Backblaze was analyzing their particular experience building a very large storage system using commodity drives. What they found was that certain manufacturers fared better than others. I didn't see anything in their paper about performing any types of performance tests, reliability tests, etc.

This was merely "We put X harddrives of brands A,B,C,D an E of sizes A', B', C', D' and E' and here's how they fared"

I'd assume the drives are capable of using the many write media, it's then the economics of media cost. Also at some point is it easier to just discard the media then worry about a piece in a middle of a backup set going bad after X number writes?

I've just assumed all along that they kept everything. Deleted just meant "not seen".

I'd love to see the machine they built. A 10k stack of bluray discs at 1.2mm a piece is 12m. How are they storing the media so they can get to each piece? I'd imagine their using an ink jet printer to label each one. Maybe they're bundling them in stacks of 100 and labeling each stack?

So many questions!

I call bullshit on this technology too. What would be cooler would be something that you attached to say a port on your body that would take your blood and oxygenate it in the same manner that fish oxygenate their blood and remove the CO2 and then recirculate it back into your blood stream. I'm not sure what your lungs would think of this arrangement. Another idea is to use that technology they showcased in the abyss and use oxygenate that liquid that you then breathe. The issues with that are that your body evolved to breath gas not liquids.

I thought this was their second launch. They've already launched one of these Cygnus resupply missions to the ISS, apparently that one was a demonstration. This is their first commercial launch...

Where exactly do you live? Not all schools in the US are created equal. I live in Massachusetts and our schools are rated some of the best in the world. Granted the rest of the country uses pejoratives like "Taxachusetts", commie liberals, the list goes on.. They laugh about how much money we spend on our schools, universal health care, etc. However they usually stop laughing when they notice that we have one of the lowest rates of unemployment and one of the highest levels of education in the country. At last check eighty six percent of adults in Massachusetts have a bachelors. Massachusetts is one of the innovation centers of the world.

Please don't judge the entire US merely on the poor experience in your state.

As to your second point... yes, churches are dangerously powerful. I feel in the last election many states crossed the line and participated directly in fundraising and coordination efforts.

I disagree with your assertion that the US system is broken compared to most 3rd world countries. Just like there are lots of variations in the wealth of 3rd world countries, their educational systems vary greatly as well. We could have a lengthy conversation just on the many different education systems in Africa, some pubic, some for profit, some that are good and some that are horrifyingly mindbogglingly bad.

As to your last point, yes there are many people in this country who think that their ignorance is a sign of reverence. They've come to a place of cognitive dissidence in regards to the world. Their lack of education, combined with their incomplete and poorly contrived belief system has backed them into a corner.

I'm proud to say I work every day to make that corner smaller and increasingly uncomfortable.

So my car is sitting in the parking lot getting heavy load on the battery packs all day... how much more wear and tear is that going to be putting on my batteries? How many charge/discharge cycles are these being rated for?

Da fuk? What bible are you reading? My version of the bible is a veritable smorgasbord of homophobia, genocide and misogyny. If the bible is a algorithm for happiness, one wall and no roof make a house!

Please sit down and instead of selectively reading your bible, start at the beginning and start reading it straight through... Also understand that the bible you have is a highly manufactured document that was crafted out of lots of different and conflicting sources. There are lots of <i>other</i> bibles out there with lots of other scriptures that say lots of other, albeit equally crazy things.

As someone who has 100's of TB's of data stored in ZFS I couldn't agree more. In most cases if ZFS spits out a drive because it's convinced it's writing bad blocks, I believe it. In most cases (if it's a seagate drive) seatools backs me up on this... in several cases sea tools doing a quick check says the drive is fine... it never fails if I do a "full" scan of the drive it'll eventually throw an error.

I've found damaged SAS cables, JBOD enclosures with dodgy bridges, etc. because of ZFS.

With that all said, now that you've gone out and bought a small PC, stuffed 4, 4TB drives into it and set it up as a raid10 using ZFS you now need to ask the next question... what's more likely... I'm going to have two drives fail simultaneously or that my house is going to get hit with a {flood, lightning, fire, thieves, etc}

Honestly, I'd build two of these devices, one for local backups and I'd put one at a buddies house and do remote backups from your local device.

You can rewind through my posting history to see that I've written about this before... A couple of years ago Massachusetts had a bill to allow assisted suicide that failed to get passed.

As a child I watch a friend of my parents die of brain cancer in a most hideous and terrible manner. He went out of this world in abject misery. Even as a 10 year old I realized then that was no way to go. If the option had been available I'm not sure he would have taken it, but it should at least have been an option.

I wish it was legal here in Massachusetts and more over there should be a federal law that makes it legal. Note, I'm not advocating for suicide booths, this should be an option for people who are out of medical options.

After we get done with the brouhaha regarding gay marriage in the US, I think this will be the next hot button topic. Considering that a large number of Americans are moving into old age this is going to be a bigger topic.

To those people who have moral issues with it, there's an easy solution... Don't let your loved ones engage in assisted suicide. However, your moral and/or religious squeamishness shouldn't limit the rights of others.

You have to ask yourself a question... what does hell sound like?

Standing in one place all day as a procession of kiva robots shuttles in front of you, you picking off the right thing, putting it into a box, repeat for hours.
If there's a hell, this is it. I can't imagine a more droll and tedious existence.

Vs.

Troubleshooting issues with robots such as gripper and item identification.
Doing repairs on those parts you can repair, such as grippers, cameras, etc.
Watching how the robots do a task and making improvements in accuracy, speed, etc.

Now, first task is semi-unskilled and the latter are more highly skilled.

All I can say is, tough shit.

The entire warehouse is already a big Kiva robot cluster... Now use something like a "Baxter" bot to do the picking. ta-da. One baxter bot costs 22k a year. Once you got the kinks worked out you could have a whole army of the things and have a couple humans running around just trouble shooting when things don't go as planned.

I was wondering the same thing... part of the reason we're in the mess we're currently in is that for the last 30+ years instead of letting fires burn in a controlled way we've just prevented them entirely.

Now we've got land that's just choked with burnable material just waiting for a spark.

I'm all for building such a satellite and launching it but I think that it should be part of a larger strategy surrounding responsible fire management, not just prevention.

the tsunami would pass right underneath it. Because water isn't compressible, out in the open ocean away from the shore, a tsunami is just a shock wave moving through the water. At best it'll raise the water level by a meter. A moored platform would bob a bit and that would be that.

I find that particularly odd that Sony wouldn't have support for DLNA on the PS4 considering they started the consortium.

That's actually a valid point. s/child molesters/child murders/g;

When someone turns out to be murderer, it's profoundly unlucky.
They didn't pick their parents, or their genes. Nor do they pick the circumstances of their childhood or the disposition of their personality that culminates in them being a murderer.
If someone gets a brain tumor in just the right spot and it causes them to become a murderer we treat them as a victim as well.
Couldn't it just be argued that being a murderer is a form of mental illness?

Note: this argument has been made by Sam Harris, credit to him, not me.