Meh, just go back in time and get Cambridge to accept "at nauseum" as the approved version.

That's how nerds will win the internet in the future. :)

This was on Windows with Firefox and the Adobe plugin. I don't have the built-in plugin because I like popping out PDFs and because the built-in viewer is slow as balls on nontrivial PDFs.

Well if the science here is correct you can only see who won the superbowl in THAT alternate reality... You don't know for sure who won in OUR reality until, of course, it happens.

I had the same thought. There's a few realities of storage that are missed here: storage use always increases, disks aren't the only things that fail, rack space isn't free, you usually have staff available already....

This is an interesting idea if your storage is in a place where it can't be reached at all for some reason, but I think NASA and ESA have already done a good bit of research on that.

100,000 hours is 4,167 days which is ~11.4 years. That sounds pretty reasonable to me, since I've run plenty of disks for over a decade.

The spares should be warm spares. Not spinning until the RAID controller detects a failure and replaces the failed drive. So they won't take any appreciable amount of power. The concern I have is space. That many idle drives eating up rack space is going to be expensive.

They only had availability data for 4 years of drive life. This is largely a math study. I'm not familiar with any implementations of their 2D parity system, although it is outside of my area of expertise. Their assumption that the service calls would always be more expensive seemed a little suspect to me. Rack space isn't free and when you have basically 100% redundancy or more in spare drives you're going to eat up a lot of space. Putting 54 spare drives in a rack that already has 11 parity disks and only 55 primary disks just doesn't seem efficient. Is all of that space really cheaper than a single service call during the life of the machine to replace 20 failed drives all at once (when the rack drops below say 6 spares of the original 26--saving you half of the space the spares would have taken up).

I have also seen enough buggy RAID controllers in my day to make me very wary of that 2D raid arrangement in the paper.

All in all this smells like a mathematicians solution to the problem, largely unbounded by real life concerns.

IIRC XFS/SGIs had this built in that there was just enough juice to flush buffers to disk while everything was spinning down.

That's not long term. That's the normal life of a storage array. Long term is like 8-10 years.

So I tried to view the PDF, and it says "can't use the plugin, it causes problems on our server". So I figured I'd just download the file with wget instead. Nope, 403 forbidden.

Looks like fetch works though. If anybody else has trouble getting the file, try my local mirror.

> The results are in perfect agreement with predictions from the 1990s--there are no grandfather-type paradoxes.

There is no time travel citizen! Go on about your lives.

Meanwhile the military starts researching chrono-troops. Because, you know, Australia has always controlled the world with its benevolent Empire...

My favorite part is where the updater tells you that a new update is ready, but it won't install it automatically because Adobe needs another ad impression or something and you have to download and install it yourself. This is why I don't have Flash or Java installed anymore. I especially like when they try to sideload some crapware toolbar with their security update too. I can kind of understand this sort of behavior from a sketchy freeware app being hosted by J. Random Guy, but Oracle and Adobe are multimillion dollar corporations. Do they really care so little about their brand?

TiggertheMad, a nobody from the Internet, said Tuesday that the he is "very concerned" by the most of the Internet's decision to not automatically encrypt all data. "We understand the value of legal discovery and the importance of enforcing laws," he said. "But we're very concerned they not lead to the creation of what I would call a 'zone of lawlessness,' where the government violates some of our most basic principles in some quixotic hunt to ferret out terrorists and other boogie men. They might actually have to do some actual police work, you know like they did for the last few centuries."

What? I was assured that THIS was the year of the Linux Desktop!

My Nexus 7 is used every day while the iPad is somewhere probably with a dead battery. The Mini seems to be a better size for reading, but it's just too large for anything other than a TV replacement.