Recent Comments

I don't pay much attention to TV, but as a casual observer, I can say they definitely didn't do a good enough job of explaining to a guy like me just what the advantage in plasma was, or why a cheapo LCD would be an inferior option. They seemed like damned expensive devices. BTW, I've heard a lot of people complain - like you did - about the loss of colors and quality of an LCD relative to a CRT. Again, I'm an unsophisticated observer, but I don't really see a difference. Maybe I should do a side-by-side comparison to really take notice of the difference.

Ha ha, I'm trying to get people to COME to this site, not go away! :) But all I know is, if someone says the link doesn't work, and I try it and it works, my job is done. Although it's funny watching someone desperately fail to figure out how to get to the linked article - Christ, you can even read it in the printed URL!

Very cool, thank you!

Here's his comment post: "I can call Google legal and ask them to give me some free, biased legal advice on what's okay and not, but I suspect I'm just going to get someone whose job it is to further intimidate me into self censorship the same way China intimidates all its locals."Looks like Google lawyers told him to take it down. Remember kids, the best censorship is self censorship! http://dictatorshandbook.net/book/node105.html

They made it, they killed it. Plasma came too early as a competitor to CRT's and stayed there. When the LCD came out (worse in every aspect than the CRT) they marketed the LCD and forgot about plasma. Now everybody is happy to have a shitty colour (16 bits) LCD in their house some of them (full*) HD. The LED's have improved the colours a little but there is a long way until they reach the levels of CRT's from the same prize. Of course you can buy good LCD monitors but they are very expensive (see apple) and the picture quality is still no better than on a good CRT.

I'm still looking for those 16 Miliosn colours which i've lost when my CRT died.

--
* marketing improved over the years: "HD ready" became "HD" and "HD" became "Full HD"

Usually the controller breaks or the motor driver (Fireball :) ). And the usual fix is to buy a second hand drive of the same model and replace the electronic board on your hard drive.

Lately when I use Google Maps I often get a crappy "new look" user interface. It has all the signs of "change for the sake of change" and I find it very hard to figure out where all the options are (many are hidden).

The original Maps (and street view) interfaces were pretty good. I wish the original team would just keep on making incremental improvements.

I think you can buy the same thing with eSATA if that concerns you. And most corrupted backups can be prevented with some good habits. Calculate checksums, generate parchives, really do anything more than copy and forget.

Zafiro, the link is fine. Fatphil appears to have assumed the unrequested role of Pipedot Idiot Troll in Residence. Just ignore his inanity. Maybe he will go away.

It is not good. It redirects:

"""
$ HEAD 'http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/794-ways-in-which-buzzfeed-reminds-us-of-impending-death.html?src=twr&_r=1&referrer='
...
Client-Warning: Redirect loop detected (max_redirect = 7)
"""

And here's the redirect:
"""
$ echo -e 'GET http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/794-ways-in-which-buzzfeed-reminds-us-of-impending-death.html?src=twr&_r=1&referrer= HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | nc mobile.nytimes.com 80
HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
Server: Varnish
x-r: 2
location: http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?mobile=1&URI=http%3A%2F%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fmobile.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F07%2F06%2Fmagazine%2F794-ways-in-which-buzzfeed-reminds-us-of-impending-death.html%3Fsrc%3Dtwr%26_r%3D2%26referrer%3D
"""

The link to the NYT is good - just checked it myself from another computer.

How embarassing. s/lead/led/

Well, if you're interested in the onion parody,
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/06/clickhole_the_onion_s_new_site_is_more_than_a_buzzfeed_parody.html
lead me to:
http://www.clickhole.com/

I just get a login redirect.

For only $1000-$2000.
Could have had on-site and cloud backups for an order of magnitude less. For HDD or SSD

Also I would add that since buzzfeed and such sites frequently take content from others without proper attribution, they may not always be around...

I don't think we're in any kind of danger of being irrelevant. These kinds of websites regroup a technical audience that cares deeply about a particular subject, so that they can have (hopefully) enlightening conversations and learn about the latest discoveries in their field. That is a completely different mission objective than a website which, the summary admits, is basically all over the place with extremely shallow content. http://buzzfeedminusgifs.tumblr.com This website does a good job of showing just what we're dealing with here...

Just look at pipedot. It doesn't have a huge community, but it doesn't have to. There's still quality content in here. This site is "threatened" by buzzfeed the same way indie games are "threatened" by AAA games: not at all since they address different audiences.

That is, until site owners decide they want to chase the big crowd. But that's not because the site doesn't work, it's because the owner has dollar signs in his eyes.

swap the platters to a new drive case & hardware in a cleanroom.

So...when your spinning disk motor breaks how do you plan on recovering your data? Oh, backups? Cool, did you know that backups work just as well with SSDs?

The problem with flash drives is that the information is encrypted with a key known only by the drive. So when this key is lost: bye bye data. Until those drives become more reliable i will stay away from them.

I've been really wondering about what happens when USB2 and USB3 meet. I've read many reviews telling of corrupted and lost data where the common factor seems to be mixing USB2 and USB3. Not what you want to experience with backups!!

I like the little cases -- seems to me they'd do at least a little shock absorption in the event of leaping off the shelf.

I bought one of those docks (different make) back when they were fairly new, but it never did agree to work. No idea what its issue is. Friend got the same one and it worked fine. I guess I'm just lucky!

What I've kinda been thinking of doing is having a whole pile of HDs more or less enclosed and all with USB connectors on a hub, makes 'em all accessable pretty much on demand. Hadn't occurred to me to use a dedicated cabinet, tho -- might be easier to set up for cooling and cables than, say, using an old PC case.

BTW the RSS feed does not contain any links to Pipedot, only links pointing at TFAs.

Ah, of course, I'm being stupid. Actually, what threw me off was the image associated with this article - looks like a pretty thick component relative to the thickness of your average "ultra-book" these days.

(bring back netbooks, goddammit!)

32 layers at 40 nanometers per layer is still very thin. :)

Interesting article but I realized I don't know much about the subject. I had to look up NAND:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_gate talks about the digital logic circuit, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory shows how it's used in solid state storage. OK, now I get it.

Looks like this would make devices thicker, no?

If google had just made it open to anyone, it would have turned into facebook. But, they left it invite only while myspace and later facebook were open to the world. Invite only services only work for open systems ( read email) or for services without competitors. Orkut wasn't open and had plenty of competition.

I look out the windows and I can read the gauge cluster.

What kind of car has the gauges mounted outside?

I have a file server (old computer stuffed with a few HDs), the important parts of it are backed up on the backup system with is just a Cubieboard with a 2,5" 2To HD attached to it. Also /etc and /home/.Mail of other computers are backed up there.
For the things I "work" on, they are version controlled (there is a subversion server too on the Cubieboard), so that makes a kind of backup (one with history on the svn server, several others without history on each computer where I do svn updates from time to time.

There are many weak points in this system. I do not do any offline backup/archive because I am too lazy and for the reasons below. So almost everything is online all the time and could be destroyed by a major trouble on the electrical network. Well, I hope that as they are in different parts of the house, on different electrical cables, on different UPS, there is a chance that at least one survives.

I do not feel very confident with offline backups either.
I have seen too many HDs which fail at the moment you power them on after a long time without being used.
CDs/DVDs degrade too quickly.
I may like tapes but althought tapes are cheap, tape drives are unbelievably expensive (and if it breaks, you need to find another drive compatible with your tapes, and that drive should be compatible with your new computer; it reminds me I still have ZIP disks somewhere around, but even if I could find the drive, there is no more // port on current computers; you see the kind of mess it can become in the future).
I considered Glacier and such, but the awfully complex pricing seems designed to screw you (and with automated scripts, it is easy to make huge mistakes), and depending on your internet connection, it can be very long to perform your backups (especially if you encounter transfer errors) and very long to recover data when you need it.

I've had real-time driving data streaming ever since I started driving. I look out the windows and I can read the gauge cluster. No hack required.

If this NSA shit keeps up, I'd bet money that something like FIDONet is the future! I still visit the Electronic Chicken BBS once in a while, usually by Telnet, just for fun. Still a great place. Found it via Synchronet's list of BBSes.

By the way, one fun thing I did was to visit it on my Psion 5MX (http://therandymon.com/index.php?/171-The-Psion-5-For-Writers-on-the-Move.html - my page about the Psion, not the Chicken session). The Psion had a decent serial terminal app and it was a pretty easy thing to dial up using the modem and access the site via that terminal. Cool nerd self gratification, if nothing else!

Long-term Economic Grand All-region Locomotion? (LEGAL). A stretch, I know. I suck at this.

Interesting how the leaders in the field suck at this. Washington DC has pretty crappy public transport - a limited underground metro system that purposely avoids the Georgetown University area (that was a bone thrown to the Cab lobby, who makes great money in that neighborhood), and a hub-and-spoke network that makes it pretty hard to move around the spoke without first going into the city. New York tried banning cars and Bloomberg took a beating because of it.

Frikking Denver? How the hell they come out front in an intellectual issue like this. Not that Denver doesn't have smart people, it's just not the kind of place you expect to see this kind of innovation.

I've been surprised by how often I see lua crop up in different places as an extension language. World of Warcraft mods, nmap scripting, nginx integration just to name a few. I've never had much luck learning languages just to learn them, but I find lua already involved with many things I already use, so I can do interesting and useful things with it.

Popular Other Transit (POT).

For a true emergency only backup, Glacier's prices are fantastic. Pipe a tarball to your favorite encryption tool before upload if you're concerned about security. There are some tools you can use to automate the uploads, but it isn't a turnkey solution at all yet.

I'm always amused to see the shock when BBS's are thrown up these days...

Synchronet is alive and well, and while FIDONet, Dovenet, etc are a shadow of their former selves, they are still functional. Check out www.synchro.net for more info (afaik, it is the only still actively developed BBS package).

I don't really use a computer at home; I have kids so have little tree time meaning most of my "computer" use is actually just using a smartphone or tablet.

As I have kids I have a lot of photos and videos, taken from my phone and backed up online automatically. Occasional I copy them over to a netbook to free up space on the device.

I'm pretty judicious about what I keep, but I've still got stuff i'd hate to lose: scanned versions of all important documents in case of fire (birth certificate, marriage license, passports, etc.), the full manuscripts to seven editions of three books I've written, offsite backups of my websites and their databases (in case of disaster on those servers), and some correspondence, plus every resume I've ever produced. But the biggest treasure is my photo collection - I went full digital in about 2005 and scanned all my old physical photos and then destroyed the originals. On the same list goes old genealogical pics I've scanned and incorporated into a family tree book, and some other basically priceless stuff. I'm at about 200G of data, I think.

I do monthly CD or DVD burns, each starting with the present and going back as far as the medium will reach, so each disk overlaps the previous by a stretch, allowing for multiple copies of that stuff in the middle. Once a year I take the disks to my folks' place for offsite storage. I know CDs and DVDs have a shelf life too, but it's better than nothing. I also religiously backup my machines to external hard drives - the Mac is the "official storage place" for all important data, so it's the device I'd grab if I had to quickly abandon the house, or something. I back up twice to two separate external USB drives, and store the two drives in different locations.

But I just got a NAS, and that's forcing me to change everything. First of all I've added a lot of ISOs and MKV video and so on - I've decided not to back any of it up. If I lose my movie collection, who cares? But now the NAS is the central, official repository for everything I have in digital form. It's FreeNAS with 4, 1TB WesternDigital Red drives in a RAID-Z formation. And I'm experimenting now with how to back up what's on the NAS. Pulling data off the NAS over my network to, say, the Mac, where I replicate it to an external USB drive is turning out to be slow given my crappy router and wireless network. I'm experimenting with mounting the external drives to the NAS itself and running a cron script that mounts the drive, rsyncs the data, and then unmounts. Then I just have to remember to attach a drive every Sunday evening at 5PM or something like that.

I'm lastly tempted to get an account with something like rsync.net or something to automatically rsync to an offsite server. But I'm feeling too cheap to pay a monthly fee for the service and kind of reticent to put stuff like my passport scans on someone else's server. And the price per gig for offsite storage of my photos, for example, is a bit much.

Still experimenting here, but in the mean time I still plan on burning monthly disks. They've saved my bacon on many, many occasions!

That's awesome if it's true (I hope it is!). But i'd heard it was the name of the Google developer who created it.

To be fair to your father, I think that ADA has improved in the past couple of decades (to toss out a wild guess). Certainly it improved a lot in the 90's. I had kind of a crappy time with it in the late 80's. Beta compiler with bugs. Very frustrating.

I don't care for the language because it doesn't subclass the way that I like.

Still, it has a bunch of really cool features, and as a learning tool it has a lot to offer.

• Mukii Zipo Hard Drive Sleeve - Not really required, but protects the bare drive a bit.
• INEO USB3 Hard Drive Dock - Pretty Aluminum base, 100MB+ transfer speed, unfortunately only works up to 3TB (my 4TB WD Red drives do not work!)

The most common model of this type of hard drive dock is the Thermaltake BlacX line. The original models all have over 600 reviews at newegg. The updated USB3 version has fewer favorable reviews, but many other manufacturers have now come out with similar products.

I like that last idea of yours... can you point us at some specifics (eg. site that sells 'em) so we know what to look for? cuz I hadn't heard of a basically "bare shelf" system available commercially.

(Tho I have done the "several HDs scattered around the desk" method...)

I figured it was the only pronounceable five-letter dot-com they could find that wasn't registered.

I'd read many complaints about ADA, but I started taking a tutorial recently and found much of it made more sense to me, in-terms of structure and how everything must be clearly and extensively defined. I also found open source compilers easy to find for my Windows and OpenBSD (gcc) platforms.

What had spurred me (besides my fathers taunt that ADA would make me pull my hair out) was first, an article i read* from an informal study of programming students progression as observed by the teachers - they found that students who learned ADA first rather than later, had a higher likelihood of succeeding in subsequent classes, and better practices and understanding of what they are writing. Second, the realization that ADA is still widely used in critical applications; isn't going anywhere; and its always good to know the odd language or skill, that nobody else is 'interested' in (ie: not cool)

Out of practicality, I am back to learning C for the time being, but next on my list-to-learn

http://libre.adacore.com/- GNAT GPL, and GNAT GPS (multiplatform IDE)

*i'll try to find the article, i hope i didn't butcher the jist too much

Sorry, reading your post again I realize that I got nostalgic and did not answer it :-D Orkut was like facebook, but simpler. Photo sharing, and open talk in communities or in the user's scrapbook. Online chat, for example, was implemented a lot later, we used "private messages" like email.

Nothing in geocities or Myspace is comparable to Orkut.Yes here in Brazil it was like "what, you don't have Orkut yet? Let me invite you right away!" (yes, it was invite only on the first year or two, like gmail).It still has/had a bunch of people (that I knew of, and active) at least a year ago when I finally left it, closing my account.About 90% of them were also on facebook, at this time (except me heh) so the migration went smooth. The best feature were the communities, all very localized, people even got upset when "the gringos" started showing up. Still a lot active when I left. I categorized it as good auto-updated contacts list at first, then it got crowded and annoying, too much updates... like Facebook. I remember people making that comparison.In the end with people posting on Facebook and coming to Orkut for the communities, it was a social ghost town and just a dumbed down forum for whoever couldn't keep up with the alternatives, and very good at it. A lot of people will still miss it.

Twenty years ago, I began saving videos and clips that I downloaded from the Internet. Back then, dial-up modems and crappy video codecs meant that anything you downloaded took days and was a great accomplishment once successfully transferred. Obviously, I wanted to save the downloads, so I started looking for archiving options.

Hard drives back then where far too small, so I started to burn the videos off to CD media. The blank CDRs where cheap and could be bought by the spindle. A few years later, DVD burners became available and were a welcome upgrade (1 DVD could hold about 7 CDs worth of data) All in all, I burned approximately 600 CDs and 400 DVDs. Many of the CDs have started to deteriorate - the thin foil on the top of the disk just flakes off. The DVD media has protective plastic layers on both sides and have endured a little better, but read errors still occur on all of these 10+ year old optical disks.

Spinning 3.5" hard drives are the new best bet for large archives. I could store an entire spindle-worth of CDR disks on a single large capacity hard drive. Of course, loosing one of these hard drives to a failure made relying on a single copy a significant risk. Nearly 100% of all hard drives (around 20 drives) that I purchased with capacities between 80GB and 1TB failed within 5 years. I recovered from nearly all failures by simply storing 2 copies of all the data. Each drive was purchased in pairs - one drive as the master while the other was an offline full copy backup.

I tried creating large arrays of hard drives, but there are significant limitations and costs to doing this in a single system. After experimenting with a number of different setups with large 3ware raid cards as well smaller consumer raid cards, I've come to the conclusion that an ideal system should not include more than about 8 hard drives per computer. Trying to find which "bad disk" is spewing SATA errors to the console in a 16 drive array is just not fun. Scaling storage beyond 8 drives should involve a second computer and a network filesystem over Ethernet.

But what if you don't need all of the data online all the time? Instead of keeping all the disks spinning all the time, why not place the drives into external USB enclosures and only turn them on when needed? This system worked great for me - up to about 20 drives. You see, USB doesn't have enough power to run a 3.5" hard drive. So 20 external USB enclosures + 20 wall wart power adapters + 20 power cables + 20 USB cables + daisy chaining multiple USB hubs and their associated power adapters = one giant rats nest of wires. I tried to salvage this system with a custom made wooden cabinet with 18 front mounted switches, an series of internal USB hubs, and individual cubby-holes for each drive. It worked, but the low speed of USB2 (less than 20MB/s) as well as incompatibility of the external USB enclosures on drives larger than 2TB has caused me to abandon this system.

My latest attempt at archival is simply storing caddy-less hard drives on the shelf. It's so simple, I have to wonder why I bothered with any of the other approaches. Now that hard drives have ditched the IDE ribbon cable for SATA connectors, a new breed of USB enclosures have sprung up. These devices are USB3 (nearly as fast as the drive itself), can easily be upgraded (to support multi-terabyte drives), and simply accept a bare drive into its slot at the top of the unit. Increasing storage capacity is simply a matter of buying another drive or two. I did, however, end up purchasing several dozen hard drive sleeves (just a few dollars each) to protect the drives from dust and minor vibrations while on the shelf.

It was slang for "orgasms".

Hmm, I had never even heard of Orkut. The webpage, of course, is now just a redirect to a support.google.com page about the shutdown notice. A quick trip to the wayback machine shows a standard looking google login dialog and not much else.

For desktop:

1. C
2. C++

For web:

1. Javascript
2. PHP or Python

For mobile:

1. Java (Android)
2. Swift (iOS)

The only time I would recommend starting with JavaScript is if that's all you ever want to do - write (crappy) JS code for web pages.

If you want to learn to program, then I'd recommend starting with something simple and then adding to it. I started my college education with Pascal, and I can't think of a reason that was a bad choice then, or would be now. But very soon thereafter I did some of:
* C
* ADA
* Prolog
* lisp
* Assembly (68000)

These days I would probably recommend starting with something like pascal - simple, no (c style) pointers, no OO. And then
* C (understand the machine)
* Maybe some assembly - but maybe not
* Something OO (Java, python, ruby)
* Something crazy (Prolog)
* Something DI (maybe javascript)

You could do a lot worse than http://pragprog.com/book/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks once you have the fundamentals.