organization saw their trademark being used without their permission in an advertisement, and asked that it be taken down.
Indeed, biz as usual I guess. And I'm not sure it's a good idea to have "anti something" ads in the first place.
I just had a big revelation around this non-story though. Look at Google's news stories. It's 90% ads, and 10% google apps trivia (up the disk space here, add a site tool there, boring).
What happened to innovation in the search technology, Google? All we hear is ads, ads, ads, ads.
Expansion and innovation in Google is coming up only with more effective ways to shovel ads down our throats, and not with better ways for us to find our site.
And the field is full of ideas. Hell, Microsoft's live.com had some fresh ideas recently even (UI-wise).
Should I start thinking of Google simply as a giant ads shoveler, and not as the industry-turning innovator they were in the beginning? Nothing good lasts forever.
What is so bad about Vista? I have not used it yet. I've seen it, and I know some people that are using it and they don't complain about it. What's the deal? Is it just that it's new?
The reason isn't simple. Anyone giving you one single reason so many people reject Vista would be silly. Here are few:
- yes it's new, means back compat issues with software hardware
- eats lots of resources and delivers little for it (comparable Linus/OSX interfaces run on lesser GFX chips and deliver faster responce... why this is, no clue, let's hope Vista SP2 fixes it)
- no direction, GUI chaos, feature chaos
The latter is a bigger problem than one can imagine, since it's not one that solves itself with bugfixes and time.
Vista clearly lacks focus and lacks central philosophy behind its GUI. We see that a huge team worked on this OS, but no one gave them a single set of rules to work behind. Everyone just had its own idea how to change the Windows experience and simply went for it without regard to the rest of the OS.
Last time we talked someone said "but typing to find apps is so much faster than menus! I hate the whiners that don't like vista's start menu".
Right. So if typing is so much better, how come they converted the Explorer address bar from *hinted typing* to *menus* in vista (you need to right-click, then deselect, and then you can finally double-click a segment to retype).
Or maybe the Start menu exists in a universe of its own from Explorer.
The Control Panel is entirely unpredictable. It starts like a web page, but half of the features pop-up the old XP control panel applets, with the other tabs disabled (or not disabled.. again, all this is random).
Unhiding hidden files, which is what many people do, causes two "desktop.ini" files on the Desktop (they had the sense not to show those in XP and before!).
So, basically stuff like that. It's not crucial, you can do your work, but it's a *lesser* experience, it's a pain, and goes against you, for no good reason than "I'm new, buy me". And why go for the lesser experience, when you can go for the better experience, which is XP?
So there. Now Microsoft will have to weight both sides: can they admit failure and fix Vista, or keep demanding it's just fine, but we need to get used to it?
I really wish they fix Vista, but they don't give a sign of doing this so far though. SP1 will build on performance and stability features, which is great, but they only fix couple of UI issues.
Maybe SP2 is where they will do it. We'll see.
If you want the voiceover then get the 5 disc set. [amazon.com] It will contain all the released cuts of the movie, plus some extras.
Nice, I can finally put this to the 62 DVD set of Star Wars releases and the 536 DVD set of all Star Trek series, movies, cut, and uncut, in all languages it was ever dubbed in.
Boycott Microsoft for... er... Microsoft. That'll show them!
Right, very funny, but they never said they want to boycott Microsoft.
I know, it's all confusing since part of normal people's agenda for once matches Slashdotters' agenda. But the reasons are different, the details are different, and the goal is different.
All the eye-candy is performed on the GPU, and the talk about it being DRM-with-a-GUI is nonsense - it performs perfectly as a media player, with astounding video quality (thanks to everything being rendered through Direct3D, and real emphasis placed on media quality).
When you call your opposition's opinion nonsense, it pays not to spew out nonsense yourself.
Pray tell, how on Earth does rendering through Direct3D improve video quality? I use media player classic which has all modes of rendering, ranging from overlay through Direct 2D, 3D, Open GL and so on.
It's impossible to tell which one you're using without peeking in the settings.
Oh wait, I know, it's the soft shadow behind the player. Makes the explosion sequences that much better, just like that flames sticker made your computer faster.
Not quite. When XP came out, all the geeks thought it was terrible and wanted to use Windows 2000 instead, because chances are they were already using it. The people that didn't care about computers loved Windows XP, because they were coming from Windows 98/ME.
Right, that's how it was. And do you know what's the subtle difference here? People that don't care about computers don't like Vista. Pure and simple.
Grasp the difference, for it's crucial when you make silly parallels like these.
Problem? On the contrary! This is great. It's competition at work, improving things for users. Google offered lots of storage. Now it's competitors offer more. In response, Google will offer more. Whichever of these services you are using, you will get a better deal. The only problem here is how you can put all that space to good use.
Oh right, it's great, until the competitors start lying to make their offer look better. Happened with ISP-s, happened with cheap hosting providers (check dreamhost.com - 500 GB space and 5 TB traffic for 6 bucks! weeee).
Users will be stumbling onto unspoken limits and various oddities written with tiny print in the ever changing ToS of the providers.
And since most people do not hit the limits, but just want it in case they ever need it (which is again, never), the minority who cries for suffering from this will be never heard of.
I can see how you can hide it easily but that doesn't mean you're not supposed to pay the tax on it, just like in a lot of states you're supposed to remit sales tax for out-of-state purchases. So in practice the tax isn't collected but it's not that a tax isn't levied.
I suspect that after the death of RIAA and MPAA in about 5 years, the biggest enemy of your typical nerd would be governments trying to tax their OSS apps.
And you know nerds don't like doing things because someone above says you have to.
I agree that it's stupid but could you explain again how Skype is untaxable?
I could go on and on, but let's say it's somewhat similar to why P2P networks are hard to control.
What we'll end with is offshore hosted VoIP apps running encrypted traffic on a random port. Then you need to tax all encrypted traffic. But you can't, at least until 2011.
And thus, VoIP will be only selectively taxed.
What's the point of taxing voip when there's untaxable free voip like Skype out there (and not just).
It just makes business harder for those entrepreneurs trying to offer voip as a solid alternative to land phone lines, you know "voip for the rest of us".
Stupid.
So basically let's bash Toshiba and Microsoft from trying to make an actual implementation of some obvious vagueness Apple patented.
The basic idea is so obvious, even I came up with it few times when holding a touchscreen portable ("hmmm if the touch was on the back, I could hold it better").
They should come up with some stronger word than "bias" to describe the typical anti-MS slashdot post. I bet my money that you wouldn't spin it like this if Toshiba worked on this alone. Pathetic.
Ehmm... wrong. Since Firefox is an open source project, ANYONE has the option to contribute patches, a [...] Though I can't think of a reason why Microsoft would WANT to fix a problem in Firefox
So uhmm what was the point of this post at all? Anyone in Microsoft's position wouldn't want to fix their competitors' software, it being OSS or not.
Firefox isn't just a browser competing to IE on Windows. It's a browser on Windows that works the same on Mac and Linux. That's horrible for MS as the browser becomes the most important application ever to be had on an OS.
There are plenty of people who criticise Vista but, from the way they talk about it, have obviously never used it properly themselves. You seem to be one of these people.
You're fighting the wrong windmill. I didn't say a word about my personal Vista experience. I commented I've met an incredible amount of people, average people, who believe Vista is bad.
You can run bullet lists and numbered items by me and tell me "see, the analysis shows it's great", but guess what. Your analysis is worth dick, if the average people out there think Vista is bad.
What I think I'll keep to myself for another discussion.
XP was not finished when it came out and now it is the flagship operating system. This happens everytime, there are problems cause some old POS hardware doesn't have a driver for Vista yet (or at all) and there are bugs here and there in the OS. Time will change it, whether the anti-MS crowd likes it or not, and MS will stay rich another day.
No, that's why I said this supposedly happens with every release, but that'll be a false positive hit in your analysis. As is your assumption I'm part of some "anti-MS" crowd. I eagerly expected Vista, and had every pre-release Longhorn bit tested, amazed at the new technologies inside.
I saw it's inconsistent, instable, slow, and a resource hog. But I ignored all this. I thought "sure, it's alpha/beta, they'll get it working on release!". But no. Release candidate 1, 2. Still same problems. Release, still same problems.
And this is where users get pissed off since they can see it too.
Yes, previous OS-es had hints of this problem, but in Vista it's much worse. People know Vista is bad. Whether it's bad or not, and what the anti-MS crowd thinks matters not. If people think it's bad, it's bad.
...in learning something difficult?
Ballmer's comment seems really prick-like to me. It probably wasn't meant as such, but still.
He was doing damage control. He couldn't really say "ok I admit, Vista kinda sucks and we know it".
But I *do* think this was important for him to hear face to face. Sometimes all the statistics and focus groups can't tell you what a mom can tell you in a direct conversation.
The more "normal" folks tell Ballmer where Microsoft went wrong with Vista, the better the chance is they figure out what to do and get their act together.
According to our web stats, about 8% of our viewers are using Vista.
That's not an insubstantial share, especially since most of our viewers are probably corporate users and it's a bigger PITA for them to upgrade than a home user.
I didn't say Vista adoption is poor. Although it's worse than Microsoft projected, which should tell you something.
Microsoft is in a position to drive adoption when people are neutral to Windows. Mostly since people run Windows software, and exclusive OEM deals. That's not bad, I mean, good job of Microsoft for doing so well.
Microsoft is in a position to drive adoption even when people are somewhat negative to Windows Vista. I suppose many companies that have signed up for the MS Software Assurance moved to Vista to explain the insane money they paid to their shareholders (see? we have Vista! yei!).
It'll be interesting to watch how far can Vista adoption go with such poor word of mouth. And also I hope SP1 is really good.
I don't *want* Vista to fail. It's just, the world can't care less what I *want*, I just report observations.
That's it. I've never seen the public react this way to a Windows release before. Not Linux geeks, but the average Windows users.
Yea, yea, every new release faces nostalgia of the previous release blah blah. It's way worse here.
Average people call Vista shit. Businesses run away from it.
The Vista brand is ruined. Now even if they fix Vista, the brand will never recover.
I hope Microsoft learns something from this. First impression lasts forever. Don't release software unfinished.
--Testing. Government agencies and military often test their new equipment in more 'predictable' scenarios such as protests. If it were proven technology, it would already be deployed in those high-priority areas like in the Middle East, China, etc..--
What makes you think they haven't, hmmm?
What makes me personally think so is that no one in Middle East, China etc. reported flying robot flies. If a bunch of protesters could easily spot them, why no one else did.
I gotta admit I'm pretty 50/50 on whether the protesters are nuts or those are real.
Didn't anyone snap a photo of those with their camera equipped cellphone? At least a very very smudgy, motion-blurred, out of focus, UFO-photo-style one? Such a shame.
I pondered mentioning checksums, so it's obvious I'm just kidding, but I hate being obvious. I love the angry answers though.
It's almost as if someone's life is hanging by a thread should I potentially discredit Flash memory on Slashdot.
Most flash controllers remap the sectors on the fly to ensure that the memory is not worn down prematurely. So if you rewrite the same logical sector 5 times over, a chance exists that you'll get 5 different physical sectors.
:)
:)
Yup, it also means, if one single sector is faulty, the controller will keep putting more and more different information on it and getting it wrong, potentially ruining a big chunk of your data
Hiiiiiilarious
But of course, it's all about the revenge. Water droplets? Arm/leg twister? Acid (.. music)? Tazers! It sure will help with the lost records!
From personal experience, trying to do more work and cut off your vacation is the most sure-fire way to bring your work quality and productivity down.
Are they trying to set him up to lose another tape?