Not quite, It is more Apple ruined them by promising to buy their product and then not following through after they had already heavily invested in meeting the supply for that promise. regardless they need to accept responsibility for entering into such a lopsided agreement. You make stupid decisions and stupid things happen. Why would you trust any company in this way, especially apple.

Well, the other problem was the sapphire wasn't of sufficient quality. Apple's contract said they'd buy it if it was of a certain quality and it failed to meet the bar.

And while lopsided, Apple did lend over $1B as part of the contract to build the factory and merely demanded repayment on a schedule.

Now, Apple is claiming innocence to the fact that they didn't know of the troubles - saying if they knew they would've worked with GTAT to fix issues. Whether it's true or not, we don't know.

Apple bears part of the blame for coming up with the lopsided agreement in the first place. That's not to detract from the blame GT deserves for signing.

Well, Apple has lawyers draw up the contract. GTAT has lawyers to review the contract. It's not Apple presenting a contract to a 1-man shop - it's an organization that's been around and has the resources to scrutinize and negotiate. If GTAT only saw dollar signs when they were handed the contract and didn't review it closely, that's their fault. This isn't a big supplier going after a lone inventor (who may be given leeway for not completely understanding the deal).

Interestingly, Apple is keeping the plant and planning on re-hiring laid off workers. GTAT will be selling off the furnaces but Apple paid ofr the factory and is keeping it to manufacture... something.

Please buy our crap. Pretty please?

We just want to make our money off your app store purchases.

Look, we'll give you the thing for cost if you'll just buy our crap.

*LOL*

Except Apple doesn't make much off of app sales, or media sales for that matter. Even the dwindling iPod sales outclasses the iTunes sales.

Amazon however will sell hardware at or below cost because they plan on selling content, which is why the thing is so tied to Amazon's ecosystem.

Apple, doesn't really care. You could buy your videos off iTunes, or Amazon or even Google Play or whatever. All the content does is help drive hardware sales, which is where Apple makes money. And just use the Kindle app or Nook app or Kobo app for books.

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

Drives like this exist, I don't know if any are being sold at the moment but they've certainly been made. I believe the strategy has been used both for dual-attach and for increasing throughput. Some drives also used to read/write multiple tracks (that is, on multiple platters) at a time, but (as has been covered elsewhere in this thread) it got to be too complicated to keep everything aligned as the temperatures and rotational velocities increased.

Alignment isn't an issue - there's no alignment on a modern drive. Instead, at the factory, they write a set of servo tracks all over the platters which do the aligning for you - basically the head seeks to approximately the right position and starts reading, and the servo track tells it where it actually is, so feedback gets the head to the right track.

Old hard drives were open-loop - you said seek to track N, it went to track N by using a stepper motor. Modern hard drives are closed loop in that they are constantly looking for servo tracks to tell them where the head is to pinpoint the right track. It also allows for individual platters to have their own servo tracks before being assembled, as well as handling thermal expansion dynamically (old hard drives would do a scan every 30 seconds or so to find out where the tracks were - called "thermal recalibration". Modern ones don't need this since feedback automatically gets them there, which has the advantage that drive accesses are not paused during the recalibration). This was important if you were streaming data to or from the drive, which was why the early ones were called "A/V" drives - they were designed to do the recalibration on the fly so you can constantly write or read data.

No, the bigger reason why two actuators didn't work is far simpler - think multiprocess programming. Both actuators could read or write data to the platters (of which there was one set) and if you screwed up the order of the accesses, you could easily write the wrong thing (think you do a read then a write of a sector - and the sector happens to be under the actuator doing the write). And yet, if you serialized the accesses, you're back to square 1. So maintaining data consistency was incredibly difficult and at higher datarates, unmanageable.

OP asked for "biometric" ID, okay? RFID, cards, NFC, etc. are not biometric. The reasonable assumption -- unlike yours -- is that he had an actual REASON for asking for biometrics. People don't usually say things for no reason.

Probably because biometrics are easy. You're pretty much guaranteed to have a face or a finger that can be scanned inside the cleanroom. Except of course, you're wearing gloves, and no mention if they have to put on the burka-like hoods as well (which eliminate all but iris scans, which may not be possible if it's an enclosed hood).

Basically the problem is they need fast logins that preferably they don't have to type usernames and passwords (which can be hard on clean-room capable keyboards), so an RFID badge can easily solve the problem since they're usually already clipped to the badge holder on the suit.

And given it's a cleanroom, that usually means it's in a more secured area so primary screening can validate badge against other measures, so unless one also planned on swapping or swiping a badge post-entrance, you can be reasonably sure the credentials are valid.

Plus, usually for stuff involving computers, you either use a login and password, or biometrics. RFID cards or ID badges don't typically come to mind when wanting an authentication solution.

Or do you think Microsoft desperately wants a share of that market?

Actually, Microsoft does. Because that's a heck of a lot of PCs, and if they are running Windows and Office, that's a heck of a lot of PCs not running Linux, OpenOffice or other software. Even if Windows and Office are pirated.

All the big commercial vendors pretty much say as such - it's better to have the software pirated than to have those users seek out the competition, whatever it may be.

So even if a user uses pirated Windows, that makes them less likely to use Linux instead. Because if they try the competition, they may like it.

We have no experience curing Ebola.

We have lots of experience trying to keep people alive while what's left of their immune system defeats the virus.

It helps if the people who catch it are fit and well before they catch it.

You know most diseases aren't cured by drugs, but by the immune system. The drugs just help out by making you feel better so you don't feel so terrible and harm your immune system. E.g., the painkillers and all that make it easier to get rest so you're not so worn down that your immune system is compromised.

And Ebola talk died down because people were freaking out over it, when in fact they're far more likely to die of influenza than Ebola. Yes, the flu has killed an order of magnitude more people in the US than Ebola has worldwide.

Oh yeah, it helps if you catch the flu that you're fit and well too. The people that die from the flu generally are immunocompromised or vulnerable. Enterovirus D68 (part of the influenza family) is particularly deadly to children and it's huge so far.

Ebola outcomes are more successful in the western world because we have access to clean drinking water - Ebola works by wreaking havoc by causing the blood vessels to leak, so being able to get fluids into the body means the person has a fighting chance at living.

I used to work at an LTO manufacturer and asked why we never drove the older generations down into the SMB space and it is simply this - the components are *really* expensive, the majority of the component cost of the drive is the R/W head, that alone probably accounts for 25% of the drive and you just can't push the price down much further, it costs what it costs. Also, the HUGE majority of these things go into libraries with hundreds of drives, thousands of slots and robots that can move upwards of 90km per hour.

Why? Is the head made of exotic materials that cost a lot?

I mean, a hard drive has a read-write head that is tiny and made to fine precision, but because of the immense R&D that went into production and simply mass production forced optimizations in cost and production methods that drove the price down so much that you can pick up a ton of storage for not a lot of money. Like 2TB portable hard drives for under $100. And that neglects the fact that the mechanical parts of said hard drive are far tinier and have tight tolerances in order to stuff that much storage in the space smaller than a single tape.

The price is probably expensive because no one's ever bothered to scale it from the thousands to millions of units.

uck naming shit to appeal to the plebes and media. It's not a popularity contest. It's a fucking security vulnerability that needs to be patched. You don't get points for media mentions.

I know, I mean, if they didn't call it "heartbleed" there would be millions of easily exploitable servers and security appliances out there to rip data from. instead they had to get media attention and force people to actually examine their systems and update them. After all, a few months later about 80% of vulnerable machines were patched.

And stuff like OpenVPN would be much easier to break into if people didn't force updates to their VPN appliances and stuff.

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