Posts by Nigel 11

Re: Cannot imagine wanting under any circumstances

Spinning rust as a storage medium has pretty much reached it's limits. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that we never see a harddrive bigger than 20Tb in a 3.5" package.

Assuming you mean a drive containing a conventional hard disk purely electromagnetic write head, you are probably right. The physics limits for that have been reached. Magnetic domains can't be pushed closer together along the tracks (they become unstable if made any smaller), and heads cannot be made any narrower (the head would have to fly much closer, and there are power density issues even if that hurdle were overcome). Stacking tens of platters isn't likely to work either (too flexible / vibration coupling issues).

On the other hand, there's HAMR which uses a focussed laser to address a narrow track. It "softens" the magnetic film by heating it, so that a wide magnetic bubble from a conventional head operated at lower write intensity can change magnetisation only of the laser-addressed track and not affect the adjacent already-written ones. I expect that can go to many 10s, maybe 100s, of TB per 3.5 inch disk if it can get out of the lab, and if there is a market for such huge drives.

There's also BPM, about which I know less.

Wait and see. It's still possible that solid-state will obsolete all magnetic disks, but not current Flash which is also close to its physics limits. 3D flash may reach an affordable TB scale. Memristor tech has the potential to surpass that. It's rather further away than HAMR.

Re: Slippery Slope Indeed....

you don't have to be driving, just sitting in the driver's seat can do.

Yes, one of many moronic laws that gets coupled with Jobsworthy cops and rule-following unthinking prosecutors. Someone actually did get banned from driving for being asleep in his car in the pub car park after realizing that he was far too intoxicated to actually drive the thing.

The law on using mobile phones is similar. I completely support throwing the book at anyone who uses their hand-held mobile while trying to control a car that's moving at significant velocity. But they've made it illegal to use your mobile to let people know why you'll be late, when you are stuck in stationary traffic on a motorway that hasn't been moving for minutes. This, even if you have turned your engine off to save fuel.

Re: Nowhere else in the UK would this happen

I think what the uninformed are talking about, is what happens when the weather "nukes" the infrastructure across a wide area, and there aren't sufficient generators and human resources to fix it all within hours. So there's triage. The most economically important bits get fixed first. Which does mean that London will be prioritized over (say) Swindon, which in turn will be prioritised over Lower Cheeseworth (I made that one up).

Re: Don't bother investigating

I don't think jet engines are going to digest these toys very well without some serious consequences.

They have to be able to digest a goose without serious consequences (although two simultaneous geese requires a miracle to survive)

They also have to be able to digest a stone during takeoff (that might be kicked up by the nosewheel). Not sure what size of stone is tested.

In short, aero engines are pretty tough and well-tested (including confined destruction).

Which isn't to detract from the message that putting a drone in the air where an airliner might collide with it is criminally stupid and thoughtless.

Re: If...

First thing I did was Google "Linux Toshiba Chromebook 2" and found

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Toshiba_Chromebook_2

which says it won't work yet, because the boot device is UHCI not SATA. Anyone know more? I'd have liked a cheap full HD Linux laptop (I am one of those alleged nobodys who use Linux as their desktop of choice).

Re: @Charles 9 - Why are Microsoft giving this away?

"Free" has at least two meanings. One is zero cost. The other translates into French as "libre" and means "at liberty" or "not confined" or "not restricted".

Free software should be understood to refer to the second, not the first meaning.

Also, "cost" does not exclusively refer to money. If I let the air out of your tyres and lend you a pump, that unfriendly act has not cost you nothing, although air is free.

Re: Quart in a pint pot

Is it because of the tilt of the panels?

Depends on whether "area" includes inactive area, i.e panel edges, support frames. If it does, then an inclination angle of arccos( 183/200) or greater would make sense of this. That's about 25 degrees.

Re: More important things

they don't usually have solar panels or turbines on the roof

Well, they ought to. There are companies that will rent roof space and install the solar panels, should the server farm operators not wish to make the investment themselves. Heck, building codes ought to outlaw large areas of roof with high insolation that aren't equipped with solar panels!

(As for the cost - how about scrapping a few regulations that marginally increase a building's fire safety at considerable added construction cost? Unnecessarily pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere is a far greater hazard!)

FedEx still refused to enter into any discussion about it and started threatening me when I didn't pay the invoice. As it was only about twenty pounds, I paid it, but I feel that the money was effectively extorted out of me, and I have resented FedEx for their disgusting behavior ever since.

I'd have told them to sue me and be laughed at by the judge. In fact, I might well have counter-sued, alleging barratry on their part (which sadly hasn't been a criminal offense for quite a few years). £20 is small-claims court fodder, no need for a lawyer. But they're also liable for the court fee, and for your damages (such as having to buy another copy of the book because they won't hand over the one you purchased, also the cost of the time they force you to waste).

In practice a recorded delivery letter threatening legal action if a matter is not resolved in fourteen days is usually sufficient to cause whatever "little Hitler" you are dealing with to hand the matter over to someone slightly more competent and a lot more flexible.

Anyway, reading this has probably cost them more in profits than the £20 they extorted from you.

Re: How to tell?

How unlikely is unlikely?

It must be *possible* for a star to go supernova in a very symmetric implosion that doesn't break its gravitational binding to a near neighbour.

There's a similar explanation of the Fermi paradox. Somebody had to be the first intelligent life in the galaxy, and the (very limited) evidence so far supports the hypothesis that it's us.

Re: Thermite

... only way to be sure?

I deduce you've never seen electronics that's been the victim of a lightning strike. High voltage and current is faster and more effective than any sensible amount of thermite. It gets at the electronics from the *inside*.

A large HV capacitor deliberately connected to the LVDC would probably be an adequate substitute for lightning,

What they *could* do ...

A company could become its own ad server, and use something such as server-side inclusion to make the adverts pretty much indistinguishable and inseparable from its own content. So why don't they do this? Well, some of their customers might take umbrage and depart forever. But the real reason is surely that they would then have to accept full legal responsibility for the advertisements they served. They'd no longer be able to claim that the advert came from some other server run by some other company, and that any malware served was therefore not their problem.

So we get to block ads (and one channel for malware delivery and snooping). They want to have their cake and eat it, and the court has very sensibly said that they can't.

Re: It had to happen

... slowly become service based -> (not sure what's next, but I hope I don't live to see it) -> copy cheaply. -> ..

What comes next is to go down the Tesco, Ryanair or Microsoft route (or Digital, for those over 55 that remember). Get fat and lazy. Start ignoring your customers, treat them as sheep to be fleeced and led to (financial) slaughter. Until one day, there aren't enough suckers left and huge profit turns to loss.

At that point the company is headed for extinction, unless it remains able to remodel itself. (Ryanair seems to have managed that trick. Tesco and Microsoft, the jury's still out. Digital dismembered itself and died horribly.)

Re: Is size everything?

Cost.

If they could be churned out really cheaply at some lower density, then they could be spread out over a larger form factor (such as the 5.25inch drive size) and stacked vertically as lots of circuit boards.

(Which is what happened in the early days of RAM, and going back further, ferrite core memory).

I wonder who really needs hundreds of terabytes of flash? Won't most folks be happy when a good flash cache solution is available as a front-end to lots and lots of good old spinning rust?

Ammonium Nitrate _is_ fertiliser. You make a better bomb if you add some kerosene. At least, so I've heard. ANFO.

AFAIK this is the only time a terrorist organisation (anyone know which one? ) contributed something useful to the body of knowledge used by civilisation.

Mining used to employ high explosive (Dynamite, TNT, etc.) which is expensive and non-trivial to store and in some cases toxic to handle. Open-cast mining has now adopted ANFO - cheaper, non-toxic, and manufactured down the hole where you want the explosion. Nitrate fertilizer first, then add fuel oil, then top with a detonator.

BTW Ammonium Nitrate is also an explosive on its own. You do have to hit it very hard before it goes bang, but if you manage to do so, watch out. One of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever was in the Netherlands when the roof of a warehouse full of Ammonium Nitrate leaked, and the entire contents set solid. Someone had the bad idea of loosening it up with a few sticks of dynamite. He did not survive the several-kiloton non-nuclear explosion which resulted.

But the floppy disk is quite definitely on its last legs.

F*king cat videos

But seriously, what else would a techie use to test that he's got the video and audio drivers right on a new install of someone else's device? AFAIK kittens are a safe choice.

Re: Plus.

Mine's the one with some 'Bayko' building blocks in the pocket.

Yes, I remember Bayko. A product that had the reverse influence on young architects, to that of Meccano on young engineers. They grew up, and started building with factory-manufactured brick- and tile-patterned panels, held together with steel bars, instead of real bricks and tiles. And within a few decades we are tearing down these horrid mouldering and disintegrating constructions, built of materials with no track record and as we now know, no staying power.

Please, somebody tell me that the Commies invented Bayko, in a half-successful attempt to cause the home of capitalism to sabotage its own future. I suspect it was an own goal, though.

PS anyone remember Architex? Same comments apply, with respect to system-built tower blocks.

Re: Yeah helium, great

So maybe a few hundred drives' worth per wedding rather than a few thousand. Same point.

Re: Devonian?

The Chicxulub impactor was particularly devastating because of where it struck, on thick strata of both carbonate rocks and gypsum (calcium sulphate). Vaporised, these injected vast amounts of sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The sulphur dioxide would have formed sulphuric acid clouds that would have reflected much sunlight, causing far worse global cooling than mere dust from silicate rocks. Over the next decade it came back down as acid rain. And then after a brief spike of global cooling, the sulphur was gone leaving the carbon dioxide to caues global warming. This massive two-way fluctuation was probably the last straw for lumbering great dinosaurs. (The small flying ones did survive - we now call them birds).

This on top of a global environment already seriously degraded by the Deccan Traps erruptions.

Re: This is a lovely story

Overdue, I see so many hooky £1 coins and just pass 'em along as people losing faith in the currency is a bigger problem ...

I suspect that even if every single £1 coin was a fake, the damage would be negligible compared to HMG's efforts, generally referred to as "QE". And yet, faith is not being destroyed!

(Total value of coin in circulation in the UK: a mere 4 billion quid or thereabouts. Excluding the fakes, of course. )

It's far worse than a zombie.

I await the day when SCO makes an appearance in one of harlse Stross's "Laundry" books, revealed as an agent of a Cthuluesque entity intent on world domination.

Oh wait ....

Re: Spinning rust.

That flash RAM fails after sufficient write activity is fundamental to the physics of how it operates. In contrast a magnetic film does not wear out, however many times it is written to, merely as a consequence of being written.

On the other hand, the moving parts in a hard disk do wear out, usually in a slowly progressive manner. Also any contamination inside the HDA can cause gradual degradation of the read head and magnetic surfaces (and sometimes much less gradual degradation - catastrophic failure known as a head crash, akin to an aeroplane flying into a mountain instead of grains of wind-blown sand)

Anyway, my experience is that quite a few hard disks "never" fail (ie, they are declared obsolete and junked while still working perfectly after five or ten years in service). Many fail gracefully: you get warning that they are deteriorating through their SMART statistics, and you can hot-replace them proactively if you are using mirroring or RAID or just shut down and clone to a new disk with ddrescue. A good fraction of the rest are rescue-able even after failing hard as far as an operating system is concerned, i.e. you can use ddrescue to copy them to a new hard drive with no loss of data after many re-tries, or with only a few sectors unreadable. Only a smallish percentage go from disk to brick "just like that", and a majority of those inside their first month in service ("infant mortality").

The controller of a flash drive must surely know how many pages have failed and been replaced from the pool of spares. So what's going on? Are SSD controllers not being honest with their SMART statistics (for example with SMART 182, " Erase Fail count")? Or did the testers simply write until failed, without monitoring the statistics to see whether impending failure was easy to spot? Or are there whole-chip failure modes with flash storage, that make abrupt failure far more likely than with other VLSI chips such as hard disk controllers? (Well, there are 8 or 16 more VLSI chips in an SSD, so maybe 8 to 16 times the risk).

More research needed.

Re: @Ac

Weren't you one of those students once?

“If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” (Often erroneously attributed to Winston Churchill)

We have an ageing population, which can't be good for the socialists.

Re: I want to learn Linux but ...

Off-topic ... but there are dozens. Most are described as "Live CDs or Live DVDs" and will boot off a CD or DVD, but with most it's described how to copy or install into a memory stick instead.

Fedora has a liveusb-creator app that you can run on Windoze to create a bootable Fedora Workstation USB stick.

Linux booted off a CD or DVD is surprisingly usable. An application may be slow to start the first time (while the DVD drive spins up and seeks slowly) but will usually then stay cached in RAM for repeated use.

Re: Cost / Benefit (cons / pros)

Killer cost omitted. It requires that you support the weight of the thing out in front of you while you use it. To say nothing of the weight of both your arms. Ergonomic FAIL. (BTW, it's probably illegal for a business to ask its staff to use such a device, under the EU VDU regulations).

If you doubt me on this, try holding an ordinary keyboard in the illustrated pose for a few minutes, and then consider what several more hours would be like.