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Rise of the Super-High-Res Notebook Display 333

Posted by timothy
from the closer-closer dept.

Comment: Re:You're buying an extended warranty (Score 1) 270

by Amouth (#45600811) Attached to: For First Three Years, Consumer Hard Drives As Reliable As Enterprise Drives

The other main point i see between consumer drives and enterprise is the behavior. Especially when the drive encounters a bad sector.

Consumer drive encounters a bad sector, it retries for a long time and then eventual remaps it. In the mean time it has stopped talking to the raid controler and gets dropped from the array as a failed drive.

Enterprise drive encounters a bad sector, it relays the write fail and bad sector to the raid controller who then remaps and reissues a write command. Drive never becomes unresponsive and never gets dropped from the array.

In one case you have a degraded raid array and the overhead of a rebuild putting data at risk, on the other you have a log entry/notification of a drive starting to degrade and very limited risk.

Enterprise drives allow you to manage your storage arrays and handle small failures on your time, consumer drives force you to do it when ever even the smallest errors occur.

This matters a lot when you get to larger arrays where rebuild times can be in the days and not hours..

Sure it's just a firmware/behavior difference, but until they allow you to control that on consumer drives, or allow you to flash consumer drives with raid friendly firmwares, it would be unwise to use consumer drives in hardware driven arrays.

This firm can get away with it because they don't use normal raid striping, they use a mixture of software raid distribution logic (reminding me of something akin to ZFS) where you have better separation and control over how things react to minor failures and behavioral differences.

But for most people, we use hardware driven arrays, and in that world enterprise drives win over consumer drives.

Comment: Re:Common knowledge (Score 1) 270

by Amouth (#45598775) Attached to: For First Three Years, Consumer Hard Drives As Reliable As Enterprise Drives

Source on the tanker claim?

Also FYI the octane requirement can be related to timing advance, where a lower-compression turbocharged engine with more advanced timing would need higher octane gas to make longer burns from each spark (higher octane gas burns longer than lower octane gas). The earlier spark sets off a longer-burn time of gas timed to the timing, needing the longer-burn ability of the 92+ octane. An old simple truck with 0 BDC timing would be happy with 87 octane, where a newer engine with 15 BDC timing advance would be better with 92+ octane.

While you are correct your numbers are off.. i haven't seen a car thats less than 10 years old with timing at 0 BDC or retard.. a naturally aspirated 90's miata runs 36 advance, and you can safely take that to 39 advance on 93oct and into the low 40's with 100oct

Comment: Re:Let me guess (Score 2) 294

by Amouth (#45466367) Attached to: How Munich Abandoned Microsoft for Open Source

I've only found a few with the same functionality as exchange, and i can say that they are not free. while they have "community" versions, to get full exchange functionality you end up having to pay licencing fees to access and use it, and in the end it is borderline cost effective vs exchange. (yes the licenses are cheaper but support and experienced techs aren't)

Comment: Re:Let me guess (Score 4, Interesting) 294

by Amouth (#45465995) Attached to: How Munich Abandoned Microsoft for Open Source

I think you are thinking about the Exchange server filesystem api. for exchange server 2003 and performance reasons exchange would replace the file system io with a special customized for exchange version. A few competitors complained that this was unfair, i think the final verdict was if they wanted "fair" they where free to write their own drop in replacement for the filesystem i/o

Comment: Re:Great for CC scammers (Score 3, Insightful) 222

by Amouth (#45427618) Attached to: Startup Touts All-in-One Digital Credit Card

I don't think the issue is so much with having a skimmer. Right now if i show up with a card that doesn't look like an actual CC the person at the counter will think something is up. But if this gets going and has blessings of the CC makers, and looks official the teller will just say "hey he has that neat new card" and not care that you are no infact using a skimmer.

Comment: Re:"three-pronged trailer hitch"? (Score 1) 526

by Amouth (#45388799) Attached to: Man In Tesla Model S Fire Explains What Happened

I'm sorry but i just don't trust those things for anything above the lightest load.. the way they are made ALL of the load is on the weld from the ball to draw bar. and honestly the welds look questionable.. especially when the ball and the drawbar look to be different grades of steel..

There are so many things i see when i look at that, no way i'm towing with one..

Comment: Re:Did they take into account... (Score 1) 108

by Amouth (#45328041) Attached to: Fuel Cell-Powered Data Centers Could Cut Costs and Carbon

NASA uses RTGs which are HORRID when it comes to efficiency. BUT they are extremely simple, reliable, and have a very long very predictable lifespan and usability. Also do to it being on another world they don't have to worry about it's interaction with people or even the environment.

RTG's are the exact opposite to any power problem on this little world.

Comment: Re:One day battery life. (Score 1) 365

meanwhile, some mechanical watches of decades ago *never* needed anything because they were self-winding from wrist movement. ah progress...

funny you say that, i'm currently wearing one that is a little over 40 years old.. never have to bother with it, always works..

I want my watch to tell me the time, that is what a watch is for, if i wanted it to be something else, it would be something else.

Comment: Re:why? (Score 3) 372

by Amouth (#45237051) Attached to: NYC's 250,000 Street Lights To Be Replaced With LEDs By 2017

Actually this is a simple math problem.

Two options:
Replace all at once
Replace as they burn out

Either way i have to physically replace each bulb.

It is more cost efficient to replace them all at once in a sequential pattern, rather than one at a time randomly, Thats because the cost to replace is the same, but i'm minimizing my travel distance & times as i'm going dispatch->pole->pole->dispatch rather than dispatch->pole-dispatch->pole->dispatch. You would be surprised but travel times are normally the highest impacting item when it comes to wrench time measurements. Also to add to it, if i wait and replace as they fail i'm paying X for electricity over that time, where if i replace it now i pay Y which is lower than X. The power savings is a fringe benefit compared to labor, but non the less it is factored in.

The biggest question that comes to mind for this type of decision is the time value of money. I can spend X now or X+1 from Now till then. which one is lower cost overall between now and then isn't always a straightforward answer.
