Hurry before the next flood in Thailand, where most of the major hard disk factories in the world are conveniently located nearby each other (hence the price surge of 2011).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11...

From the article:
“Surely one of the inevitable impacts of this is that never again will so much be concentrated in so few places,” said John Monroe, an expert on storage devices at Gartner, a technology research firm.

Yeah, sure.

The day Netflix offers The Wire and the Star Wars movies I may consider doing the same. Until then they are my $8/month source for bad British or Swedish series, although they are becoming quite a good source for bollywood movies too.

I'm not kidding. Recently I had the opportunity to watch the puzzling movie Besharam on Netflix. The scene with the exploding car at the beginning got me hooked but the highlight of the movie is definitely this dynamic duo of Indian guys dressed in aluminium foil who dance like Michael Jackson on what sounds like Korean pop played on a 8-bit Casio keyboard.

See for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(notice the frequent zooms on the main guy's crotch)

THANK YOU NETFLIX

Just like before I can lose entire tv series when the disk fails. But now it's the HD version of the series I will lose. That's called progress.

I get the "bought" part, that is after all how lobbying works (it's not a secret), but how does one "sell" a politician? Do you mean that political parties are pimping out their people?

Also I would suggest that given the kind of loyalty one can find in Washington, the proper term should be "rent" rather than "buy".

The Egyptians did not move those blocks into place. They did like those companies we know and admire, they made plans and outsourced the backbreaking work to unscrupulous partners in countries where labor is cheap and workers safety is not a priority. And then pretended they were not aware of the abysmal work conditions in the pyramid factories.

I'm pretty sure that if someone was to raise the pyramid there would be a Made in China label at the bottom.

Whenever I hear about Box, I hear about Aaron Levie. I even got spam the other day telling me that "Aaron Levie Wants You To Register For BoxWorks".

Name-dropping used to involve famous people. Now startups name-drop their CEO all the time and this sucks.

I prefer java desktop apps to adobe air apps.

Talk about horrible stuff and annoying updater...

Thank you for ruining my day. I don't know what JavaZone is but I now hate it.

Who says you are a cool kid?

The stock has been a roller-coaster ride over the last 3 years. The real good thing that he did was the deal with IBM to at last set foot in the enterprise. For a very long time a lot of people have been using iPhones at the office but most of the time it was in BYOD organizations. If the Apple-IBM thing can move forward (and if Apple can get a grip on reality, price-wise) it could be a new era for Apple.

Enterprise customers can't be dazzled by marketing or fashion trends like the typical Apple crowd. And while people keep talking about the wonderful app store and its billions of apps, the truth is that a business won't run on angry birds and yos. Hopefully Apple will get a clue and start using its factories to deliver cost-effective devices on which enterprise apps can run. Take things where Blackberry left them and move forward.

Apple is not a front-runner anymore in design. Samsung, Microsoft, Dell - everyone has good designers nowadays and lawsuits aside, all smartphones are user-friendly enough. Apple should really use its position and deep pockets to set foot in the enterprise before they fade away.

When you deal with cold storage you have to look at things from a node level, not in global storage size. If your basic unit is a 50GB device instead of a 4TB device, this means that each request you make to recall data has a much smaller footprint.

Let's say that each stored account takes up 1GB of space. That's 50 accounts per BD drive, and 4000 accounts per hard disk. This means that when some dude comes out of jail and tries to access the photo his mom posted on his Facebook wall in 2010, there are 3999 accounts that are pulled out of their coma with it for no reason. On a BD that's only 49.

As long as you partition stuff properly it's unlikely that a single request will span multiple BD drives. You may have to deal with clusters of BD disks and this requires a bit of tuning, but even with the best indexing system in the world you can't power up only part of a hard disk. So BD is a clear winner here, especially if to that footprint issue you add the fact that spinners die quickly when you keep playing with the on/off switch.

Bytes are bytes when you live in a software world. But physical factors and limitations come into play when you deal with storage, and that's why most people with a software background can see WTF where there is instead good engineering.

So they blew millions on a lousy website instead of forcing their citizen to use the lousy website on which the federal government blew millions. I'm sure the Oregon people are happy to have paid twice for the same garbage.

Meanwhile Oracle's stock is up almost 1/3 this year. At least some people made money with this healthcare thing.

Especially if they are held hostage like Nokia in India.

What you describe is called a MAID and over the years it has proven quite unreliable. Hard disks are sensitive creatures and don't age well when being powered-on/powered-off randomly, and because of the nature of cold storage it is difficult to achieve a right balance of redundancy and power savings.

Also I would advise you to be careful when you label something as "phenomenally stupid" otherwise in instances like this one it may make you look like you are "phenomenally uninformed".

I'm not sure which is the most depressing:

1) the gas station with an attached convenience store where the clerk is behind bullet-proof glass and when you want to buy something in the store you have to turn the barcode of the item towards the barcode reader yourself to ring up the sale before sliding money in the reinforced drawer

2) the ones where they lock doors at night so you have to stand outside and ask the clerk to go fetch whatever you want to buy and he puts them in the drawer after you have paid

The saddest thing is that I'm pretty sure those measures are not there to protect the clerk per se as much as to minimize liability for the company in case a robbery goes wrong.