You must not be a credible journalist

You must not be a credible journalist. I only see 2 sources at the end of your article. Go find a third, so we can all feel better.

Martin

Everything old is new again.

The same thing has happened multiple times since the advent of the original Usenet.

And I daresay it has occurred previous to that, as well, in print journalism.

Usenet in particular has always been a technically clued sort of environment; even the denizens of the first iterations of such battlegrounds as alt.flame attracted people of competence in multiple fields. A great many of these people had talents far beyond the rest of the general public.

They were truly the renaissance people of an entire generation. Why? Because they were not only technically literate, they were erudite on an order not seen in more current generations. They could write well. They could express themselves well. They could be humorous in a literate fashion that crossed over into the methods of communication they were actively building. Then the PC users came and sullied the playground, much to the despair of those already holding forth in said forums.

But this was really not the hideous mess that some declared it was... anyone who could actually make Trumpet Winsock work was not utterly clueless. Additionally, many of these users had long experience with the BBS scene and online interaction as a lifestyle.

The advent of Windows 95 opened the spigot further with greatly simplified TCP/IP connectivity. WYSIWYG NNTP clients brought things to the open fire hydrant stage.

Maybe they were not as well educated over all as their forebears, but there were worthy talents that emerged from even these plebian beginnings.

And then the great flood came.

AOL announced that they were going to an unlimited access monthly plan, instead of the hourly rate plans that had held so many in thrall for so long.

And Usenet was buried under a teeming morass that had their hands held for their entire internet experience.

There were people of good will and intent among them.

But there were an even greater number of those who could not get a clue even if they had disrobed, rubbed themselves all over with clue pollen and walked slowly through a field of mating clues. Any sort of communications media that involves public access is going to have distinct stages. The early adopters: those who can do things the hard way and still make it work. The second wave: who may not be quite as savvy as the first generation and benefit from the work of their forebears, who have made it user friendly enough to be much more workable on a daily basis. What they really do is grow the media to the point that it becomes visible to a broad audience. The latecomers: who make something popular on an overwhelming scale. Think Myspace. Or the Blogosphere. Or even the internet.

I have seen this from the perspective of the PC user that was online in the early 1990s as a BBS user that used QWKMail to insult those located in exotic (for myself) climes such as Alaska (Psyche, The Ear), California (The Stud) and even New Jersey (Hambone, Windows) from my PC to a BBS located in Tampa, Florida (P-38, Albion, Al Hunt, Man of Steel and many more) and migrated to the internet and found himself lucky enough to read the postings of the last of the early adopters of the public internet. :)

Muttley9

Budget Brownout for home PCs

Thought you might want to do a follow-up piece on the political response to the end of HCI - after all you did criticise the politicians for not doing anything ;)

Here.

Robert

Mean time before failure

I'm sure you know it but some of your readers might not and might be curious such that it would be worthwhile to post a brief explanation (an asterisk leading to a footnote?) Equipment makers MTBF is based on the service life of the device, so, rather than one extremely dedicated drive working for 1.2 million hours before read/writing its last, WD expects 2,082 of every 2,083 drives to behave splendidly for (at least) five years and one to let you down within 5 years of your installing the ungrateful thing.

Name, email supplied

Actually according to Google it's almost 137years... Where can i get one of those drives?... :D (1 200 000 / 24) / 365.242199 = 136.895463 years

DMCC

In the article on the new WD drives, there was a comment about a failure rating of over 120 years. This was most likely a MTBF specification, which is mean time between failures. A MTBF of 120 years means that if you have 120 drives, on average, one will fail per year during the service life of the drive.

Once you get past the service life, the MTBF decreases as the failure rate goes up. With a 5 year warranty, the service life is probably over 5 years, and Western Digital will have priced it with the expectation that they will have to provide warranty replacements for about 1/25 of the drives that they sell.

The bottom line is not to confuse service life with MTBF. It is highly unlikely that any of the drives will remain operational for 120 years of continuous service.

JH

"The drives have a rating of 1.2 million hours before failure, said WD. [Is that 120 years? Ed.]"

Hi, no it is not 120 years, but 136.

Regardless, it means nothing in these terms, anyway. More realistical interpretation of this statistical number is this: For 1.2 million powered, and in service, drives out there in a field, ONE drive wil faill in an hour. Scary, hm?

Best regards

Roger

Actually, it's 138.57 years. Roughly.

Think of it in these terms:

A 300 terabyte NAS storage array would have 150 of these drives. That's an average failure of at least one hard drive a year. Think Yahoo!, Google, Amazon etc.

If you're running a busness with 10,000 blade servers with 2 drives per blade, that's 20,000 drives. Statistically speaking and discounting real life performance, that's 144 1/3 drives failing every year or 2 3/4 drives every week.

In the real world, you'd normally see an initial set of failed drives in the first 3 months and then very few failures for the next several years. After that, the number of failures per year would start to creep up.

Regards,
Guy

New York top pleader takes aim at PC "spyware"

Great that NY is after those guys. They are the most despicable forms of pirates in the world. Just disgusting.

Anyway, the only way to stop spyware/adware is to sue the advertisers. It is that simple.

On the topic of Spybot S&D. It is a nice product. It is only one of many and it only knows about 60% of the total nasties that one can get installed. The only way to truly get rid of spyware/adware/malware is to use a combination of tools. Spybot Search and Destroy, by itself, just doesn't cut it. It only takes one remaining bad boy and it will propagate all its' buddies in no time, especially on high speed internet connections

. Jim Blaich

Sony, Nintendo muddy the online waters

Pardon me for halting Microsoft's high horse, but the on-line community of gaming isn't being dominated by them. Last time I checked, Nintendo was doing just fine in the on-line community with WiFi. One million users and climbing isn't something to shake a stick at, considering it has only been out since about last November.

And from what I can predict in the future, Nintendo and Sony will do the same thing that they are doing right now. Nintendo with the USB adapter and Sony with an internet attachment.

Another thing. Sure, Microsoft offers free* games on Xbox Live (*you have to pay an outrageous up front fee to acctually get the service.), but Nintendo is offering their service for almost free. All you really need is a computer, a DS, roughly $30 CND and a pair of legs. And as far as I'm concerned, 30 dollars and no additional costs sounds better than continuously renewing your subscription.

Noah

Bright Idea for Vendors

Here's a radical idea that I would love to see some day.

Imagine that you can use your computer for regular stuff (Browsing, Mail...) with all the power you want,

And when you wanna play a game, all you have to do is to press a button called "Game Mode",

Game mode will have very few processes running, no services, no anti-virus, there can be something that looks like MCE menu, but outside the OS itself, just thumbnail view of the games.

I bet this will really make everyone's life much easier, gamers will not be forced to upgrade every quarter and game developers will not even need to tweak games like they do now.

Why can't someone from M$ think of this?

Mohammed Issa