Content in the file name
IIRC (but it was a long time ago) some variant of some Cray OS stored sufficiently short files directly in the inode (or non-ix equivalent). So, prior art, sorta.
1439 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
Dunno about Africa, but the main hazard of animal driven damage to telecom structure here in the U.S. seems to be certain bipeds that like to use pole-mounted telecom gear for target practice.
Meanwhile I can't be arsed but maybe someone could calculate how many Aldis Lamps would be needed to accomplish this task.
Flash without serious endurance issues
Flash without dodgy controller firmware that hides the impending doom by shuffling blocks (sometimes correctly)?
Flash that allows you to delete/erase those hidden blocks?
Flash where the special commands to do that erasure actually _works_?
OTOH, with 1Gb chips, a 128GB memory would cost too much to use the normal "retirement" process involving heavy construction equipment and thermal lances.
OTOOH, those extreme measures may not be needed...
Why do they persist in using a system they know is broken?
To Clarify:
One "They" is the manager who managed to wangle a hiring slot for a needed task.
But another "They" is involved. That "They" does this for the same reason they buy utterly crap development tools and demand the company standardize on them. Same reason "They" continue to buy parts with a high defect rate from a known-shady vendor...
That second "They" are the folks a step or more above the first "They". Decisions are made based on what their nephew says about the latest hot methodology and what their golfing partner promises are temporary issues.
Or a brown envelope...
(Aside - It's a bit amusing that the mention of this HR CV-scanning plague is in the rough temporal neighborhood of an article about flinging boobytrapped Office files. At least a few of those scanning services require all CVS to be in Word (tm) form. Yeah, even for Linux kernel devs)
"... protecting the victims of rape and incest"?
He's just taking a slightly different approach by, according to him "eliminating rape in Texas".
This will presumbly be achieved by changing the legal definition of the offense, "de-criminalizing" it, or the usual fudged statistics and victim-blaming.
Has Samsung factored in what they will need to set aside for on-campus private schools and medical facilities?
Already gathered enough downvotes for one comment, so I'll stop short of Mark Twain's opinion on rental property.
the Bureau of Land Management, or I could not indicate what the code was intended to do.
Also puts me in mind of a friend who was attacked by social media vigilantes when someone (probably pirating the software) discovered the (OK, fairly naive) encryption used for the "stop list".
So, copying Apple again?
IIRC about the PPC ->x86 transition (10.5?, or was that the time they borked xterm if you were using a client on an other-endian machine) using the Mac calculator app in Programmer RPN mode would do odd things when switching between radices after logical operations. Thankfully, I still had my HP-16C in the drawer, and even more fortunately, the batteries still had enough charge to work.
Thinking of backups, where do they hide the UPS to make sure all the data that was streamed into the cache (and claimed to be written) has made it through to the (possibly drastically slower) SSD chips before a power fail.
Which leads me to wonder whether the read of long requests is similarly diddled. Given the nature of the actual chips, I suspect "maybe, but not near as much".
But there is no such thing as a backup if you can't restore.
the IBM 1401 went so far as to offer LSD math as a (hardware) option. At extra cost, of course, just like the console sense switches that _rented_ for $6/month apiece, IIRC.
One of the working 1401s at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA is alleged to have that option.
@J.Cook
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All it does it tell the drive that the tape is supposed to be read only, though,
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I'd love to know when that particular cock-up occurred. Old-school mag tape drives (at least from IBM, like the 729 and even the budget 7330) had a groove in the back of the reel, which could be plugged with a "Write Ring" if one intended to allow that reel to be written. "No Ring, No Write". It was not advisory, but actually was needed to apply power to the write head drivers.
In the (two) installations I was familiar with, the ring was _ALWAYS_ removed as the tape was taken off the drive and put back in storage, only to be added when a tape was mounted and the "run sheet" specified it. If the Boss caught you carrying around a reel with a write-ring, you were due for an ear-roasting.
My recollection of 8-inch floppies is similar. At least some drives had the "Write enable" sensor physically control ability to write. Later 5.25inch drives did not (IIRC), and switched from "put the little sticky-tab on if you want to write" to "put the little sticky-tab on if you want to prevent writing, and pray it doesn't fall off on its own". I assume this attitude extended to also making the sensor merely advisory.
So, the movement from write protection to "pretty please don't erase my data" probably started in the early 1970s
Perhaps you had an early encounter with "Every OS Sucks"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8
or in text:
https://genius.com/Three-dead-trolls-in-a-baggie-every-os-sucks-lyrics
From which one can deduce it was written some years ago because it includes the lines:
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The fridge, stove and toaster, never crash on me
I should be able to get online, without a PHD
My phone doesn't take a week to boot it
My TV doesn't crash when I mute it
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Ah, for those halcyon days.
Maybe an early encounter with "Every OS Sucks"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8
or in text:
https://genius.com/Three-dead-trolls-in-a-baggie-every-os-sucks-lyrics
From which one can deduce it was written some years ago because it includes the lines:
-----------
The fridge, stove and toaster, never crash on me
I should be able to get online, without a PHD
My phone doesn't take a week to boot it
My TV doesn't crash when I mute it
-----------
Ah, for those halcyon days.
Here (California, but basically anywhere in the US, I suspect), you can readily find those long lags (tens of seconds to single digit minutes) reminiscent of "Live via satellite" pretty much anywhere, from broadcast TV local traffic reports to video conferencing. Without having to leave the atmosphere. LTE "phone" service often has a whole set of weird echoes and multi-second lags that remind me of satellite calls to Japan back when. I have to wonder if some bright spark decided that San Jose to Corvallis was best relayed via Myanmar.
BTW: buying one's own Cable modem is a mugs game. As soon as enough people have done so, the ISP "upgrades" the service to require a new Modem, so you can't amortize the CapEx.
Wasn't something of the sort also stated by Standard Oil after one of their tankers was caught refueling u-boats?
I mean, it's clearly possible for a rogue employee to pick up the keys to a tanker from the guard shack and do a bit of freelance commerce, right?
Likewise the result of an extremely rare occasion of hiring someone who just happens to have a personal/monetary interest in the information they coincidentally end up managing.
That usually shows up when you order aluminum powder.
At least it's a bit more sensible than gmail (back in the day when the deal was "free email if we can run related ads") started showing me ads for kilt rental and bagpipe lessons next to a thread on Functional Programming.
(I assume that went FP -> Haskell -> GHC -> Glasgow -> Scotland -> Profit!)
Ah, yes. Like when I worked for a major manufacturer of networking equipment and the access point that (allegedly) served the area including my cube lost its back-haul. I lost track of how many times I filed that, only to have it closed because the WiFi crew had verified that they could connect to the AP. It didn't matter how I phrased "test by connecting to something other than the AP".
I developed a strategy of carrying my laptop close enough to a nearby AP to connect, and _carefully_ walking back to my desk, where I could continue to work via the "wrong" AP until something hiccuped and the laptop sees that wonderfully strong signal from "my" AP and re-connects to the bridge to nowhere.
After a couple months of doing this a couple times a week, I took the obviously less hassle route by moving to another company. This of course is easier in an area like Si Valley.
If I am reading the article correctly (and it appears from the existing comments that I am not the only one noticing this), the two head assemblies serve distinct areas (platter sets?) of the drive. So Random IOPS are only boosted to the extent they are evenly distributed between the two "logical" (virtual? semi-conjoined?) drives. Enforcing that means they are not exactly "random".
Compare and contrast to the IBM 350 (RAMAC)
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350.html
which could be had with two access mechanisms, each capable of reading/writing any sector on the disk. This option was introduced in 1958, and the last shipments were in 1961 (from article cited, so you don't _have_ to read it).
Note this was for "one of the last vacuum tube based systems" from IBM.
The follow on 1405 also (IIRC) had optional dual access mechanisms. Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_1405
says "one to three" access arms.
Once worked on a "fixer upper" cottage. The tool shed behind the garage had an impressive set of light fixtures.
One participant in a discussion about power companies tipping off authorities asserted "they can't tell the difference between a grow house and bitcoin mining". Asked if "you had to explain bitcoin to the cops", replied "no, just showed them my Medicinal Marijuana card".
Some friends were delighted to get cheap rent on offices in an industrial area. One day the water didn't work. Asking a neighbor was told "Oh, yeah they always shut off the water when they are about to raid a meth lab.
A friend's parent (elderly couple) were held at gunpoint for over an hour because the helicopter pilot was off by one street in reporting the address with "evidence of cultivation.
YMMV as to which of these tales are funny.
It's a lot cheaper if you have a bunch of shell companies and proxy buyers buy the land before the average Joe figures out that something big is coming. But, yeah it's still within the realm of possibility for the likes of Larry or Jeff, let alone their businesses. If they throw in a nice golf-course with private helipad, so much the better.