CBHighlander - Slashdot User

Vista: More Installs or Uninstalls?

Submitted by

theStorminMormon

on Friday March 02 2007, @04:50PM

theStorminMormon writes "I recently got a new computer at work. Since we're a small company (about 30 employees) we get our computers from Dell and HP and others so this one came pre-loaded with Vista. The first thing we did was uninstall Vista and install XP Pro because we're not interested in dealing with the hassles of a new OS. My parents bought a computer as well this week, and it ships with Vista even though it's really not fast enough to run it (even without Aero). XP Pro will be going on that too. This got me thinking: are there more people uninstalling OEM copies of Vista than buying retail copies. Will this reverse-adoption ever show up in the press or in market penetration numbers?"

Disk drive failures 15 times what vendors say

Submitted by

sysrammer

on Friday March 02 2007, @04:32PM

sysrammer writes "Computerworld has an article on disk drive failures from the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose, showing, among other things, "no evidence that Fibre Channel (FC) drives are any more reliable than less expensive but slower performing Serial ATA (SATA) drives", and that "that temperature seems to have little effect on drive reliability" (it looks like they're talking about temps closer to the upper operational limit, not catastrophic a/c failures, etc.). FTA: "About 100,000 disks are covered by this data, some for an entire lifetime of five years. The data include drives with SCSI and FC, as well as SATA interfaces. The mean time to failure (MTTF) of those drives, as specified in their datasheets, ranges from 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 hours, suggesting a nominal annual failure rate of at most 0.88%. We find that in the field, annual disk replacement rates typically exceed 1%, with 2-4% common and up to 13% observed on some systems. This suggests that field replacement is a fairly different process than one might predict based on datasheet MTTF." The authors did not identify particular vendors vs. the drive stats...their goal "is not choosing the best and the worst vendors but to help them to improve drive design and testing". Another note is that the study shows disk replacement rates, not necessarily actual failure. The article is at... http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012066&source=NLT _AM&nlid=1 ...and the Usenix site is here... http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder .html mp"

Comment: hard to believe (Score 2, Insightful) 250

by CBHighlander on Tuesday July 04 2006, @01:24PM (#15656735) Attached to: Cambridge Breached the Great Firewall of China

I can't imagine why anyone would choose a stateless firewall over one the preforms stateful inspection on all traffic. There are so many options available (pix, checkpoint, or just a well built iptables system), it would seem you'd have to work at finding something stateless.