There really is a difference. However... that difference is in the firmware, and that's where the manufacturers were scamming.

There is a thing called TLER - time to recover from errors. That is, if the drive is trying to write or read from a block, and it finds a problem, it goes to write to another block, or uses error recovery to read. For servers, they really want the time that the drive keeps trying to be under seven seconds. The consumer drives could be adjusted using software like hdparm.

Then around '09, and apparently starting with WD, they made a change to the firmware, and you could no longer change that variable. Servers scream and gag and give up, and tell you the drive's dying, when instead of spending under seven seconds, the drive keeps trying for ->over two minutes-. Everything you read says do *NOT* use those for RAID, either.

The server grade drives are very much *not* into spinning down, and they have that short TLER.

This is why, around here, we're ecstatic at the new WD Red drives, that are "targeted towards NAS"; the reality is that they've got TLER set to seven seconds. And, where the server grade drives are two to three times the price of consumer grade drives, or higher (some sources are a *lot* higher), the Reds are 1.33% of consumer grade drives.

Reliability: we have some of everything, and have not noticed a real difference in reliability. And our drives get used a *lot*.

                      mark

As others have said, save all copies of email between you and your boss informing them of the flaws. Make sure all future emails are return receipt requested. Print them out. Take copies home... and then buy a safety vault in a bank, nothing less, and store them there. That way, they can't be made to disappear so easily.

Yes, I knew someone who lost their federal job, and the documentation at home disappeared.

                mark

Meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt to have a bit of a side conversation with someone in legal (for a start), then escalate it to formal conversations with them via email (again, print those suckers off) should nothing get resolved.

You don't have to approach them as if you are blowing the whistle on your boss. Just tell them you are concerned about your personal liability should you get caught breaking the law.

I mean, there's one of the eight copies of that manuscript by Abdul Alhazrad there....

                  mark

Spend a week, and convince the others to follow suit: Document, down to quarter hours, how much time you spend doing your job, and how much is spent on help desk work. Then suggest what management is paying for a sysadmin or programmer to do help desk work.

The costs alone will push them, esp. if any or all of you are doing overtime frequently.

Add one more argument: what happens if one of you gets hit by a car, or the flu, or finds another job - how's the slack going to be picked up? Long time ago - I was working in a mainframe shop back then - the systems programmer went on vacation for a week. Tuesday of that week, they found him on the beach, and had him come back to fix a problem. A month later, one of the operators got promoted to assistant, and started training. Being irreplacable means never having a life of your own.

                        mark

Last time I heard the mainframe "declared dead" was the late nineties... and at the same time, IBM was shipping more mainframes than they'd ever delivered before.

The desktop dead? Let's see, why might that not be the case?
1. People upgrading their existing systems, including hardware, rather than buying a new computer.
2. People without 20/10 vision, who can't read email on that tiny screen.
          2.a Websites (such as MySQL's documentation) that use fixed widths and locations, resulting in
                          overprinting if you don't have your browser fullscreened.
3. Gamers.
4. Anyone who actually wants to watch a video. (I "watched" Thor on a 12" screen on an airplace a couple
                            of years ago, with daylight in the cabin. Tell me what you're watching on your expensive phone
                            gives a better view.)
5. Anyone who is actually doing work, including writing something longer than a twit, spreadsheets (the
                            original killer app), Power Point (no, no, I don't, but managers *adore* them), or graphics, or....
6. Anyone who does more on it than a couch potato.
7. See 3. (Who do you think drove video?)
8. Um, most of the stuff that you look up on those phones and tablets? What do you think *THAT* is running on, if not
              servers or mainframes?

                        mark

If it was a hit song, then why is there no income in July? And August? Oh wait, there is, he might still be collecting money for work done years for DECADES to come.

Who else gets payed for work they did once? Let him add the total, over his lifetime AND his childrens lifetime, and divide it by the number of hours he spend on it. Wanna bet it comes to far more then minimum wage? And this is ONE source of payment? You ever did work and get payed by multiple people for decades to come? No, me neither.

This artist purposely uses misleading data. That means he is a lying piece of scum.

The summary states how much artists are payed and the claim that the artists think that because the payout is not a billion dollars, they are payed to little and spotify is in the wrong.

I am sure many a person cleaning toilets is ALSO not happy with the payout. But the market value of cleaning toilets is low and so apparently is the market value of music by most artists.

Is spotify paying to little or is "indie" (read non-popular) music simply not a viable product in todays entertainment market.

THINK OF THIS: I see NOTHING in the article that could not lead to the conclusion: For barely any plays at all, unknown artists earn more per month then the majority of Americans. 3300 bucks? Isn't that in fact several times minimum wage in the US?

So what are they bitching about? Can I bitch that I am not payed enough for having sex with women? I only make 3300 dollars a month for shagging 400.000 women and I just don't think that is enough...

How much do these artists they should be payed FOR A SINGLE song that, statistically speaking, nobody wants to hear?

Life is hard, many people have to do back breaking work and still don't earn 3300 a month. And they certainly don't get payed for work they did last month, last year or even a decade ago.

How much do these "artists" expect to be payed anyway for a SINGLE listen to a SINGLE song by a SINGLE person?

the developers are always getting pressure from other departments for projects they don't have the manpower to even start. I'm not really sure how to convince them we need more people.

You don't. You tell the people asking you for stuff that you don't have the resources to do it, and you let them convince your boss that you need more people.

Stop trying to do everything, prioritise the important stuff, say no to everything else, and if the things you say no to are important enough, they'll find the manpower.

I mean, I occasionally read stuff from the other side,,, but a fair bit of it ranges from Michelle Bachman (R-wacko)'s la-la land pronouncements, to a guy on a mailing list I'm on, who's sure that with the Fed printing money, it's devaluating as we type, and oh, yes, we live in a soclaist America....

How does this "bubble-bursting filter" screen out the total crazies, to get *reasonable* contrasting information?

                  mark

...a target. As in, paintball, anyone?

Or, for that matter, oops, I stumbled and spilled my coffee/soup/fries with ketchup all *over* that 'droid....

                      mark

Ah, but the timing is important. Tele-operated missions are arguably more advanced, taking the position that a manned landing mission is an admission of failure to design adequate remote control systems. So it can be argued the West caught up with the Old East and went further. Now the East is repeating the same advances. How soon before they go further?

You are talking of a single transaction shifting the market 5% and you call that small?

Real economic markets panic of fractions of a percent shift with billions in transactions.

If a real currency could suffer a 5% inflation with the selling of a single million, everyone would conclude that currency is totally non-viable.

Basically you are saying that if you own bitcoins, you could lose 5% anytime someone sells a single million of a currency supposedly worth billions. That is NOT a stable reliable currency.

Some people still life in the free world.