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Data Storage

Higher Hard Drive Prices Are the New Normal 261

Posted by Soulskill
from the sorry-about-your-luck dept.
An anonymous reader tips an article looking at the state of HDD pricing now that the market has had time to recover from the flooding in Thailand and a round of consolidation among manufacturers. Prices have certainly declined from the high they reached during the flooding, but they've stabilized a bit higher than they were beforehand. Quoting: "Are things going to change any time soon? We doubt it. WD and Seagate both reported record profits this past quarter. In Q1 2011, Western Digital reported net profit of $146M against sales of $2.3B while Seagate recorded $2.7B in revenue and $93 million in net income. That’s a net profit margin of 6% and 3%, respectively. For this past quarter, Western Digital reported sales of $3B (thanks in part to its acquisition of Hitachi) and a net income of $483 million, while Seagate hit $4.4B in revenue and $1.1B in profits. Net margin was 16% and 37% respectively. With profit margins like this, the hard drive manufacturers are going to be loath to cut prices. After years of barely making profits, the Thailand floods are the best excuse ever to drive record income for a few quarters. All of this means that while we expect prices to gradually decline, holding off on a necessary purchase doesn’t make much sense."

Comment: Re:Or what? (Score 1) 340

I was more thinking on the lines of the conspiracy theriosts that would say this was to prevent proving the landing was a hoax.

Or plausible deniability when investigators don't actually find anything.*
"Well, sure, you didn't find anything because YOU stole it and wiped out the footprints."

* full disclosure: I'm quite sure we actually went to the moon.

Social Networks

Facebook Shares Retreat Below IPO Price 471

Posted by samzenpus
from the back-to-reality dept.
First time accepted submitter gtirloni writes "Just days after wrapping up the biggest initial public offering in Silicon Valley history, shares of Facebook slumped 6% and tumbled below their issue price on Monday, a troubling signal for the newly-public social network. Facebook broke below its $38-a-share issue IPO price in the wake of a highly-anticipated offering that raised more than $16 billion, the second-largest domestic IPO after Visa's 2008 debut. Shares of Facebook were recently off 6.44% to $35.72."

Comment: Re:Whatcouldpossiblygowrong (Score 1) 325

by Applekid (#40041307) Attached to: 'Inexact' Chips Save Power By Fudging the Math

and how do you know which one is right?

With 4 chips, you can get 4 different answers.

But sometimes it's not important to be "right". Maybe you just need values compared with some previous sampling, so that the difference between two answers that are wrong is the same that the difference between two answers that are right. Maybe that delta only needs to be accurate to a certain number of significant digits.

Unfortunately neither of the articles really describes what an "occasional error" actually entails. Are these chips occasionally wrong in a predictable way? Are they wrong by a random amount? Are they always wrong for certain calculations or does it depend on the operands?

Privacy

US Justice Dept Defends Right To Record Police 305

Posted by samzenpus
from the watching-the-watchers dept.
Fluffeh writes "In recent times, it seems many Police Departments believe that recording them doing their work is an act of war with police officers, destroying the tapes, phones or cameras while arresting the folks doing it. But in a surprising twist, the U.S. Justice Department has sent letter (PDF) to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department — who have been quite heavy handed in enforcing their 'Don't record me bro!' mantra. The letter contains an awful lot of lawyer babble and lists many court cases and the like, although some sections are surprisingly clear: 'Policies should prohibit officers from destroying recording devices or cameras and deleting recordings or photographs under any circumstances. In addition to violating the First Amendment, police officers violate the core requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process clause when they irrevocably deprived individuals of their recordings without first providing notice and an opportunity to object.' There is a lot more and it certainly seems like a firm foothold in the right direction."
The Internet

Ask Slashdot: Holding ISPs Accountable For Contracted DSL Bandwidth 345

Posted by samzenpus
from the fight-the-power dept.
mcleland writes "I'm not getting the bandwidth I paid for from my DSL connection. My '3mbps' fluctuates between about 2.7 during the day down to 0.1 or 0.2 in the evening according to speedtest.net. Let's assume DSL is the only viable option for broadband at my house and I can't really move right now (rural area, on north face of the mountain, no cable service, very poor cell coverage). This was discussed 6 years ago, but I'd like to see if there are any current thoughts on whether I'm just stuck or if there is some way to make the ISP hold up its end."

Comment: Re:Not just Apple (Score 4, Informative) 337

by Applekid (#40020841) Attached to: Apple Tells Siri To Stop Recommending Nokia

Not yet anyway. If someone else comes out with a better equivalent to Siri, or Siri starts producing terrible results that aren't for gimmicky questions people will drop it like a rock.

Nope, because Apple would simply disallow any app from their market from competing with Siri (just like alternate web browsers, alternate stores, etc). iPhone users can't run what they want without talented hackers.

Comment: Re:It just doesn't work (Score 1) 648

by Applekid (#39972663) Attached to: How Would Driver-less Cars Change Motoring?

I would absolutely use a car that had an auto-drive mode. If everyone did, then you wouldn't even need stop lights or other controls at intersections, or speed limits, as the vehicles would work together to melt traffic into a perfect flow. It might be a bit unnerving at first, watching traffic weaving through intersections, but we would get used to it.

Google or not.

I don't know if that is completely true. You still have to account for mechanical failure. A overlord system would have to monitor for such failures externally and space traffic enough so that it can compensate when a failure occurs.

There aren't a whole lot of mechanical failures that couldn't be predicted. Granted, cars use "miles/km" for wear instead of a more appropriate "hours" like everything else motorized, but with all the datapoints a proper AI car would have to gather, a subsampling can easily detect if the tires are near blowout, if the shocks aren't absorbing what they should, brake response is delayed, and the car can refuse to function until it's corrected.

Even things like roadkill or debris on the road could be noticed by one car's sensors and communicated to all others in short order.

Comment: Re:It just doesn't work (Score 1) 648

by Applekid (#39972357) Attached to: How Would Driver-less Cars Change Motoring?

p>What worries me is the increasing incidence of big-rig drivers to run GPS Jammers just so their cargo can't track its own route. I've had my GPS jump two states away just because an 18 wheeler pulled up behind me. I whipped out my phone only to find it couldn't get a fix either. 10 miles this went on, then the trucker tuned onto a different highway, and everything went back to normal.

Where was this, if you don't mind me asking? In the US, I'm pretty sure the FCC prohibits jamming devices, so if a cargo company is deploying them wholesale it would be a very interesting allegation.

Brain off-line, please wait.