Posts by DuncanLarge

Re: Have they been hacked?

> Yet modern USB flash drives seem to die if you look at them.

I had a 54GB flash drive that was used all of 3x in as many years die sitting on a shelf for 1 year or so, I didnt even have to look at it.

It was dead as a dodo.

I've had a little 2GB sandisk die and come back from the dead as well! Still works but I dont trust it. I dont trust any of them.

Re: Have they been hacked?

You'll find that most of the issues with writing are due to the old media.

Re: Have they been hacked?

> Worse, drive timings vary, so not all drives will work in a given device

All 3.5" drives are standard. They dont have different RPM, if they do thats because they have a fault.

5.15" drives did have different RPMs.

The only differences between 3.5" drives are those that are fully schugart drives (practically EVERYTHING) vs those that are not fully schugart (IBM PC). Many drives support both with a jumper.

A Gotek supports both with a change to its config files.

Re: Curious what the floppy replacement will be?

> The easiest replacement might be a purely electronic device that emulates a floppy disk

It's called a GOTEK and you can have one off ebay for £20-30.

It is a drop in full replacement for a 3.5" floppy drive. YOu plug a USB flash drive into it containing floppy images (it supports a very wide number of floppy image formats) and select which image to mount.

It is fully hardware compatible witha 3.5" floppy drive, simply plugs into the usual floppy cable.

They are used to replace floppy drives in all sorts of industrial systems as well as retro computers.

Re: Nice to have the little piece about optical media once a decade

The problem with the holographic discs were the lasers. As compenets they had to be tiny and were simply not really useful.

This new disc uses 4 lasers for different stages of reading and writing and as comp[onents they are more usable.

What they did here was find a way a BIG laser diode can make marks way smaller than its wavelength. None of the holographic systems could do that.

Re: Missing important use cases

> And Blu-ray failed to make the same splash exactly because at that point, many people had an Internet connection that was good enough to just stream whatever they were interested in.

The actual reason more like this:

1. VHS made home video popular, not DVD.

2. SVHS failed because people already had VHS and didn’t care enough to have a new machine and tapes just for a better picture

3. DVD came about and now the public were ready for a picture upgrade, also eventually getting DVD recording too. The old tapes were old by now, SVHS just was too new with not enough benefit. DVD went into a market ready for such an upgrade.

4. Bluray came out, like SVHS it has struggled because even with people having HD TV's most people don’t care about HD enough to stop buying DVD or swear they can’t tell the difference, still! It is well known that DVD sells better than bluray, thus many shows and movies ONLY get a DVD release as it’s cheaper to make and buy and makes loads of sales. If it were just "the age of streaming" that caused blueray to have less sales, why are people still buying loads of DVDs?

It’s all in the numbers. The films and TV shows getting physical releases don’t just sit on the shelves and evaporate, they have to sell otherwise they wouldn’t be produced in the first place. I mean FGS, Audio CD is still everywhere and all bands, at least the ones I listen to, release new albums on Audio CD and even Vinyl too. Super Audio CD? DVD Audio? Didn’t grab the market, no longer made besides some SA CD's for classical markets. DVD Audio fizzled out and was simply replaced with Video DVD that had the audio and video (such as a concert) on it! Same quality, more standard.

Audio CD, still made and sells. DVD Video, still made and sells. Bluray still made and sells well enough. UHD bluray still fairly new and does sell to enthusiasts and those who care enough about 4K TV's to actually want to view 4K on them.

As for streaming, well, that has been getting some bad rap as of late with hikes in subscription costs and the inclusion of adverts. People went to streaming NOT to escape DVD, but to escape ADVERTS. WE ALL WENT TO NETFLIX TO AVOID ADVERTS. Plus, we were told that EVERYTHING would be on streaming, yet a decade or so later, and we have adverts and FAR FROM EVERYTHING, with things vanishing randomly, even when you were told you OWNED IT FOREVER.

So, streaming is now starting to lose out to DVD and bluray again. Even Disney has released SW expanded universe stuff on DVD and bluray to try and capture new subscribers to Disney+.

Not everyone is a sheep mate, we can’t all be herded and follow the herd to the next fashionable thing. Many who do, get bored of it and wander off back to where they started or somewhere near it (people still buy books printed on dead trees would you believe!). Some like me watch the herd and follow after they finish making a mess of things, or I stay put. And people like me have MONEY to spend. Thats why Audio CD etc still havnt died, and why vinyl popped back.

Re: 100 layers?

There are not 100 separate layers. The layers are made during the burning process, you only spin coat one thick layer of material and burn the data layers into that.

> There's a reason all the optical backup/archiving formats, including the various MO formats, have long died out while tape is still standing.

Tell me the reason as CD/DVD/and BD-R are still everywhere and used as such.

> Where it has to compete with tape.

Not hard to do, the only way tape wins over optical today is capacity. Thats it. Remove that, giving the discs as much or more capacity as a tape and it wipes the floor with tapes due to its random access nature.

Not even LTFS would stand a chance.

Tape, with its shell will however have better durability, but with hard coatings even a disc is nearly impossible to sctarch and the disc takes up less tom than the tapes.

Also, one major selling point over tape is the disc is random access.

Tape isnt, even if you use LTFS you still need to wind the tape back and forth.

When CD came out there was also DAT and DCC, tape formats that had the same audio quality (or close) as CD and that could also seek to find a track. Thing is the CD went to the selected track immediatly, while the tapes took a few seconds to wind to it.

> Erase hundreds of terabytes with one simple scratch!

If you are able to make a scratch. BD-R are nearly impossible to scratch without intentionally trying to do it!

But a HDD is easy to kill just by accidentally dropping it. An optical disc would just need to be wiped clean after picking up some dust from the floor.

Re: Read/write speed may be the barrier to adoption here

> where did they top-out? Around the 2.6Gb mark for double-sided platters IIRC

Where have you been? Try 33 GB per layer.

besides, its not about how fast you spin the disc, christ a CD can spin faster than you can blink, but the data density that affects the speeds. As this media is very dense youll just spin it like a 1x CD and get a throughput that will saturate any IO connection we have today.

> The problem is that you're not really sure on the longevity until you've stored it for a while.

Well yes but everyone will expect acelerated aging tests instead. Tests that are done on CD/DVD/BD-R, LTO tape et, but oddly not done on HDD and flash devices.

Re: Yawn

> By the time it arrives, flash storage will be cheaper per TB, orders of magnitude faster, smaller, longer lasting, and physically more robust.

And pigs will have learnt to fly drones.

> longer lasting

I cant belive that for a second, nobody is loking at archival flash. They all claim up to 10 years simply because they have no clue. ALl they know for sure is if you write to it only ONCE, that data will stay put for a very long time. But the more you use the device, the weaker it gets, to the point that it may hold data only for a few weeks!

If they were looking at actually defining the longevity of flash, I'll take that statement more seriously. Otherwise it;s all just a coin toss and by the time we get these optical discs we will still be tossing the coins.

> cheaper per TB

Thats the big con with flash. It never actually gets cheaper, just bigger. I want 4GB SD cards for 30p dammit!! A DVD+R is waaaaay cheaper than flash.

> smaller

Christ I hope not! microSD is small enough thanks!

> physically more robust

Even a CF card will survive being driven over, I dont think there is much more room for imporovemnt here.

Re: I thought we learned...

Wow, I have never ever seen any optical disc rot at all.

You must live on Venus. Or, you have shoddy discs.

I find apart from the known isue with old 90's CD's pressed in the UK by PDO, the only case of further damage seems to be in the US. Something about your harsh environments (perhaps the air conditioning) or they were made in the US by substandard factories (princo discs, you''l be better off with paper!).

The only thing that was odd recently was I opened up a commercial DVD that I hadnt opened in about 10 years. The disc was, misty. Like it had permanant condensation on it. I was like, "OMG I finally have found a case of degredation", only I noticed that whatever it was casta shadow on the reflective layer. It was on teh surface and, my finger smudged it. Something oily on the disc! So I simply gave it a light wash in the sink, just a damp soapy bit of tissue and it was clean as a whistle.

Then I looked at the inside of the case, it was in there too. I wiped that away with some IPA this time. Then I found out that some case plastics outgas and leave oily residue on themselves and the discs. Turns out the deposit on the disc is harmless, but unless cleaned off will caurse read issues. That mate is the only time Ive seen anything that gave me cause for concern about optical media and it turned out to merely be an annoyance in the end.

For comparison, my discs, pressed ones are in a typically heated UK livingroom which obviously has no AC. The burned media are in cases, spinles and the oldests are in a few binders which use plastic sleeves. These are kept out of sunlight and are zipped up for months on end.

ONly 2 discs showed issues when doing an error scan, Tesco branded DVD+R DL discs. The errors had not even got close to being uncorrectable but are above my threshold for concern, thus they were burned to new discs. The errors were at the edge, at the layer transition. My Verbatim DVD+R DL and BD-R DL also show an uptick in error rates at the edges but it's hardly anything to worry about.

Re: I thought we learned...

> CD+R and CD-R wars!

Never happened. There was only ever CD-R.

DVD has - and + formats which are still both made today. + is superior.

Re: I thought we learned...

> But the other bit I learned was that the CD-R might not be readable in a drive from a different manufacturer so I always checked the CD-R in a drive from a different manufacturer...

That has never happened, ever.

Re: I thought we learned...

> the last time we had optical media that promises of it's durability and longevity almost never panned out

Which was?

Re: THIS!!!

> A nice responsive user interface benefits lots of users - and thankfulky the threshold of clicking an icon and getting a near instantaneous response have been passed some time ago for most of us.

Anyone not running windows, yes.

The number of times I've seen windows explorer get into an unresponsive state, then gets killed by some watchdog, only to be responsive for a few seconds then enterst the unresponsive state again and the cycle repeats.

The usual fixes?

sfc /scannow?

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth?

Nope...

Re: THIS!!!

CAD worked just find 20 years ago on systems that had only just busted through the 1GHz barrier.

Much of your software is so bloated and inefficient you have to have multiple cores just to conteract it.

Only a few algorithms actually benefit from faster CPU's such as raytracing, for that your really should be using a GPU anyway. CAD is only needing it because of two reasons, acutal new processes or requirements or bloat, UI bloat, unoptimised code.

If CPU's are so fast why does it take 10 mins to log into windows 10? What is it doing? Nothing useful, trust me I've looked into it.

Slowing down the password hash functions to confirm a correct password is standard security practce to make brute forcing attacks expensive.

iPhones take it further making you wait hours or days before getting another chance to try a PIN.

That is established practice, not matter how good your passwords are, a system that doesnt add delays into the password hash functions etc means the difference between trying 1000 passwords a second and 100,000,000

Re: BIOS/UEFI security

> that MUST be pushed in order to update the firmware

Thats why a set a BIOS password, sure they may not always be secure but anything that does not understand a BIOS password will be scuppered.

Re: Unavoidable

> But then if you’re not using a picture then Shirley not vulnerable?

It may not be YOUR image, and YOU didnt put it there. THEY did. Thats the point.

Re: There is a *really* simple solution to this...

> Folks who don't want the guffware can put their own stick in with whatever pre-boot crap they want

They will solder them to the moberboard mate

> If an attacker can get a file into the EFI partition then you've got more problems than dodgy image processing by UEFI.

Thats totally trivial. It's a R/W FAT32 partition. If you are lucky something software based in the OS may try to monitor or write protect it but a user merely has to run something as admin to let code modify anything anywhere on a HDD.

It's one of the reasons why I'm against UEFI, it should ALL be in ROM. We have big ROMs these days, why is an unreliable partition needed?

Re: Whatever happened to HeatWayv?

> Using microwaves to heat water is less efficient than just using resistance heating.

Thats BS.

The microwave heats faster than the kettle.

Re: move to Resistance Heating

> My running costs are around 30% of the old Gas System.

Should pay off the work before you move I hope?

Re: Capacity

> district heating schemes

We don't have any infrastructure for that.

Where they have implemented it is when building new houses as a test scheme next to a factory.

Re: Capacity

As a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's my parents house had storage heating and it was controlled by a time-switch.

Smart meters handle economy 7 and 10 just fine. They are SMART meters, they just need to support multiple rates.

Nobody uses the "radio signal", unless its a very old system. They use a time switch or the smart meter. All the meter does is log how much leccy is used overnight separately to the daytime use. Thats it. Two readings. Smart meters thus support storage heaters that switch on due to a timer, anything that draws power overnight is counted as the reduced rate.

ITS HOW PEOPLE CHARGE EV's AT HOME TOO!!!

Re: Capacity

> need a coat of sealant

Which would require planning permission, signing off and several £000's of bills.

That's why nobody bothers. Even if you get a grant to install insulation it's going to cost you time and money, in a cost of living crisis and with todays time poor society most dont have the time to sit at home for a few days while someone installs the stuff.

They may be able to work from home, but instead of the cat jumping in front of the webcam you now have the builders bum in the background :D

DIY? Well maybe, but these days you are soon to be legally unable to change a light bulb without getting it signed off or installed by a sparky. It wont be long before putting a ladder up into the attic to install new insulation will also be something that only naughty people do as, you havnt been trained to use a ladder, and dont have the PPE.

Re: Capacity and pump issues

> You also get much higher NOx levels from burning hydrogen

I dont think you know your periodic table

Re: Capacity

> Gas pipes need retrofitting and replacement every couple decades anyway.

They do not, not domestic ones anyway.

I only know of two households that needed to replace an old pipe because of it corroding and leaking.

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

The Lib Dems are not any better, for years they ran my council and they overspent by 2.5 million.

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

> development work in China

Thats a big problem as with the oncoming war with china I doubt we will be getting anything from china in the future, no iphones and no molten salt reactors.

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

> wishful thinking

Yep, it will never happen, well not in our lifetimes.

Even if they manage to fuse stuff, Thunderfoot on youtube debunked the whole fusion thing when he pointed out a big flaw that once I realised I had missed it I was convinced fusion couldn't happen.

The problem is the engineering of the plant itself. Once we manage fusion, well you have to actually design a reactor that can make it work. What nobody bothers thinking about is all the fusion waste.

Fusion waste?

Yes, those particles don't disappear into another dimension in the reactor, no they fuse together into harmless and useless junk crap. You have to devise a way to clean them all out of the reactor because when they get created they will stop further fusion.

So the process would be:

1. Fill the reactor with fuel

2. Fuse it and draw off the energy. Fusion now becomes impossible due to interfering waste.

3. Clean out all the superheated waste.

4. Re-establish the conditions for fusion again.

5. GOTO 1

Everyone is still working on getting 2 working and nobody has any answers for steps 3 and 4. It will be a very long time before anyone builds anything but a demo plant.