Their internet service is excruciatingly slow. That, and the electronics boxes they put at the end of each block keep exploding. Maybe their video service will work better, but I am skeptical. Not too much that AT&T has done at the consumer level has worked out too well.

Some say that miniature invisible alien operatives are trying to control their thoughts

Yep, those two are conflatable. You got it.

I think it's time to put all STEM grads through an English/Philosophy regimen so we can avoid people like you embarrassing yourselves.

We need quality of labor, but instead our (brilliant) politicians and business leaders pursue quantity.

Kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have lower IQs, and some say that the races and genders differ in intelligence.

Bennett, I like all of your stuff and this is well-written but...

These apps are just going to increase mass neurosis. We don't need our heads filled with this crap. We need to spend more time thinking about important issues, not the trivia.

"Western man is externalizing himself with gadgets" - William S. Burroughs

We don't need protecting from ourselves. We do not need a hotel tax. In fact, we don't need any taxes except sales tax. But as soon as it is allowed to collect taxes, government invents new reasons to tax. That's because government is in business for itself. We're just the suckers who pay for it

Exactly - they come with all those things. However, at Backblaze we run both our 25,000 consumer hard drives and the enterprise drives in RAID arrays, and the consumer drives are run in enclosures that have MORE vibrations => and still the consumer drives performed better from a reliability perspective.

Exactly - companies make money on "extended warranties"; that's why they offer them (and why many companies push them so hard.) Like insurance, they are doing math to determine a price point where the average failures cost less than the amount they charge. If a single failure is not catastrophic to you (for example, your house burning down), you shouldn't pay for the risk-adjusted extra cost.

Agree 100% with you. And if you have 100 drives you can buy a mere 5 spares, which temporarily costs you 5% extra vs. the 100% extra that the enterprise drives cost up-front...and both are likely to fail at the same rate.

Yes, many of the vendors require you to use "their" hard drives. For example, at Backblaze, the Dell storage systems we use for for the central servers have "Dell" drives. Realistically, those are simply WD or Seagate drives with a different badge. Regardless, the failure rate of these drives that are "by Dell, for Dell, in a Dell"...still fail more often that plain 'ol consumer drives.

The drive companies claim that the enterprise drives are designed to work at a higher level of usage. However, at Backblaze we have been running both the 25,000 consumer hard drives and the enterprise drives in this study 24x7.

Dear Media,

We've heard this, or variants of it, too many times and are now desensitized to it.

Until you show us a pile of bodies, we're inert.

Sincerely,

The People

The web worked when it had a simple standard that worked in every situation.

We've put layers on top of that, and now it's chaos. A bloated, irregular, often incomprehensible chaos designed to allow people to make custom interfaces out of the web.

The whole point of the web, versus having an application for every specific task (like we did on desktops before the 1990s, and like we now do on smartphones), was to have a standard and simplified interface.

The web grew and thrived under that goal. It's become more corporate, nuanced, isolated, sealed-off, etc. under our "new" way.