It's hilarious watching people argue over a topic that has already been shown to be a non-issue. The EIA (US) and German statistics show that, in aggregate, wind-energy sources produce a relatively steady amount of power. Individual turbines and even whole wind farms might not be deterministic, but all the wind farms taken together... are.

-Matt

Except you can decode the salt trivially if you took a cab ride that happens to be in the data set and you recorded the license and medallion number. At which point the salt is useless.

-Matt

And... that's it? What did SMART say? Did you actually wear the SSDs out as-per the wear indicator? Or did you hit a bug in the samsung controller before the wear-indicator maxed out?

To be fair, the precise situation you describe, particularly if you did not retune the RAID-6 setup or the mysql server, and if the server was fsync()ing on every transaction (instead of e.g. syncing on a fixed time-frame as postgres can be programmed to do)... that could result in el-cheapo samsungs not being able to do any write-combining and cause a 256:1 write-amplication of the data.

With proper tuning the write-amplication could easily be reduced to 4:1 and you would probably be able to run the server with SSDs. Maybe use Intel or Crucial though, and not Samsung. It isn't just the controller that matters... just using stock firmware doesn't really net you a good, robust SSD and there aren't too many real vendors who work on the firmware vs just OEM whatever was supplied with the controller. Intel is probably one of the better ones. They actually fix bugs, as does Crucial. Samsung... I dunno.

-Matt

Yes, but it's a well-known problem. Pretty much the only thing that will write inefficiently to a SSD (i.e. cause a huge amount of write amplification) is going to be a database whos records are updated (effectively) randomly. And that's pretty much it. Nearly all other access patterns through a modern filesystem will be relatively SSD-efficient. (keyword: modern filesystem).

In the past various issues could cause excessive write amplification. For example, filesystems in partitions that weren't 4K-aligned, filesystems using a too-small a block size, less efficient write-combining algorithms in earlier SSD firmwares. All of those issues, on a modern system, have basically been solved.

-Matt

I have around 30 ranging from 40G to 512G, all of them are still intact including the original Intel 40G SSDs I bought way at the beginning of the SSD era. Nominal linux/bsd use cases, workstation-level paging, some modest-but-well-managed SSD-as-a-HDD-cache use cases. So far wearout rate is far lower than originally anticipated.

I'm not surprised that some people complain about wear-out problems, it depends heavily on the environment and use cases and people who are heavy users who are not cognizant of how they are using their SSDs could easily get into trouble.

For the typical consumer however, the SSD will easily outlast the machine. Even for a pro-sumer doing heavy video editing. Which, strangely enough, means that fewer PCs get sold because many consumers use failed or failing HDDs as an excuse to buy a new machine, and that is no longer the case if a SSD has been stuffed into it.

A more pertinent question is what the unpowered shelf-life for typical SSDs is. I don't know anyone who's done good tests (storing a SSD in a hot area unpowered to simulate a longer shelf time). Flash has historically been rated for 10-years data retention but as the technology gets better it should presumably be possible to retrieve the data after a long period on a freshly written (only a few erase cycles) SSD. HDDs which have been operational for a time have horrible unpowered shelf lives... a bit unclear why, but any HDD I've ever put on the shelf (for 6-12 months) that I try to put back into a machine will typically spin-up, but then fail within a few months after that.

-Matt

Google must know by now how bad a light its broken permission system is putting on Android. I can't run half the android apps I want to run on any of my Android devices any more because of the permissions they want. And a lot of the ones that I intentionally do not upgrade no longer work. It's making my three android devices useless and almost worthless.

I'm flabbergasted that there are full-on idiots in the Google command chain who are unwilling to address such a severe and obvious problem. Truly flabbergasted. Has Google gone insane?

I've already stated but I will again... when the iPhone-6 comes out, I'll be moving over to it from my perfectly working but horribly insecure Motorola Razr. At least then I can browse my facebook account from my phone without it sucking up all the stuff I've tried so hard to keep partitioned off of it. As it stands now, I can't even run customized UIs on my Android because the g*d* program insists on advertising on my notifications screen, even though I bought the paid-for version.

At least with iOS I don't have to worry about all this in-the-face crap ruining the experience.

-Matt

Where do you get this nonsense from?

-Matt

The spreads are smaller because of computerized trading, *NOT* because of HFT. HFT itself, verses normal computerized trading and non-HFT computer trading, is not going to have a big impact on the spread. In fact, HFT algorithms themselves do not really work all that well if there is any significant spread. They require volume to operate... no volume, no HFT.

-Matt