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Comment Re:Just in time. (Score 1) 219

3.5" toshiba drives are pretty much WD with Toshiba's firmware and branding.

I'd been wondering if Toshiba was really making them. I have 3 of those 7200 rpm 3 TB drives that were so cheap last year and one has just started becoming unreliable. So a 1 in 3 failure rate in about a year. That's probably pretty good by today's standards. Now I switched the Toshiba over to duty as a parity drive to protect the others. Good to know that they are actually WD.

Comment Re:Just in time. (Score 1) 219

Yeah the helium worries me. It's such a small molecule. You need a really good enclosure to keep those things contained. And it would be such a convenient excuse for all of these companies to have a sort of guaranteed post warranty failure that they could time about as well as an hourglass full of sand. They might last as long as the warranty period plus 6 months though. Probably their testing shows that is how long it *should* take for enough helium to leak out. As if these TB class drives don't have enough failure modes.

Comment Re:Just in time. (Score 3, Informative) 219

You mean you got hit by the 7200.11 bug and didn't do any research into it to discover that it's a firmware issue with a simple fix?

So you bought the Seagate company line about that? Either you never owned one of those drives or you were one of the lucky few that was eventually helped by the firmware fix. Although why you would wait around for many months for the 'simple fix' when you could get a refurb replacement immediately I don't know.

This is why a good PR firm is worth its weight in gold. It's okay to have a catastrophic production failure as long as you can retroactively convince the ones who didn't get burned that it was all just a big misunderstanding and was easily fixable with a simple firmware update. If only Hitachi had done so well with their infamous Deathstar drives.

So you believed their propaganda. Go back to the Seagate forums from that time and I think you will see that the so called "firmware fix" only fixed a small percentage of the problems with those drives. There was another fix that helped some people (more than with the firmware update) that involved removing the pc board of the drive and hacking the hardware yourself. I believe a soldering iron may have been required in addition to a particular sort of cable. I can't remember exactly but it was not a fix that most people would be able to apply and often it didn't work anyway. I had a 1.5 TB 7200.11 that I had been keeping for ages to eventually buy the cable and apply the fix but by the time I got around to maybe doing it 1.5 TB was a very small drive and I didn't care so much about the lost data anymore.

I had 6 7200.11s. Both 1 TB and 1.5 TB. Most failed in less than 6 months and then their replacements failed too. None of them work today. Not a single one. And your firmware fix could not be applied to any of my drives because it was not a firmware problem. At least with my drives. Yes a small percentage of 7200.11s did have firmware problems, but mostly it was a hardware unreliability problem. The click of death as well as drives that just refused to stay online for long. They'd just drop out. And all kinds of 'delayed write' errors etc. Those were not caused by poorly written firmware. They were 100% authentic hardware problems and Seagate shipped out countless new drives to replace the things on warranty which would seem like a rather expensive thing to do if all they had to do was update the firmware. But maybe you will say even seagate "didn't do any research" and was unaware of the "simple fix" you speak of.

Despite your convenient assumption about lots of 7200.11 owners being unaware of the too little and far too late 'fix' of a firmware update that didn't even work for most owners, I suspect that most found out about it when their drives started failing. A simple google search for '7200.11' and 'clicking noise' would eventually have gotten hits for the so called 'fix'. Of course it took Seagate forever and a day to even come up with that. I don't think they have ever even admitted that there was any sort of problem with the drives and by the time they came up with your so called "simple fix" most owners had already been burned pretty badly by their decision to go with Seagate. Before my 7200.11 I had been a big fan of Seagate. Nearly all my drives were Seagates. Now I don't care what name is on the drive. They are all incredibly unreliable. I have better luck with their refurb replacements usually.

Comment Re:Just in time. (Score 1) 219

Seagate discs for consumers have been pretty much bullet proof according to what I've been able to find.

You don't work for Seagate do you, AC? That is a very careful and strange phrasing, "according to what I've been able to find". Almost as if you have never owned a Seagate drive before.

I've had a very high percentage of Seagate drives fail on me, but after drives made the jump to 1 TB all manufacturers became unreliable. Well pretty much. Samsung was the most reliable based on my experience but they were bought by Seagate (for over a billion dollars).

So, although I won't say Seagate makes or has made the least reliable drives, neither have they been particularly reliable at least since the time 1 TB drives were first introduced, but back then everyone else was pretty reliable too.

Comment Re:Please (Score 1) 416

Maybe Lewin had been a long-time harasser, and had been on some sort of probation.

Or maybe he is 100% innocent of any unethical conduct. I have yet to see any evidence presented. Just an accusation by some unknown female who may or may not suffer from mental illness. Oh but she's female so she must be a victim, right?

If Lewin is to get the benefit of the doubt, why not MIT also?

MIT has not been accused of a crime. Lewin has and deserves to be considered innocent until proven guilty. All human beings deserve a presumption of innocence until or unless evidence is actually presented to the contrary.

Comment Re:It wouldn't be slashdot without commenters leap (Score 1) 416

Seriously, do you think his behavior is appropriate and warrants continued tenure at MIT?

Yes, probably. Do you have any specific evidence to the contrary or is the accuser always right in sexual harrassment disputes in your view? Or rather in any dispute between a male and female is the female always automatically correct and the male is presumed guilty by default?

Comment Re:TPB Decentralized (Score 1) 251

Your retarded insistence on using clearnet for serving and downloading material is an outdated model and RISKY AS FUCK

You coward. It's not any more risky than an enormous herd of sheep eating grass in a field. Sure the wolves will get a few unucky ones at the edges but the vast majority will be safe. As things currently stand the risk is minimal even in the US and outside of the US it's practically nonexistent.

Comment Re:I still use it (Score 1) 251

You've never once had to browse there without an ad blocker? It is absolutely fucking awful. I can relate to what Sunde is saying. I too use it as my main go to for torrents and I tend to always browse with firefox with adblock edge installed.

Even at an internet cafe I have to install adblock edge and noscript to make the net actually browsable. Ever seen what youtube is like without blockers? Ugh. I don't think a lot of sites could get away with fucking up the browsing experience quite so badly if so many people did not use ad blockers. I really don't understand how someone could avoid using them now. I figure advertisers must just assume that everyone has ad blockers and proceed accordingly.

Comment Re:cut off one head (Score 1) 251

My ISP blocked torrent seeding/uploading.

Do they block all uploading or just BT uploading? My ISP throttles all torrents to like 25 KB/s download speed so I joined a torrent friendly VPN and have no problem torrenting 24/7 and that is exactly what I do. Maxing out my pathetic upload and download bandwidth.

Comment Re: cut off one head (Score 1) 251

so yeah, kiddie porn, and it's in your face, right out in the open, literally a few clicks from the homepage

Really? I've tried using Freenet a few times over the years and I cannot recall seeing any kiddie porn, but then I wasn't looking for it. In your face it was not. Maybe things have changed. Last time I tested it there was no home page either. I am highly skeptical that Freenet is any sort of practical source of kiddie or really any kind of porn for that matter.

Comment Re:cut off one head (Score 1) 251

TPB was always the place I could go to find hard to get things

You spelled Demonoid wrong. Hard to find things on TPB? I never noticed that. I only found the most mainstream stuff there. For rarer stuff there used to be Emule but now there are mostly just specialized private trackers. Demonoid at least used to have rare software. The value of TPB is that it just has everything and anything that is mainstream and popular.

Comment a simulation? (Score 1) 62

> [Researchers found] through computer simulations

Simulations are not science. I could produce my own simulation that would show exactly the opposite of what his simulation showed. It's all a matter of your assumptions. No simulation can sufficiently mimic the complexity of the real world. This is guessing and nothing more. That simulations have somehow become 'science' is just sad. Simulations, if anything, are the opposite of science.

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