"more distributed" means more land use. The studies on this have already been done: moving from battery farms to free range requires 20% more feed per gram of protein (largely due to the lack of precisely temperature-regulated environments) and on the order of 10x more land use.

10x the land use=huge habitat destruction and increased global warming. We already use 1/3 of the earth's total land area for livestock.

c.f. this or this.

The extra food those chickens have to consume is not "free" in any environmental sense no matter where the chickens are. It costs a lot of energy and land. And human labor is an astoundingly costly input, even just from an environmental perspective.

Your views of the labor market and modern food production are totally disconnected from reality. Your conclusion basically is "the only reason we quit all being hunter-gatherers is because of The Man. Take out a handful of shadowy puppet masters and we'd all go back to happy neolithic paradise." Modernization of food production is the central thing that has raised the standard of living from the stone age to the present day, and economic efficiency is not some kind of bogeyman.

"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." - Orwell, 1984

No, in fact the vast majority of people who run an IOS app on an Apple device who see a permission request pop up that they don't like, say 'No', and the app continues to run just fine.

Even better, the apps on IOS tend not to request absurd permissions in the first place because they know those pop-ups will annoy their customers enough to either say 'no' anyway or not use the app in the first place. Its a black blotch for an IOS app to request permissions that it does not need, and Apple customers call them on it in the reviews.

Whereas with android, everything is quiet and silent and people run apps without really understanding what data they are giving away, EVEN if they have read the manifest... so app writers can get away with almost anything and consumer privacy on android is poorer for it.

-Matt

Google changed the way the permissions are described in order to combine non-invasive permissions and invasive permissions under the same label. Even a person reading the permissions off doesn't really have a clue about how much access the app actually has to their data.

In anycase, this is why I stopped using Android phones and went with iOS. Apps can't play these sorts of games on iOS.

-Matt

Jeeze, I remember those. Hey, how about the Bernoulli box? I had one of those too. Might not be M.O. though. Think it was just magnetic.

There is one basic problem with megneto-optical drives and why they've basically fallen off the edge of the earth... instead of having to have one high-precision/high-bw part in the drive you now have to have two. In the world of storage, that makes it too costly a technology to produce.

-Matt

Every personal laptop/desktop/server box has a SSD which holds the machine base (boot, swap, root, home dirs, etc). For laptops and workstations, the SSD also holds nominal data and there is no HDD at all. On the servers, the SSD is beefier and also caches the HDD.

Bulk data is stored on a large 2TB HDD on the server and exported via NFS and samba. There's another 2TB spare on the server.

There is a backup machine on the LAN in another part of the house with a 2TB HDD and there is an off-site backup machine in a colo with two 2TB HDDs (in addition to the normal SSD as described above). Both have around 60 days worth of incremental backups of everything.

I gave up using RAID of any sort for personal data long ago. It just makes things *less* dependable and unnecessarily expensive in heat and power. Not even needed for speed since the SSD will cache ~200GB worth of HDD data.

Right now my personal data (the permanent data that I back up) clocks in at around 1TB. 90% of it is pictures and videos (DSLRs generate a godawful amount of data, the RAWs are 20-40MB each).

I don't download videos or music. No point any more when it can all be streamed. I don't know anyone who bothers storing 3rd party video any more. However, I have friends who were CD junkies before CDs died away and do maintain large music libraries. I also know a few people who run torrents and sometimes dedicate a TB or two to that, but certainly there is no reason to back up something like a torrent let alone waste a RAID on it. I don't see the point myself, it's just a huge waste of power and bandwidth.

For the DragonFlyBSD project we run a 12-blade server in the colo, each with four 2.5" drives. One or two SSDs (boot + swap + hddcache + home dirs on most of the blades), and 1-3 HDDs for temporary bulk data which we don't bother backing up. e.g. build boxes. With a few spare blades in case something fails. SSDs hold anything important, except for the developer blade but now that I look at it, the 'backed up' portion of peoples home dirs on the developer box only clocks in at 83G so that could go onto the SSD as well. The working storage that isn't backed up is currently running ~400G or so of used space, mostly crash dumps and copies of build trees and such. Everything that we care about is backed up locally and remotely but again it only amounts to a ~1TB or so. Most of the bulk data on the blades, like copies of numerous source repos, is generated and does not need to be backed up.

-Matt

It's not finished yet. They have the clock and the delay line memory working, but it can't run programs.

Raising enough eggs to meet present demand for them in "free range" ways that meet with your moral approval would require tremendous habitat destruction, accelerate global warming, and increase poverty and death across the world. How is that any more humane than the present situation?

The interview says

Also, most eggs don't come from very good places. Yes, some come from nice, free range farms. But the reality is that most come from dirty, filthy, factory farmed facilities, that are bad for the environment

but the reality is that though "nice free range farms" may make people feel warm and fuzzy they are MUCH WORSE for the environment than battery farms. Feed inputs are ~20% higher per gram of protein, and land use is obviously tremendously higher. We already use an entire third of the planet's land surface to support livestock; trying to raise all that livestock in "organic, free range" ways just because people have an aversion to modern food production methods would actually require tremendous habitat destruction and accelerate global warming.

The same thing is true of other trendy organic etc methods. They are less efficient in ways that matter not only economically but environmentally. There are reasons people moved away from the "old ways" to be able to feed the planet.

Moving almost entirely to plant-based food is the only way to substantially improve the environmental impact of our food production, and it's urgent for us to do.

Hampton Creek's mission is an important part of that. It's just unfortunate that they seem to some extent to have bought into the anti-science, environmentally counterproductive attitudes of the Whole Foods crowds.

Seriously, the rush to electronic voting after the 2000 Presidential election was just a bad idea all the way around -- and, frankly, most IT people with any experience were saying so. It is vastly, vastly harder to change physical media than to change electronics.

HDDs are not as recoverable as you seem to think. I have several bricked drives to show for it. Plus there is a trade-off in that your HDD's chance of failure goes up dramatically over time no matter how little or how much you use it. Even keeping it on a shelf won't make it last longer. SSD failure mechanics are very different beasts. If your SSD is barely worn after 3 years of operation (and most will be), the failure rate will not be appreciably higher than when it was new. The chance of multi-bit failures eventually overcoming the automatic SCAN/relocation (in SMART) will increase once appreciable wear occurs, but the wear is write-based and not time-based and for most SSD users that means reliability will be maintainable far longer than the 3 years one can normally depend on a HDD for (assuming it isn't one of those 5% of HDDs which fails every year anyway).

And, again... You don't make backups? Depending on the recoverability of your hard drive virtually guarantees that you will lose all your data one day.

-Matt

I hear this argument quite often and gotta ask... what, you don't have backups? When any of my storage dies I throw the drive away, stick in a new one, and restore from one of my two real-time backups (one on-site, one off-site). For that matter, I don't even trust any HDD that is over 3 years old. It gets replaced whether it reports any errors or not. And I've had plenty of HDDs fail with catastrophic errors over the years. Relying on a HDD to fail nicely is a false assumption.

Another statistic to keep in mind is that SSD failure rates are around 1.5% per year, compared to 5% failure rates for HDDs. And, I suspect, since HDD technology has essentially hit up against a mechanical brick wall w/regards to failure rates (if you still want to pay $80 for one), that SSD failure rates (which are more a function of firmware) will continue to drop while HDD failure rates remain about the same, from here on out. And that's assuming the HDD is powered on for the whole time. Power-down a HDD for a month and its failure rate goes up dramatically once you've powered it back on. HDDs can't even be reliably used for off-line backups, SSDs can. SSDs have a lot of room to get even better. HDDs just don't.

It is also a lot easier to run a SSD safely for many more years than a HDD simply by observing the wear indicator or sector relocation count ramp (actual life depends on the write load), where-as a hard drive's life is related more to power-up time regardless of load. If I only have to replace my SSDs (being conservative) once every 5-7 years vs my HDDs once every 3 years, that cuts many costs out right there. I have yet to have to replace a single SSD, but have replaced several HDDs purchased after that first SSD was bought. Just looking at the front-end cost doesn't really tell the whole story. Replacement cost, lost opportunity cost, time cost (time is money). There are many costs that matter just as much.

In terms of speed, I think you also don't understand the real problem. The problem is not comparing the 100-200 MByte/sec linear access time of a HDD to the 500-550 MByte/sec linear access time of a SSD. The problem is that once the computer has to seek that hard drive, that 100-200 Mbytes/sec drops to 20 MBytes/sec, and drops to 2 MBytes/sec in the worst-case. The SSD, on the other hand, will still maintain ~400-550 MBytes/sec even doing completely random accesses. Lots of things can cause this... de-duplication, for example. Background scans. Background applications (dropbox scans, security scans). Paging memory. Filesystem fragmentation. Game updates (fragmented data files). Whatever.

People notice the difference between SSDs and HDDs because of the above, and it matters even for casual users like, say, my parents, who mostly only mess with photos and videos. They notice it. It's a big deal. It's extremely annoying when a machine reacts slowly. The SSD is worth its weight in gold under those conditions. And machines these days (laptops and desktops certainly) do a lot more work in the background than they used to.

There are still situations where HDDs are useful. I use HDDs on my backup boxes and in situations where I need hundreds of gigabytes of temporary (but linear) storage... mostly throw-away situations where I don't care if a drive dies on me. But on my laptops and workstations it's SSD-only now, and they are a lot happier for it. For that matter, in a year or two most of our servers will likely be SSD-only as well. Only the big crunchers will need HDDs at all.

Nobody who has switched from a HDD to a SSD ever switches back. People will happily take a big storage hit ($150 2TB HDD -> $150 256GB SSD) just to be able to have that SSD. Not a whole lot of people need huge amounts of storage anyway with so much video and audio now being streamed from the cloud. For that matter, even personal storage is starting to get backed up 'on the cloud' and there is no need to have a completely local copy of *everything* (though I personally do still keep a local copy).

-Matt

Only for linear accesses. Once you have to seek the head, it's all over. I'm kinda amazed that people still try to argue this point, HDDs lost the performance war long ago.

-Matt

You might as well ask the same question about a hard drive. If you power down a hard drive and put it on a shelf for a year, there is a better than even change that it will be dead when you try to power it up again, and an even higher chance that it will die within a few days.

A powered-down SSD that has been written once should be able to retain data for ~10 years or so. Longer if kept in a cool place. As wear builds up, the retention time drops. You can look up the flash chip specs to get a more precise answer. A powered-up SSD should be able to retain data almost indefinitely as the self check will relocate failing sectors as they lose charge. However, in practical terms, it also depends on how the drive firmware is stored. The drive will die when the firmware is no longer readable. But that is true for hard drives as well.

-Matt

The orbital mechanics can get a bit tricky; but interplanetary distances open the possibility of reviving good, old-fashioned, delay-line memory...

Just think of how much data you could keep in-flight if you just replaced Pluto with a nice orbital mirror and told your vendor "GIVE ME AN XFP MODULE OF TERRIBLE POWER."

For real archiving, of course, you'll need to look at siting your mirror outside the solar system for a longer round trip.