* Posts by Nigel 11

3191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Murdoch hate sparks mass bitchin', rapid evacuation from O2, BE

Nigel 11
Flame

Re: Going, going, gone.

Thinking along those lines, it might be better if I stay with Sky for a while (3 months?) and THEN tell Murdoch where to stick his service. This way BE gets to walk off with more of Murdoch's cash and therefore Murdoch has less of it.

Also my reason for leaving is made better-known to the cause thereof.

Bing uncloaks Klingon translator

Nigel 11
Headmaster

Enormous feat?

There are recent instances of new languages arising quite spontaneously, when groups of people without a common language find it necessary to communicate. Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea, "pidgin english") is perhaps the newest. English itself was once such a language, born of mutual incomprehension between Norman French invaders and Anglo-Saxon natives. It's since evolved in a different direction to both parents, most noticeably by progressively jettisoning its formal grammar.

There's also a new sign language, born of deaf children being dumped in orphanages and left to rot (i.e. given no guidance on existing sign or other languages. So they invented one.)

Apple asked me for my BANK statements, says outraged reader

Nigel 11
Coat

Re: Not just Apple----correction

and I've recently been seeing a lot of headlines starting BANKS HIT ...

China: Online predator or hapless host?

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

Re: soam..

I know of a small business that gets a significant percentage of its trade from China. It's not the business of BT to decide which countries its customers are allowed to receive connection attempts from. It's the business of each business to decide what firewall rules and other data security to impose on itself. the only sensible approach is to assume that ALL internet addresses are potentially hostile. It may have been your best customer until yesterday, but how do you know who is in the driving seat of today's connection attempt?

Identity cards: How Labour lost power in a case of mistaken ID

Nigel 11

Re: I wonder how much of the opposition matches mine?

I'm fairly sure that if I use a private boat to get to France or Ireland, the EC rules don't allow for me to be refused entry just because I've left my UK passport at home. (That's assuming someone actually notices that I've arrived). They can probably fine me for not carrying an acceptable ID document if their laws say that I should be doing so, and of course the hassle and wasted time would be a pain.

The easiest way to get out of the UK without a passport would be to take the ferry to Northern Ireland and then walk across the border into Eire. When Scotland leaves the UK it'll be even easier ;-)

3D printed gun plans pulled after US State Department objects

Nigel 11
Alert

Re: Oh please...

Not that I would ever walk through a backscatter x-ray machine, ionising radiation anyone??

With that attitude you shouldn't ever get on a plane! You need to compare the ionizing radiation dose you get from the detector at the airport, with the ionizing radiation dose that you get from cosmic rays at 40,000ft for several hours. Which is about 10x greater. And of course the greater danger is that the plane crashes, due to pilot error, mechanical failure, or even a terrorist. (Getting to the airport in a private car is even more dangerous).

I'm convinced that the radiation is close enough to harmless, because aircrew don't suffer an obviously greater rate of cancer than other people, despite spending much of their working lives at altitude. You can also find out about the native fisherman in India, who live and work on a beach made of natural thorium-bearing sand that would be deemed a serious low-level radiation hazard were you to bring a bag of the same sand back to the UK. They're far healthier than the books say they should be. The evidence is fairly persuasive that you can't extrapolate the measurable dangers of moderate doses of radiation down to the lower levels found in nature that living beings must have evolved to deal with.

Nigel 11

Crossbow!

If I ever wanted a one-shot lethal weapon I'd make a crossbow (or investigate the springonne which is more compact). They were making crossbows in mediaeval and roman times. You don't need advanced technology, though using modern plastics, you don't need metal either. You don't need anything controlled or explosive or traceable. You don't need anything you can't shape from raw material with hand tools.

A longbow is also a formidable weapon, given enough practice. Martial-arts experts can hit a three inch target at a distance of many yards, firing (wrong word) from a galloping horse, and it offers a quiverfull of shots.

Standard Model goes PEAR-SHAPED in CERN experiment

Nigel 11

Re: We don't *know*, but we are pretty sure it does

A major re-think like that might explain a lot, but since we have no data that would shape what that rethink should be, we cannot start it now

Sightly too strong. If a theory of everything exists that supercedes both quantum mechanics and gravitation, it might be concieved of tomorrow by a mathematician of genius. If it were simpler than the existing two irreconcilables, I'd wager Occam's razor that it was right. And it would probably make predictions which were at odds with one or other of the existing theories, which would then help the experimentalists know what to look for.

It wouldn't be the first time that the theory came first and observations that confirm the theory later.

Some might say that the theory *has* to come first, otherwise the universe wouldn't know what to do. And a few would say that it didn't, until something somewhere started thinking. Philosophy, again.

Nigel 11

Including the very slight fluctuations in the spectrum of that radiation in different directions?

Continuous creation for infinite time would even the background radiation out in all directions, unless you're prepared to countenance that empty space has different properties in different directions as viewed from here.

The big bang hypothesis predicts that there should have been quantum fluctuations in ther very early universe, the signature of which would be seen as anisotropy in the cosmic background radiation. Those fluctuations have now been observed, at levels that are not hard to reconcile with the hypothesis.

Nigel 11

Re: Sharing: Dream of Four-Dimensional State and Fivengtange-Dimensional State

Don't knock such visions ... but unless you can retrieve the underlying meaning, if any, and set it down in the language of mathematics, you'll find it hard to convince many people that it's anything other than a purely subjective imagining.

Organic chemistry was given a huge advance by Kekule, who dreamed of a snake swallowing its own tail and backtracked to the structure of a benzene molecule. Newton reputedly cracked gravity because of a falling apple, or its effect on his head. Many mathematicians and some scientists are Platonists. They believe that mathematics is the language in which the universe is best described, because it exists independantly and timelessly outside of all physical reality. Like most philosophies, it's hard or impossible to disprove, and I believe in Occam's razor! But allowing that they might be right, perhaps we do all occasionally come back from wherever we go when asleep with faint and scrambled recollections of the deepest of realities, and sometimes manage to reconstruct another tiny facet of the infinite?

Nigel 11

Re: We don't *know*, but we are pretty sure it does

Bosons are commonly their own antiparticles. The commonest such particle is the photon. Observation of light in gravitational fields on distance scales from smallish (Earth-Sun) to comsological show that photons are attracted by massive objects much as predicted by Einsteinian gravitation. And since they are their own antiparticles, then antiphotons are likewise attracted.

We don't know of any Majorana fermions - ones which are their own antiparticles. The equations don't rule out such particles, and neutrinos are not yet well-enough understood to rule them out as candidates. But gravity acts alike on bosons and fermions, so it would be a major asymmetry if it acted oppositely for antibosons compared to antifermions!

Nigel 11

Asymmetry can be an emergent property.

The general belief is that the universe started symmetric but unstable, or evolved to become unstable, and then spontaneously changed into a more stable but less symmetric configuration. Imagine a ball perched on a mound in the exact middle of a dish, with perfect rotational symmetry about the Z axis. Precisely because it is perfectly symmetric, the ball doesn't move. The slightest fluctation of anything changes the situation from metastable to unstable. The ball starts to roll. Once this starts, it will ultimately settle down to stability in a lower part of the dish, displaced from the centre. The arrangement of ball and dish is no longer symmetric about its Z axis. Incidentally the ball is also merely metastable with respect to rolling to and fro in its sponaneously chosen X-Z plane and won't "ignore" its freedom to also move in the Y direction for very long.

If you ask how it got onto the mound, one answer is that the dish itself always retains perfect rotational symmetry, but is evolving in shape from one with the lowest point at the exact centre, to one with a mound at the centre. At the critical point where the centre is no longer the low point, the ball ceases to be stable and becomes metastable.

Coke? Windows 8 is Microsoft's 'Vista moment'. Again

Nigel 11
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Telemetics is correct

ROFL.

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

Re: I'm still curious to know

they seemed to be shifting old stock at a discount as the current version with win8 was £100 more!)

That's not the reason. On Toshiba's price-list the Windows 8 systems are cheaper than the same hardware pre-loaded with Windows 7, by about £50. Methinks if you buy a Windows 7 one you are paying Microsoft for a 7 license and for an 8 license. On the other hand, if you buy the 8 system, you have to spend hours "downgrading" it, and you'd probably be on your own if you were to need support from Toshiba for a software issue.

Nigel 11
Coffee/keyboard

USB teletype?

For a fairly close approximation ssh onto a machine in Australia and then back to a machine in the UK. Repeat until the character echo appears no faster than a quarter of a second after you type it, and often longer. This is what life was always like, in the days of 110 baud acoustically coupled modems.

(I've still got one at home in my loft. It needs an old bakelite standard-issue Post Office telephone to couple it to. And probably new valves and capacitors and rubber bits by now. Nice polished mahogany box, though! )

Nigel 11
Mushroom

Sinowsky hoisted by his own petard?

The number that Microsoft has, which we don't, is the number of Windows 8 activations versus the number of Windows 7 activations. By now they should have a very good idea how many systems shipped with Windows 8 never boot it, how many boot it for a day or a week and then get "downgraded", and how many excess Windows 7 activations in the period (as opposed to Windows 7 "sold").

Where I work, the ones that don't get nuked to Windows 7 the moment they are unpacked, get nuked to Linux.

Sinowsky lived by telemetrics, and may have died by telemetrics. Good riddance.

BTW to anyone at Microsoft reading this ... WE TOLD YOU SO!

Deep inside Intel's new ARM killer: Silvermont

Nigel 11

"Netbook" - fast enough.

The fall of the netbook is largely down to Microsoft, not Intel. I have an EeePC 1000 running Windows 7, and it's usable. How? You upgrade the RAM to 2Gb and the disk to an SSD. I think it was Microsoft who insisted that manufacturers sold them with a maximum of 1Gb RAM and a hard disk (though of course, SSDs weren't cheap enough for the size needed until recently).

More cores and a bit more speed will be nice, but for anyone wanting to run Windows on something that we may as well still call a netbook (small, light in weight, long runtime on battery, and cheap) the keys are SSD and plenty of RAM. In the latter connection, I hope that Intel won't hamstring the new CPUs with too small a physical address space.

Move over Radeon, GeForce – Intel has a new graphics brand: Iris

Nigel 11
Headmaster

75 times faster snail is still a snail.

Err ... no.

Say a snail can do 1 cm/second. 75 times that may be a funereal walking pace, but is still far beyond any land-dwelling mollusc.

Gaming app ENSLAVES punter PCs in Bitcoin mining ring

Nigel 11
Flame

Re: Why not...

your VERY expensive GPU has its operating life shorted significantly

in that case it's your very expensive AND VERY BADLY DESIGNED GPU. Silicon should last effectively forever (at least a decade, by which time it's obsolete) running at 50C - 60C. Typically it suffers logic errors and crashes at around 100C, because the hotter it gets the slower the transistors switch. This, however, is crash not burn. Once it's cooled down it again works fine.

Modern designs normally throttle themselves back when they're getting too hot, on the basis that users prefer slower to crashed. The cynic in me suggests that it's also a great way to persuade users to buy a new "faster" computer when all they really need is a new fan on the old one's heatsink to restore its original operating performance. (Or even just a vacuum cleaner to get the fluff out of the heatsink fins).

"Damage" is cumulative, caused by thermally activated migration of atoms within the chip. The rate at which it happens rises as the exp of the ABSOLUTE temperature. 60C is 333K, 100C is 373K, the difference is fairly small.

I was once called in to service an AMD Athlon system with what turned out to be a failed hard disk. Before I got there I touched the heatsink and my skin sizzled. The CPU had been running at over 100C since the fan failed months? years? ago, without any problems at all.

ISPs: Get ready to slurp streams from Murdoch's fat pipe

Nigel 11
Pint

Re: So the Anti Murdoch brigade

Personally I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole

Seconded. It's nothing at all to do with Sky's technical competence or lack of it. Neither is it to do with their prices. It's to do with my perception that the Murdoch empire is evil, and as such I refuse to voluntarily give it any of my money.

I thought folks celebrating Thatcher's death was extremely distasteful, but I might allow myself a private drink or two on the day that I hear that Rupert Murdoch is no more.

Thousands rally behind teen girl cuffed, expelled in harmless 'explosion'

Nigel 11
Flame

Bloody ridiculous

When I was at school we were making similar devices - under the guidance of our Chemistry teacher! He also showed us a nice gas/air explosion in a cocoa tin, and a flour/air conflagration in a drainpipe. Lesson learned: even "harmless" substances can be dangerous if you don't understand the risks.

the USA is evolving from a land of can-do spirit to a land where nothing is allowed unless explicitly permitted. Sad.

Cat ladies turned brand-squatters poke fun at religious right

Nigel 11
Coat

Typo

I too am easily amused by funny things.

Furry things, surely?

Guess who PC-slaying tablets are killing next? Keyboard biz Logitech

Nigel 11

Upgrade ...

What came with your computer may be OK or may be completely ghastly. If you want a good keyboard and mouse at a low price, I'd still recommend Logitech entry-level ones over all others I've tried. As for the expensive gadgets - whatever floats your boat, but I've never been able to view the extra bits as anything other than a nuisance.

The trouble for Logitech is that once you've got a mouse and keyboard you like, why buy another? The PC market is now mature and saturated. People don't replace kit until it's worn out. Logitech will still have a business, but it'll be shrinking not growing, and the competition (far-east no-name stuff) is raising its game.

Black-eyed Pies reel from BeagleBoard's $45 Linux micro blow

Nigel 11

Re: I'll see your ARM core and raise you a SATA port. ;-)

Is a HD in a USB caddy that slow?

No, but an SSD in a USB caddy is. Actually the extra power drain of a USB to SATA chip may be greater pain, if whatever you are doing is supposed to run off a battery. (In which context an SSD eats far less electricity than an HD).

SanDisk '2-3 years' away from mass-producing 3D flash chips

Nigel 11
Meh

Re: 3D semiconductors

Getting rid of the heat? Are SSDs anywhere close to overheating at present? A 256Gb SSD with a 2.5 inch drive footprint runs on about 0.5W and is scarcely warm to the touch. A smartphone CPU uses more watts in a footprint of a square centimeter.

The first step that they don't yet need to take would be passive heatsinks on the flash chips, like a low-end fanless GPU or top-speed RAM. Active cooling wouldn't be a problem for a datacentre solution - after all, the CPUs are all actively cooled.

Not to say that memristors won't wipe out flash in the longer term!

Nigel 11

Re: Flash gets worse

On the other hand, SLC with small cells is probably better on all fronts than MLC even with cells with twice the area. At present MLC and TLC exist because they can't yet make tiny cells right down at the noise threshold for single-bit reliability.

Microsoft CFO quits as quarterly results fail to sparkle

Nigel 11
FAIL

They have just under a year

... to realize that a lot of businesses are still running XP and are quite happy with it. When they kill XP, they imagine all those businesses will upgrade to Windows 8. HA bloody HA!

Ok, there's Windows 7, which is perhaps less painful. Even so, lack of drivers will obsolete a lot of hardware, and lack of RAM will obsolete a lot of PCs. And there's no real upgrade path. MS say you should upgrade to Vista and then from Vista to Windows 7. Sorry I feel another attack of graveside laughter coming on. Even if it worked, how many extra man-hours will that consume?

Given the requirement to tear it all up and start again, how many will stick with Microsoft, and how many will go to Apple? Some may even find time for Linux. Those that do stick with Microsoft are unlikely to bear any goodwill for Microsoft in the future. Sooner or later someone will ship a Linux derivative for business use (just as Google shipped a Linux derivative for handset and tablet use: Android).

So what they have to do now is simple. Announce that XP will continue to be supported until an idiot-proof upgrade to Windows 7 is developed. And annnounce that you'll never have to learn a new interface because the Windows 7 one will be maintained in perpetuity (ie Windows 8, Windows 9 will have a "Windows 7 style" option). Ditto Office.

Oh, and to make money stop selling perpetual Windows licenses. That way you won't have to keep shredding old Windows in order to force customers to use New Windows. You'll just charge them renewal fees for continued support of what they want. Of course, it would help if your customers trusted you more than they trust a low-end used-car salesman. Sacking the CEO might be a good start, followed by a new CEO eating humble pie.

Malwarebytes declares Windows 'malicious', nukes 1,000s of PCs

Nigel 11
Unhappy

Need for speed

In partial and general defense of Anti-malware and Anti-virus software, it absolutely has to be released rapidly. This is at odds with the need to do comprehensive testing before release.

No excuse if it breaks ALL Windows installs, but I can imagine cases where it passes all the vendor's tests and then screws up a small fraction of configurations that weren't covered by the quick-release tests.

Bitcoins: A GIANT BUBBLE? Maybe, but currency could still be worthwhile

Nigel 11
Mushroom

Re: A finite calculable resource [like] gold/precious metals -- NOT

One unarguable difference - gold will survive something which returns civilisation to a pre-1950s level. Of course, its owner might not. Quite probably wouldn't.

Icon may represent a Carrington event, as well as the obvious

Space elevators, vacuum chutes: What next for big rocket tech?

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

Zero velocity?

You misunderstand. It's got as much kinetic energy as you can pour into it via the maglev. A U-shaped track is a plausible maximum-length realization in a mountainous region.

There's no particular reason you shouldn't start at the bottom of a mountain and accelerate it to the top, but that would be a shorter run so you'd subject the crew to a higher G force for any particular "launch" velocity. A long horizontal run to get up speed before deviating uphill is also possible, if you can find a mountain that rises from a plain without any foothills. Whichever, you certainly want as much atmosphere as possible below you before "launch", in other words end the track at the top of a high mountain, and for other hopefully obvious reasons a mountain close to the equator.

Nigel 11
IT Angle

"When worlds collide"

Cine SF afficioadoes will have seen this film, in which mankind escapes from a doomed Earth in a spacecraft which is launched along a track from a mountain peak, down into a valley, and then up the other side.

I've never found out why this idea is unfeasible. The problem with rockets is that you spend most of your fuel getting the rest of your fuel up to mere subsonic velocity. So why not use a maglev track (or even a giant train track) to electrically accelerate your rocket up to maybe 600mph, and only then fire the rocket? The aerodynamics of a supersonic maglev launcher would be far harder, but physically there's no reason why your assist has to stop at subsonic speed. (Might be safer to accelerate only after the liquid-fuel rocket was burning. Throttle up from minimum to maximum after it leaves the track).

Launching from underneath a carrier aircraft is somewhat equivalent, but is limited to the payload that can be lifted by an aircraft. (There's a limit, to do with the bending strength of wings). A track launcher could handle much heavier payloads.

Nigel 11

One idea missed

That's the satellite with giant rotating arms which scoops a balloon out of the atmosphere and deposits it into space. Thanks to Charles Stross "Saturn's Children" for introducing me to this idea. It's probably even more hairy than a space elevator as an engineering project, but doesn't require quite such strong materials.

Intel demos inexpensive 100Gb/sec silicon photonics chip

Nigel 11

So it boils down to "Got Memory?"

Cue another mention of memristors?

Just when software is getting a bit stale, the world of hardware is starting to get very interesting all over again.

Should I be buying HP and Intel stock?

'North Korea Has Launched a Missile' tweet sent by mistake

Nigel 11

Re: Well that couldn't have gone wrong anyway...

In an alternative universe WW3 has just ended and WW4 is about to start. You know, the one that will be fought with stones and other bits of rubble.

Want to know if that hottie has HIV? Put their blood in the DVD player

Nigel 11

Re: Shatter!

Seriously, if you've ever wondered why the fastest CD rate is 56x, this is why. Early in the development of computer CD drives, they marketed a 64x drive and maybe even a 72x drive. I was once sprayed with plastic shrapnel by one of the 64x drives. The manufacturers soon worked out that 56x was the safety limit of what a CD can take.

Anyone know if anyone ever suffered actual injury and/or sued?

Nigel 11

Re: Lets see...The pregency stick came firts...

Home HIV test is already available! I vaguely remembered reading about it - Google found this http://www.hivhometests.co.uk/ and many other similar (including Wal-Mart in the USA!)

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

Re: Clever

A cheap laser scanning microscope is a great idea. Couldn't it be marketed to schools? Or be used for quick analysis of lubricating oil samples? (the number and types of metal particles therein can give advance warning of bearing or gear failures).

I'm not so sure about the HIV testing. I thought that needed an antibody test? Counting the cells in a blood sample might tell you if someone is developing AIDS ... but that happens years after infection with the HIV virus, and the infection can be passed on during that time.

Hey Intel, Microsoft: Share those profits with your PC pals, eh? - analyst

Nigel 11

Re: Dual Boot

Actually unless you are thinking hard about run-time on battery, you don't need to dual-boot. You can run Linux in a VM under Windows and it works just fine. In an ideal world I'd prefer to run Windows in a VM under Linux, but have to admint that getting Linux up and running and supporting the power-management and other integrated features of a notebook can be a a pain (or plain impossible if you didn't research what hardware to buy carefully enough).

Which again makes my point about a mature market. A plain ordinary laptop can happily run a virtual machine! (Or indeed, several VMs at once, if you buy one with an SSD and enough RAM).

Nigel 11
Meh

Mature market

I doubt that the PC is dead. For a lot of purposes, especially business or serious work, you need a keyboard and a mouse and a decent screen at arm's length.

I think what's changed is that no-one sees a compelling reason to buy a new PC every three or four years. The old one works just fine. Folks really don't want Windows 8. Lots of folks don't even want Windows 7. They'd be happier sticking to XP, except Microsoft are hitting the kill switch. Apple must be rubbing their hands in glee, since a Mac is the obvious alternative to Windows 8 for a home user who is forced off XP. Intel don't care - it's the same chip in a PC or an iMac.

Market maturation happens with every new technolgy sooner or later. The market saturates, the rate of progress slows, "New" goes from "must have" through "boring" to "bloody annoying gimmickry", and sales drop to the level necessary to replace hardware that has physically failed. I'd guess that's a new PC every six to twelve years, rather than a new PC every three to five years.

Tablets are selling like hot-cakes because the market for them is neither mature not saturated. Their time will come (and faster than it did for the PC). Most folks not living in poverty will soon have BOTH a tablet AND a PC, because each has its place.

Mali to give away .ML domains for free

Nigel 11
Pint

568.ml

perfect for CAMRA? If the Eurosceptics don't get it first.

Finance bods probe RBS over bank-crippling IT cock-up

Nigel 11
FAIL

Loyalty and experience

It's to do with two things - loyalty and experience.

If you pay well for local staff, they'll stay in the job long enough to acquire a large knowledge base specific to your operations, stored where it's most needed -- in their heads. A lot of this stuff can't ever be written down, because the people who know it don't necessarily know what they know until a problem arises that has to be solved asap.

Then someone arrives and cuts costs by sacking the experienced staff and relying on a bunch of outsourced (or even locally contracted) mercenaries who'll leave as soon as someone offers them more money. For that reason, staff turnover is high and the in-head knowledge base is destroyed. (Loyalty, of course, is long gone). The old system ticks over on auto-pilot for a large amount of time, and management pronounce it a success (and make further cuts?). Then the roof falls in.

If it's tangential to the primary purpose of the organisation, outsource it. If it's mission-critical, don't. Is there really anything else needs to be said?

Boffins say flash disk demands new RAID designs

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

Re: spinning rust and other stuff

Secondly: 2Tb and larger drives have a terrible failure rate. I'd gotten used to seeing drives lasting 6-8 years and now they're down at the 3-4 range again. Manufacturers dropped their warranty to 12 months for sound financial reasons.

So what do you say about my twelve 2Tb disks that haven't experienced a single failure since they were installed three years ago? Not even server-grade ones. Could be luck, but if the MTBF really is three years then half of them should have failed by now, and the odds of NONE having failed are 1 in 2^12.

I think you're generalizing from bad luck. I keep telling people that the big risk is common-mode failure caused by bad batches of disks. If you buy all your disks at once, then if one is of low reliability, the other N are likely the same. If you are running mirrored pairs, then you should buy half your disks from one manufacturer and the other half from a different manufacturer, and pair them heterogeneously. That minimizes the chance of losing the whole array to one bad batch of disks.

I suspect manufacturers cut the warranty because disks were getting so cheap, the warranty replacement process was becoming too expensive compared to the disks themselves, even if the percentage failing in warranty has not changed.

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

@Ledswinger good point

Very good point. For read-mostly data SSDs should be much more reliable than HDDs, as well as faster.

Nigel 11
Meh

Wear-levelling works against you?

Couldn't wear-levelling actually work against you in a RAID environment, by causing all drives to fail at nearly the same time?

Not exactly. Without wear-levelling a small subset of blocks would get hammered and the "disk" would fail a lot faster. RAID or no RAID.

However, there's a difference in failure mode between an SSD array where all devices will predictably degrade to unacceptable at about the same time, and an HD array where the future failure of each device is pretty much unpredictable unless you are suffering from common-mode failure (ie a batch of bad disks). In any case HDD failure is linked firstly to hours in service, and then to seek activity. Volume of data written to a HDD does very little that could cause earlier failure.

RAID nearly doubles or trebles the number of write actions. With JBOD, M writes spread over N disks. With RAID-5, 2M writes spread over (N+1) disks. With RAID-6, 3M/(N+2). This will reduce the SSD life expectancy in that environment by ~2x or ~3x.

With SSDs you might want to define a new sort of array that puts differing amounts of parity on different drives, so each SSD in the array experiences a different level of write activity and wears out at a different rate. Of course, there would be a penalty w.r.t. the performance of such an array.

Steve Jobs' 'spaceship' threatened by massive cost overruns

Nigel 11
Coat

Any company which can contemplate spending $5bn on an office is circling the drain

And the drain is of course right there on the plans. Has to be, or rain would fall in and not get out util water pressure broke the inside windows. One BIG drain at the EXACT centre?

Tick-tock! 40% of PCs start Windows XP malware meltdown countdown

Nigel 11
Happy

Re: Linux support techs

Well, they could show you a dozen ways to do imaging and deployment without paying any per-seat license charges, and with script-ability second to none. All starting with booting an appropriate stand-alone Linux environment off removeable media or off the network.

Take a deep breath: No NORKS panic for ICT supply chain … yet

Nigel 11
Unhappy

Re: Relax

The question is whether they're sane, mad, or totally rabid.

Mad means they are trying to put a nuke onto a missile and (I hope) failing, while their country rots and starves.

Rabid means that they've hidden the nuke in a container that's been reloaded and relabelled a couple of times in third-world ports with lousy security, and which is shortly going to be delivered to the USA.

Relax - only because it's one of those things like cancer or a pIanet-busting asteroid that I can't do anything much about.

Microsoft Xbox gaffe reveals cloudy arrogance

Nigel 11
Joke

re: Goto

Ir was written by and for the marketing division. What did you expect?

Nigel 11
Coffee/keyboard

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ilMx7k7mso

Like it. (Don't be drinking cola as you view it! )

How I nearly sold rocket windows to the crazy North Koreans

Nigel 11
Big Brother

Re: How to make the world a better (choke, splutter) place

There is a way to make a legal system that covers all possible cases. It's actually pretty much the one that they have in North Korea! "You do what you are told to do by the Great Leader. Anything he approves of is OK. Anything he does not approve of will be punished". I was going to add "If in doubt, ask" but of course that's very dangerous advice because the Great Leader might not be amused, and that's probably illegal.

Anyway, it covers all possible cases. "The Great Leader is right. You are wrong. You will be punished. End of."

It doesn't even need interpretation of a holy book, as in theocracies, or lawyers, as in other places. If there were a way to make sure that the great leader was omniscient and omnibenevolent, it might even work.