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Comment Re:scsi (Score 1) 297

Nope. They really are constructed and/or tested to higher standards. Now, you may have a poor experience putting high-end drives into a crap situation - that's not necessarily the drive's fault.

If you start talking to a company that wants to sell you a lot of drives, and for relatively cheap (a couple of bucks per managed-RAIDed gigabyte), ask them about the duty cycle on the drives. A lot of consumer and even midline drives have duty cycles of less than 40% (put heavy read/write cycles on the disk for less than 40% of the time it is powered up). Enterprise drives are rated up to 100% utilization. If you take a midline drive and an enterprise drive of the same type (SAS, SATA, FC, etc.) and run them at full load head-to-head, statistically, the midline or consumer drives will fail sooner.

Comment Re:Better idea (Score 4, Interesting) 90

I thought the same thing. Although, from the site:
> One of the hardest parts of hunting for signals
> from space is separating what might be an ET
> signal from the earth-based RFI sources. We
> think that human eyes, and our amazing brains,
> should be better than a computer at finding
> interesting signals in the noise.

So it's an attempt to use the brain to manually pick out patterns? (I can't tell yet because the site may be overloaded - I get a "Loading..." screen but no updates.

I'm not sure that's a great idea, since the brain tends to make associations even if none truly exist.

Comment Re:Steve Jobs said it best (Score 1) 97

> ..."because my company is doing that and I don't like competition"
Why bother to refute the claim itself when you can simply smear the supposed originator? The use of ad hominem remarks weakens your intended message.

I've long thought the same thing, without the use of clever quotes. Where I originally came to this realization was a volunteer librarian, upon hearing I worked "with computers", asking me how best to filter the local library internet connection. We spoke for an hour or so, and I finally became enlightened to my own arguments. You can't "solve" a problem like speech with 100% certainty without destroying the benefit of the remaining, uncensored, content.

> how about this for a famous quote:
>
> "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." - George Bernard Shaw

How about this?
"He who trains his tongue to quote the learned sages, will be known far and wide as a smart ass."
-- Howard Kandel

OK, ribbing aside, what point were you trying to make? Were you saying that there are technological solutions to social problems? Any that are actually and successfully in use? Were you arguing that he said something couldn't be done, or just bickering with an AC?

Also, as pointed out elsewhere in the comments, the performance balked at by the OP above is quite possible. It may not be as cheap or simple as we might imagine, but it's hard to say something is impossible, given enough time and effort (read: money). It's just a large transaction processor.

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Submission + - 1 billion PCs by end of 2008 (cnet.com)

javipas writes: "Acording to a study published by Forrester Research, 2008 will be the year in wich a psychological barrier will be surpassed. By the end of next year there will be 1.000.000.000 computers all around the world, a number that will double itself in just five more years. The reason: the emerging markets of countries such as Brazil, China, India or Russia, which will be responsible of 775 new PCs and laptop computers. Part of them, of course, coming from projects like the OLPC's one."

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