Posts by Charles 9 16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Found the article that is the source of that image.
That's an IBM 3390. $250,000 that thing cost. In 1989 dollars. Yup, the thing is a quarter century old and held somewhere up to around 22GB, which doesn't seem much until you realize at the time, 200MB hard drives were just coming on the PC market and were no small change, either. So it kind of solidifies my point, as it's very old and very expensive.
No, there's a limit there, too, as more platters will strain the spindle and the motor. Old drives in the past spun slower, reducing the forces but also lowering the performance. That's why Quantum's brief step back to 5.25" hard drives fell flat. Eventually, as noted in the article, rust is going to run in to the immovable wall of physics AND be pinched by performance demands (I can speak from experience. Mirroring 3TB worth of stuff over USB3 took the better part of a day; transferring lots of data takes an unavoidable amount of time which opens the door for reconstruction failures) that prevent larger but slower solutions.
Because Switzerland is much less culturally heterogeneous than in the US. Swiss cultures tend to keep to within well-defined enclaves so interaction is limited enough to keep things well-managed (that was one reason for the design of Hadrian's Wall in England; it controlled cultural interaction). Whereas in the US various ethnic groups are mashed up and scattered all over the map; the end result being culture clashes.
I'd need to look, but it seems a consistent trend that the most peaceful countries also tend to be the most homogeneous.
"These days if you're going to do a seizure order on equipment I'd start with the comms kit (offsite routers and network switches) before moving to the petty stuff such like cash registers. Point of sale terminals don't work very well if they can't connect to the server and you don't have to expose yourself to bar customers who might become hostile when they work out your presence means they can't be sold any more booze."
How long before someone savvy makes it physically impossible to remove the comms equipment without removing the POS equipment first AND makes sure to place key equipment on the sales floor so that any attempt to seize the stuff means you're in plain sight and risk a riot?
"When rugby players put on pads and play gridiron, gridiron players start getting extremely badly hurt."
I don't know. Like I said, very rough tackling is frowned upon in rubgy whereas in gridiron it's much more tolerated. The gridiron players have experience and have to run fast and turn sharp corners WITH their gear on. Plus, like I said, there's the issue of weight which contributes to both momentum and inertia.
Unless you can show an actual demonstration, I'll have to disagree with you. Experience and physics seem to advantage the gridiron player in a collision.
"He moved it next door, so I had all those ports turned off too."
What happened next? Did he move them to the same room as equipment used by someone over your head, meaning you couldn't turn off those ports without having to answer to him/her why they couldn't make the weekend deadline because you cut him/her off just as the deadline was closing?
"Our kit turned out to have been sending alerts for nearly three hours while underwater, which we reckoned was a pretty good stress test."
Yes, and you can be thankful that was fresh water flooding your kit. If it had been salt water, I doubt any kit would've lasted five minutes (salt water is an electrolyte; everything would've earthed through it).
"Should read "Oswald's a Brit, so when he says “football” he means football... not pansy ass version of rugby with body armour.""
There's nothing pansy about dealing with 300-plus-pound linebackers charging at speed. Trust me, those pads are there for a good reason, because when 300-pound-plus people collide, it can HURT. Rubgy's rules bar rough tackling but Americans consider it standard Sunday procedure. So consider the course before you blame the horse.
PS. It's not just Americans that use the term soccer (and yes, we DO use the term "club" with soccer, like with SC). Australians use the term too to avoid confusing with their own version of "footy".
"Of course I don't know the differences in formulation between Regular and Cherry"
Actually, that IS rather surprising, given about the only difference between a Cherry Coke and a Regular Coke is the additional cherry syrup added to the Coca-Cola concentrate (which has the sugar and phosphoric acid). Most of the rest is just seltzer water (adding a touch of carbonic acid as well).
"The United States prison population is something they should be ashamed of not trying to increase."
Nope. America is damn PROUD of being tough on crime. As a native Texas comedian even used as one of his bits, "We have the Death Penalty and we USE it!" As far as they're concerned, this is population control and the price of living in an orderly society.
No, if it's made of aluminum, it's aluminum foil. Tin foil MUST be made of tin or it's false advertising (and that's why you never see the term in America--aluminum was basically perfected here in the late 19th century so tin foil never really took root). Besides, like I said, you MUST go tin or bust. ONLY tin blocks the brainwaves according to them.
Not just Windows but also with old motherboards that were built before the idea of flash as a separate interface even existed. Boards where the main reason for PCI Express was graphics and thus only had one x16 slot and maybe one or two x1 slots that may well be blocked by a double-height graphics card. Trust me, a Core 2 Quad (especially the 9000-series) still has plenty of legs so those machines still need to be accommodated.
"Never understood how a manufacture believes that poor software support encourages you to buy from them again. My Galaxy Note II stopped getting updates 16 months after purchase.
It is not technical reasons that prevents it from getting upgrades, as third-parties offer upgrades to Kit Kat, and shortly to MarshMallow."
Cartel behaviour. ALL the phone makers know they need repeat business to stay alive, so no one rocks the boat. And now, thanks to things like KNOX and SafetyNet and dm-verity, customizing phones is frowned upon as more and more apps become root-aware.
But if the target is an agent or other go-between for someone IN Congress, and this form of extraterritorial power becomes de jure, then as the saying goes, it's open season. It's can easily be seen as basically an attack on foreign sovereignty, and so soon after the scandal that is the Panama Papers, sovereignty as a shield is going to face a double whammy.
All Senator Ron Wyden has to point out is that with this simple change, law enforcement officials could easily be hacking into THEIR computers and perhaps dig up some dirty secrets. Congresspeople have gone to jail in the past, so they're not safe in this case. The point is that this would a potential Executive crimp on the Legislature. Even Republicans would be able to recognize this threat for what it is and this should be enough to set up a quick debate and bill to prevent this. If they get enough bipartisan support, they could even get that rarity of rarities: a veto-proof majority.
There's really no substitute for wires. Physics dictates this. Plus when it comes to storage, the lack of a Micro SD slot is a deal-breaker to many. It certainly is to me.
And I wouldn't mind a step back towards portable bricks if it means I can run the thing flat out and not have to hunt the boonies after an hour or two for a charger or battery pack when I'm forced to travel light. Designers really need to ask people if they're willing to trade in weight for working life without having to resort to bodges.
When it gets mandated, it'll probably require professional installation using tamper-evident equipment, registration, and so on. Then it pretty much can't be faked without them noticing. And they can probably find thin plugs and so on to keep them from being accidentally dislodged in cramped settings.
Thing is, this is going to get government attention, and you try to screw with government, they can screw you back. You just watch. They' mandate this or prevent your from driving, and if you're far from public transport, you'll basically have to (a) bend over, (b)become dependent on others to get anywhere, or (c) be isolated from the rest of society.
It's very rare for that to happen, and it usually has to do with congestion. If more accidents are the result of stop-and-go driving than the result of speeding then they'll have a case for speeding things up because slowing down in that case has become counterproductive.
Then I propose Godwin's Law for Godwin's Law.
1. If you don't believe there's such a useful thing as "reputation," then you don't trust anyone. By definition, you're paranoid.
2. If you don't trust peer review (which includes rivals who would love to shoot down the competition), then you don't trust anyone. By definition, you're paranoid.
3. If you don't place your stock in other countries and their laws which will differ from country and country and may indeed see each other as rivals or even enemies, you believe there is a global conspiracy. Meaning you don't trust anyone. By definition, you're paranoid.
If you aren't willing to back up the claims you make, you're either making a baseless claim or you don't think backing up the claim is possible because the moment you make it everyone will oppose you because you. And if you're that paranoid, why haven't you abandoned the Internet at this point, gone to the mountains, and hidden in your lead bunker waiting for Judgment day?
But then you have the issue of First Contact. How do you pass the code to the other side without it being intercepted? Indeed, how can Alice know Bob is really Bob and not Mallory or in this case Gene if they've never met before and there's always the chance Trent's been doubled? Not to mention custom codes like this tend to have a limited vocabulary, much like good stego. You can only convey so much information, and it's hard to "wing it" and convey an arbitrary change of plans without giving yourself away.
The thing is, Comcast is in a unique position. They have the advantage of vertical integration due to being BOTH a transport AND a source (Comcast owns NBC). It's like a railroad owning a mine or a timber plot. Private property rights now butt up against competition regulation, and everyone has skin in the game one side or the other.
"Want to own that line and charge anything you like with any rules you like? Keep it 100% your content."
And there's the rub. Comcast OWNS NBC. That means there's vertical integration and they can serve up as much NBC and affiliated content as they want without ever going out on the Internet proper. (and as long as it's just going through the cables to the customer's cable modem, that's all first-party stuff, much like driving strictly on private roads means you don't necessarily need to register your car).
Nope. Not gonna happen. You take the bundle or you leave it. And you'll find EVERY provider works that way because we've cornered the market on the upstream pipes (and no, you wouldn't be able to afford their rates). Dumb pipes won't get enough revenues and nice guys finish last. Life tough. Live with it or check out.
That'd go against the Democratic grain. They're usually against superconglomerates that tend to wax conservative. Plus there's still the matter that, no matter what the political landscape, Congress never swings very wildly between elections because each district tends to be subject to a localized SEP field. It's always, "Not MY Congressman!" That means getting a favorable Congress if not an overriding majority is a longshot.
The thing about edge cases is that they don't stay edge cases for long. Many times, they transform into norms as people latch onto them. Mark my words, ads will never go away. You'll just run into more ad walls until they're all over the Internet. Then it'll be either submit or abandon the Internet, in which case it's back to the junk mail (with nonexistent return addresses so any attempts to Return to Sender get Returned to Sender) and the international IP phone spam calls that are routed through hostile powers.
Except it's a lose to people with tight bandwidth caps. There's no physical way to block the transfer of the ad AND fool the server into thinking it was loaded without either it smelling something fishy or using a third party that would have its own constraints.
YOU look again.
"The pricing for PM863s is slightly under linear (double capacity slightly less than double price) and a 4TB PM863 is about 3 times the price of an _enterprise certified_ Hitachi 7k 4Tb drive (which are about 400 quid for my Nexsan Satabeasts, not 100 and some change)"
So 1200 each. In case you haven't noticed, that's a pretty hefty chunk of change for 4TB, and your mileage may vary in regards to longevity. We've already heard plenty of stories of sudden catastrophic controller failure.
Plus you didn't note my last sentence:
"and there's no analogue to them at the consumer end."
I just recently bought a pair of 5TB USB externals for $350 (two to provide a mirror) and a 4TB SATA internal for $150. Please show me a 4TB SSD for less then $750.
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