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Comment Re:We're better because we do the same thing! (Score 3, Interesting) 345

In my experience TomTom vets its Map Share corrections by just not approving them. As one f'rinstance, it took 3 years for them to correct an illegal turn on two very busy roads in Sydney, despite me and presumably umpteen others reporting it every damn time. A new bridge near my work took over a year to feature on their maps. So I guess you should say that their vetted corrections are 100% accurate.

Comment Re:lots of experience with hdds (Score 2) 445

Why, I would be delighted to give you a complaint about Drobo. Here's one I prepared last year:

I just want to take this opportunity to warn people off buying a Drobo and/or DroboShare. For those who haven't heard of it, Drobo is an impressive-sounding box that you slide drives in and out of as you like, and it manages all the RAID and defragging and whatnot.

The acute problem is that without warning they can screw themselves up and refuse to mount. When this happens you are completely hosed because nothing except a Drobo can read the Drobo disk format. You will need to format and restore from backup. What's that, you say? You bought the Drobo because it seemed like the safest way to keep 8TB of storage going, given that that's really hard to back up? Tough tits. Yes, I know "RAID is not a backup" etc, and I did have actual backups from which I restored my data, but the difference between the Drobo marketing and the Drobo reality is staggering, especially given the Drobo cost.

The chronic problems? Drobo is slow, glacially slow. For some reason the makers claim that it can be used as "primary" or working storage, which is a laugh since the access times are significantly slower than a plain USB2 drive which is already uncomfortably slow for serious work. It will drive you nuts. The management interface will drive you nuts. The way Drobo lies to the OS about its capacity and available space, so you have to use the management interface to find out this basic information, will drive you nuts. And you will live in fear that unmounting the device by any means other than the management software will corrupt your data unrecoverably. Gods forbid you knock the USB cable out by accident.

DroboShare is the additional expensive component that turns Drobo from a USB drive into a NAS. It has its own problems. The least of which are that once you switch to DroboShare, neither Time Machine nor Lightroom will let you use the Drobo storage.

I thought Drobo was a great idea, it sounded awesome when described, I think CK even had good things to say about it, but I was wrong. It was a very expensive disappointment. This is my story.

tl;dr: Drobo and DroboShare suck, do not buy. Or if you must, buy my one.

-marauder

and then

See also:

http://www.devwebsphere.com/personal/2010/03/drobo-wont-mount-today-the-pain-continues.html

All of http://www.devwebsphere.com/personal/drobo/ is a tragicomedy really, he bought one in 2009 and quite liked it for the first week, then spent 24 months battling with every problem I described and more, and he still hasn't given up! Me, I nearly stroked out when Disk Utility said "won't mount, can't fix, it's dead", and I never trusted it again after that.

http://writelarge.com/node/319

HTH.

Sci-Fi

Ray Kurzweil Wonders, Can Machines Ever Have Souls? 630

Celery writes "There's an interview with Ray Kurzweil on silicon.com talking up the prospects of gene therapy as a means to reverse human aging, discussing different approaches to developing artificial intelligence, and giving his take on whether super intelligent machines could ever have souls. From the interview: 'The soul is a synonym for consciousness ... and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul — there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property.'"

Comment Re:Asked and answered (Score 1) 372

A lot of the big boys have turned to something like Omniture (http://www.omniture.com/) when they reach this point. You can't afford not to know what your visitors are doing, and an in-house solution is pretty bleh compared to what Omniture does. One of my customers is using Omniture to track what 15M visitors a day are up to, and they know exactly where their traffic is coming from and going to, and how that turns into revenue.

The other advantage of not doing it yourself is that then your visitor analytics suite talks properly to your email campaign manager, on-the-fly website customiser, CRM suite, etc. Then you're easily doing things like installing TouchClarity to automatically present content that this visitor is most likely to be interested in and pay for, or telling your emailer "send a flight/accommodation package offer to everyone who added a flight to the Bahamas to their carts 3-5 days ago but didn't convert, and bring the campaign results back to Omniture". This stuff is amazingly profitable because it meets visitor needs.

The Internet

The Virtual Teacher 94

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from Illinois and Florida are developing a networking system which will create virtual representations of real people to improve our knowledge. They will use artificial intelligence and natural language processing software to enable us to interact with these avatars. The goal of the project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is to give us the possibility to interact with these virtual representations as if they were the actual person, complete with the ability to understand and answer questions. We should see the results at the beginning of 2008 — if the researchers succeed."

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