I wrote that it was "before Detroit caved itself in" via unions.

Which was the fucking point. Unions had nothing to do with Detroit's demise no matter what Koch's teabaggers tell you.

I'm not anti-union.

Prove it. Point to a pro-union comment by you made before now.

Go to the link in my sig, look for "Grandpa Got Dismembered By A Shambler"

... Yes, but earlier systems, which the OP was suggesting could be used for this purpose, lacks that functionality. Also, please reset your sarcasm detector, it appears to be out of alignment -- a functional detector would have pinged on "Raid 9 Million(tm)".

Correct, and those that are aren't immune to human stupidity. No filesystem can save you from a guy who decides to pour beer into the storage array, or who goes to move a directory and misclicks sending it to the trash. Disaster recovery is not a simple matter of choosing the right filesystem and then patting yourself on the back. It requires careful planning and consideration... None of which the majority of the people on this thread seem to be capable of. At least you seem to have some grasp of the underlying technology.

Dude hack the thing! Its Android, the only good thing about Android is if your device don't do what you want it to do? ROM the shit out of the thing. hell my phone is from 2011, was slow as shit...with the default ROM. I put in the Area51 ROM for my phone? Not only did it comes with flash already installed but its a damned nice phone now, just a pleasure to use. i was planning on getting another phone but now i think I'll just get the larger battery for this one and call it a day.

But if the rumors are true you can thank Cupertino for adobe killing flash on android as well, the rumors are that Apple made it clear adobe would be a second class citizen on their platform if they kept flash and Adobe makes too much money of of Apple hipsters to risk that for a free player so they killed it. As for why you haven't seen squat when it comes to HTML V5? Its simple dude, take ANY video and encode 2 versions, same resolution and FPS, make one flash with Spark or VP6 and the other H.264 compatible with HTML V5 and see what you get. I can tell you that the flash video will play smoothly even on this 800Mhz single core ARM phone while the H.264 will choke anything less than a 1.2Ghz dual core without hardware acceleration and even WITH acceleration it'll suck down cycles like a drunk hitting a free mini-bar.

Actually I'll probably get hate from the left for pointing this out, but know where most gun control laws started as? "Fear of an armed negro". Go ahead, look it up, type that phrase into Google and there are several videos detailing the history of gun control laws in the USA, the first one of which was right after the civil war and was targeted at recently freed slaves.

Why do you think that damned near ALL the guns they demonize are cheap guns? Remember the whole stink over 25s and Saturday Night Specials? Blacks could afford those. And does anybody think these laws will affect somebody who makes 100k a year? Nope cheaper guns means more blacks could afford guns and again "fear of an armed negro" comes into play.

Uhhh...sorry but that would be like saying "Hitler was the ultimate capitalist" since he lets his corps run wild, use slaves and all that. there is a BIG DIFFERENCE between a socialist state like say Sweden or Denmark and a cult of personality totalitarian regime like Stalin's USSR or North Korea, BIG fucking difference.

Stalin, like Hitler with national socialism, was strictly paying lip service, the only thing Stalin cared about was Stalin. A dictator is a dictator, doesn't matter what politics they hide behind, the end result of repression and brutality stays the same.

Yeah what do you need that safety glass in that windshield for? that regular glass kept the rain out of your face just fine!

Got news for ya Sparky there is A REASON why we whine about users still on XP, because as the guy that has to work on them i can tell you more than 85% of them are running as admin, a good half have little to no antivirus and spyware protection, and a good 75%+ has more nasties than a Bangkok whore on coupon day. Say what you will about win 7 but at least it defaults to a limited user and will let you know when your AV is out of date, XP will happily let them run that 30 day trial of norton from 2002 and not say a word.

But whose fault is that? Put the blame where it lies, Steve jobs trying to push his appstore crapstore lock in. I have flash on my fricking THREE YEAR OLD single core cellphone and ya know what? plays great. try HTML V5 with H.264 on anything less than a dual core and see what you get,even with hardware acceleration its a fricking pig.

So call a spade a spade, the killing of flash on mobile didn't have a damned thing to do with compatibility, or battery life, it had to do with Steve jobs making damned sure you weren't getting shit on that iPad without giving him 30%.

I think the bigger point is FF's updates break shit and the Chromium based? Don't. Simple as that. Been on Comodo dragon since V2, now on V30, with ZERO plugin breakage. With FF my plug ins broke no less than 6 times before I finally gave up and made the switch.

BTW while I'm on a rant, WTF is it with the Gecko engine and "senior moments"? You know, where it hangs or stutters,not enough to make you think its frozen,just enough to irritate? I can run any of the Chromium based, and fricking IE for that matter, on a little Bobcat netbook all day long and as long as I stick to SD video its smooth. With any of the Gecko based (FF,Waterdragon, Pale Moon, etc) they will have senior moments even on my hexacore? WTF FF Devs? And don't even get me started on FF Mobile, I thought FF 2 was a piggie, damn.

But at the end of the day nobody would give a rat's ass if FF changed numbers every 5 minutes if it didn't break shit. After all i didn't even know what version of Dragon I was on until I hit about, I honestly thought it was V22 or V23, because everything has stayed the same as far as functionality and performance. if anything I'd say since the Moz team started focusing on sailphones that the gecko engine on the desktop has if anything gone backwards, with performance IMHO as far as senior moments and breakages getting more noticeable.

P.S., and included separately because I didn't want to detract from the informative nature of my post;

The next time you want to slam someone for "acting like you know what you're talking about", don't respond with a bunch of links to Wikipedia. Links, I might add, that are only marginally-relevant to the topic at hand. That shit wouldn't fly in college, so why do you think it's going to hold weight in a professional environment? As well, making personal attacks on someone in such an inept fashion doesn't earn you any points in the workplace either. That only works here on the internet, and even then only when someone tells the fanboys their favorite band sucks.

Exactly dick to do with what I said. The filesystem doesn't matter. The operating system doesn't even matter.

... Which again counts for exactly dick. I'm talking about infrastructure and architecture, while you're blubbering on about the hardware.

That's because you have no experience as a network administrator in a professional environment. Because then you'd know that's the very thing RAID was designed to do: Recover from hardware failure, which includes sectors becoming unreadable. You are clearly confused both which what level of abstraction is being discussed (architecture versus hardware), as well as the different types of failure modes each of these solutions presents. Bit rot is a physical process that occurs in all magnetic media, and at sufficiently small-scale, can also affect non-persistent storage such as RAM.

That's because ECC adds an extra layer of complexity to solve a problem that doesn't occur very often in computers, and when it does, the most severe consequence is usually that the computer crashes or behaves abnormally. For residential, and even most commercial uses, ECC memory just isn't needed. But for a select few use scenarios where data integrity is absolutely critical -- such as, say, nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, certain types of hospital equipment, or financial processing systems, the added cost is justified because they need high availability/high reliability of those systems. It's also used in certain aerospace applications because the physical mechanism that causes bitrot -- high energy radiation, increases quite a bit at higher altitudes, and in space increases several orders of magnitude -- and if you're going to put something in geostationary orbit, it then takes the full brunt of solar radiation with no mitigation. Correcting for memory problems in these situations is better done at the hardware level; hence ECC memory.

Your consumer-grade computer's memory is a piece of shit. It's made with commodity capacitors and ICs that are stamped out in bulk for super cheap. And, big surprise -- super cheap doesn't mean super reliable. But we don't need super reliability -- when our system shows obvious signs of a failing memory stick, we just drive to the store, plunk down a $20 and abscond with a new one. Problem solved.

That's because, as previously pointed out, your experience comes from consumer-grade hardware that you don't fully understand the design considerations made. NASA has had great success in the long-term storage of magnetic media -- in fact there was an article not long ago about how they had to reverse-engineer equipment designed during the 1960s for the Apollo program to recover data on tape reels, when they lacked the original equipment it was recorded from. They discussed how the tapes themselves had become brittle and the ferrous oxide would actually peel off in chunks while reading, much like how paint peels off a house, but they were able to recover this data anyway. The technology we have today is far more sophisticated and unlike old tape-technology doesn't require physical contact with the source media to read it. There are companies like OnTrack that specialize in data recovery from harddrives and boast a remarkable success rate... albeit a very expensive proposition for the home user.

So while your experiences with your personal home equipment may have led you to not be optimistic, my professional experience with industry-grade equipment suggests that, if you follow best practices regarding data storage and disaster recovery, you can ensure reliability far beyond what the OP requires for a reasonable cost.

The single biggest cause of data loss is user error, followed by not having a backup, or not validating the backup, prior to the disaster. Not bit rot. Not even weedy hardware, which comes in a distant third place.

I have yet, in my professional career, to encounter a data loss event that wasn't due either to human error, or gross negligence regarding data backups. I am aware of a few near-misses however due to early implimentations of RAID5 -- typically drives are all purchased at the same time, are of the same make and model, and thus tend to degrade at about the same rate. While RAID5 promises recovery from a single drive failure, designers did not at the time consider that the time between failures would not be randomly distributed over the drive's life expectancy -- multiple drives often fail in a RAID5 within days or weeks of each other. "hot swap" backup drives can mitigate this problem, but in a large array, the rebuild time can exceed the time before the second drive fails. This is why most IT professionals now recommend RAID6 -- because multiple simultanious drive failure happens much more than originally predicted. But this is not to say my optimism for long-term storage has been in any way affected; that is simply industry experience and the inevitable delineation between theory and practice -- between knowledge, and experience. You have knowledge, but I have experience. My experience has given me the optimism your knowledge has been unable to.

Yeah, and I wanted the Barack Obama we knew in 2007 to be president. Absolute power will ruin any otherwise good person and queens are no exception.

Well, if you'd have listened to any of his critics back then, done any research, read his readings, seen his "voting record", etc...you'd have known you were getting exactly what you were voting for.

One problem was..so many people were enamored with getting the first black president voted in, they (media included) completely ignored much of Obama's teachings, writings and background. But even if you go back today, research a bit, you'll see he wasn't really pretentious.....you got what you voted for.

You have no idea what you're talking about, sir. A mirror only duplicates the data. The writes are made syncronously to both sources, the reads are interleaved between devices to improve speed. In RAID-0, if either drive fails, the array is lost. In RAID-1, mirroring, data is written to two drives at the same time, and read back in an interleaved format. Unless the device itself reports a hardware error, the cluster will continue to read data back from every device on the chain. Mirroring can introduce silent bit rot because the data is read back from only one source at a time. RAID-1 (mirroring) is meant to prevent data loss due to hardware failure. It does not prevent corruption of the filesystem or your data via bit rot, and in fact under most usage scenarios, increases it.

Without parity checking, you simply aren't addressing bit rot. Period. It could be Raid 9 Million(tm) and if all it's doing is copying the data, and not comparing it, bit rot will still proceed apace, silently eating your data. But let's say you're a good administrator that has enabled parity. Great! But there's still a problem: parity cannot restore data that has become corrupted due to bit rot -- it is a detection-only mechanism. So if you have two drives in a RAID-1 with parity configuration, as you also suggest... it will detect the file corruption, but as it cannot correct it, it will then promptly seize up and fall over dead. This is because for every N clusters written, a parity cluster is also written; This allows the array to detect if that data chunk was correctly committed; But if the data on any of the clusters within the chunk are altered later, the RAID array will only know that this chunk of data (known as a stripe in RAID), is invalid. It cannot correct it.

The only way to truly prevent bitrot is by maintaining at least three complete copies of the data, and regularly compare between them. If one of them shows an inconsistency, the other two should still remain in agreement and that data chunk is then discarded and rewritten to the inconsistent device. This is how the Space Shuttle was designed with it's landing computer -- three fully independent computers, and each with three complete sets of sensors independently connected along main buses. Because bit rot is a major problem in space due to radiation, the system is designed at every level with 3x redundancy (or more; there are 7 gyrostabilizer systems on the ISS, for example).

RAID10 and similar systems are two RAID5 systems which are independent and regularly compare data; These can detect which system is inconsistent, so you will always have at least one copy of your data in a consistent state. But if the RAID ever becomes non-operational and has to be rebuilt, there will be a period of time where only one known good copy is available -- bit rot could occur during this time, and all you could do is detect it, not repair it. This is why you want triple redundancy -- so you can remove one of the systems for maintenance and still have two remaining copies, thus maintaining the ability to detect bit rot.

Now that I've explained all the ways that you're wrong, let me say that bit rot is probably not the cause of the OPs problems. Infact, USB devices are well-known for corrupting filesystems because of spontanious disconnects, power loss events, etc., and this is simply what can be expected in a typical residential environment. Even a RAID configuration in a residential environment isn't invulnerable to the "write hole" problem -- where data is partially committed to disk, but then the array suffers a power loss event.

This is what usually causes data corruption, not bit rot. Bit rot is an actual physical phenomenon where the magnetic orientation on the drive platter itself (or in memory) spontaniously reverses due to radiation or exposure to a strong magnetic field. And it's rare. You can expect 1 bit to corrupt in a 1 terabyte drive about once every 10 years, if it's left to sit in a box at sea level indoors, if memory serves; I'm sure someone else will rush to Google after reading this to provide more accurate numbers, but for the purposes of this discussion -- bit rot isn't the problem. It's plain old data corruption, caused by power loss and environmental issues.

And the solution is the same -- maintain multiple physically separate copies, have redundant copies to make comparisons with on a regular schedule, and have a UPS and/or battery backup on the data storage device/system. If you take these basic steps, your photographs will last far longer, even with bit rot, than they will as physical copies sitting in a drawer in your house.

I am in favor of tougher gun laws and a strong critic of U.S. gun culture. But I understand the desire to defend yourself in rural areas. I don't think I'd ever feel completely comfortable with a gun in my home, but I suppose I would actually prefer owning a gun to being completely helpless, if I lived in an isolated spot out in the country. I think the gun law dispute in the U.S. is too one dimensional. Urbanized areas would probably be much better off with strict gun controls, whereas owning a gun in a rural area is a legitimate necessity. I wonder why I never hear about this distinction when gun laws are debated.

I think living in a city, with more people, you're more likely to be broken into, etc...at your home.

I like having my guns for my protection wherever I live...and I feel I'd need them more in the more urban areas.

Even though I'm closer to police than in a rural area, doesn't mean the police can respond in time to actually *protect* or save me or my family.

No matter where you live, if someone is breaking into your home you have seconds to make decisions that can save you and your family's life. No time to call and wait on a cop.

Let's face it, in many areas of the US, big cities too..if you order a pizza and call 911, it will be a toss up which reaches your house first.

;)