Entropy1024: Four Lions: A film on a very serious subject that has some seriously funny moments. Christopher Morris is a genius. But is a wookiee a bear?
Entropy1024: The Disappearance of Alice Creed: Shows u can make a good film with very little money & actors. Shame on u Hollywood http://imdb.to/9wVnBf
Entropy1024: Chilean miners have requested a picture of Elvis. I guess fears for their sanity were well founded. Sounds like they have already lost it.
Entropy1024: On my own at work. I'm so ronery, So ronery and sadry arone, There's no one, just me onry, Sitting on my rittle throne http://bit.ly/4gK5BZ
Entropy1024: OMG, this is truly frightening. How many nukes do you think have been detinated in the world? 50, 100, more? MUCH MORE! http://bit.ly/9G4cQn
Entropy1024: Apple patents something that's already been invented! I have used Nokia Sports Tracker for the last 2 years, same deal http://bit.ly/asGf0b
Inside your PC is probably a single hard drive. It may be partitioned into a couple or more sections but it’s still one single physical drive. If this drive fails you can lose all the data on that device. Not a good place to be in. A little known fact is that hard drives have minor failures all the time, a sector will fail but the drive can detect when this is about to happen and swap it out for a good sector on the fly.
This is why backups are so important. However running backups can be missed, take time to do and generally happen infrequently. If the data on your drive is of great value or you want a performance improvement you may want to consider setting up a RAID system.
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Independent Disks. This is a method of using multiple drives to store your data. The way the data is stored depends on the raid system, these come in the form of numbers; 0,1,5,6,10 & 50 etc. We will take a look at the differences in a moment.
Each RAID system has a minimum number of drives required to run and has various Space Efficiencies (SE) which is a figure from 0 to 1. 1 being 100% of the drive 0.5 being 50%, 0.66 being 66% etc.
Possibly more important is the Fault Tolerance (FT) which is how many drives can fail without loss of data. Depending on how safe you want your data to be and how much budget you have for hard drives (and physical space in your PC, however you can set up an external RAID system) will have a bearing on what system you opt for. So what are the option and their advantages and disadvantages?
RAID 0 (Min Drives = 2, SE=1, FT=0)
RAID 0 is a bit of an oxymoron as it does not offer any redundancy. It simply links a cluster of drives together as one drive. So if you have three 120 Gig drives in RAID 0 your PC treats them as one large 360 Gig drive. None of the data stored on these drives has any redundancy.
On the surface of it you could argue ‘What’s the point?’. The only real advantage is that as data is spread across multiple drives the read and write times are faster. This is achieved as each block of data, generally64KB in size, is sequentiality written across each drive in the array. So when you save your file it is distributed across the drives. This system can be used where speed of access is more important than security of the data.
This setup has the maximum space efficiency of 1. With three 120 Gig drives you get to store all possible 360 Gigs of data. However if any one drive should fail you are in trouble.
RAID 1 (Min Drives = 2, SE=0.5, FT=1)
This system requires two drives and mirrors all the data between them. So if you have two 120 Gig drives they each have the same data on them. Therefore any single drive failure is recoverable.
This also helps read speeds (as in RAID 0) as data can be read from drive A whilst drive B is sent to get the next bit of data. Write speeds are however slightly slower as it has to write each bit of data twice.
The space efficiency for this system is 1/n (where ‘n’ is the number of drives used). So with two drives you get a space efficiency of 0.5. ie half of the total storage is available, the other half is backup.
The fault tolerance is n-1. In this case 1 or 1 disk.
So in summary with RAID 1 you get 100% backup with a 50% reduction in useable drive space.
RAID 5 (Min Drives = 3, SE=0.66), FT=1)
RAID 5 uses a minimum of 3 drives in the array. We now have parity being stored as well as raw data. Just like RAID 1; any single drive can fail and the data is still safe.
Space efficency is 1-(1/n), so with 3 drives this is 0.66
Fault tolerance is 1 disk.
So unlike RAID 1 this RAID 5 system gives you slightly more usable space, but does require an extra drive.
RAID 6 (Min Drives = 4, SE=0.5, FT=2)
In many respects this works in the same way as RAID 5 but with dual parity blocks for each data block. This level gives you a fault tolerance of 2 disks. So is very reliable indeed. It has a space efficeny of 1-(2/n). On the minimum setup of 4 drives this is an SE of 0.5.
There are many more RAID setups but the above ones are probably the most common. Although RAID systems offer varying degrees of protection against data loss, it is still not a true replacement for backups. I like to backup all my important data to DVDs once a month, these disks are then archived in a safe location. I know the data cannot be accidentaly erased and are not effected by electromagnetism or damp etc.
However having RAID 1 or higher on your PC does make your data safer and faster to access. Now that most modern motherboards support RAID and with the price of drives so low it makes sense to implement.
When computers were the size of small houses and there were very few in operation; most people accessed them via remote terminals, either in the same building or over large distances. These dumb terminals were effectively simple input/output devices and therefore needed very little processing power. All the main work was stored and executed by the mainframe and the results fed out to the remote terminal.
This had the drawback that at the time connecting to these mainframes over distance was very slow and expensive. As computers became smaller and cheaper you could have the computer in your own home or office and the need for these terminals ended. Now it appears that we are, in a way, heading back to this old way of working. For example; the Google Goggles app works by you photographing a work or art or logo etc and it then sends this scan (Or probably some hash of it) to Google who compare it against their library of images till it finds a match then it sends you back the result. So snap a photo of a painting and seconds later you have all the information about it you could need. This also works for translating foreign text and barcodes etc. Shazam is a sort of audio version of Goggles, if you are listening to some music and don’t know who it is, run Shazam app on your phone and it listens for about 8 seconds then returns the track title, Artist, Album etc.
The important thing to remember here is that your phone is doing very little work, the phone app is a thin client, it just sends the data to a server and displays the results. The server is doing all the hard work at a remote site from you. So mobile devices are able to perform tasks well above their processing and storage capability, it also helps on battery consumption as all the power hungry elements are handled in the cloud.
A great service I use is Google Docs. This enables you to create documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations & drawings etc. It’s nowhere near as complex and flexible as Microsoft word but for day to day use it’s fine. Your web browser is used as a dumb terminal simply inputting and displaying results. Even the files themselves are stored remotely, which is good. ’So what’s the advantage of that over local storage of your files’ you may ask? There are three main advantages, as files are in the cloud you can get them from anywhere you have access to the Internet, secondly all backup is taken care for you. Thirdly the documents can be accessed from any platform, you are not tied to Windows, Mac or Linux etc.
Treks Cloud City of Stratos. Not the real cloud.
So where is this magical place where all this work is carried out and stored? The cloud. It’s not one place but could be anywhere and indeed more than one place. A service I have used is Jungle Disk which backs up data on your PC to servers that mirror this data on other servers in various location round the world. This distribution of your data makes your valued files quite safe.
One worrying issue with storing your data in the cloud is that the provider of this service could have access to it and if someone hacks your logon details they will have access. When I write a document on GDocs I’m sure Google trawl the document for information they may find useful to target me better for services or products. You sometimes have the option to encrypt such as with Jungle Disk. Before the data is uploaded it’s encrypted so nobody can see what the data is except you, also during the transfer the data is encrypted again using TLS. When you download the files it’s decrypted. Other services may not have built in encryption but you can always use a third party solution such as AXCrypt. It’s very strong encryption with a key-file option & it’s free.
Privacy issues are a major concern for me but as with anything else in life you have to weigh the benefits with the possible problems. Having all my notes, contacts, calendar info, email, documents, music, photos etc available pretty much anywhere at anytime outweigh the possible problems. Where possible use encryption, just make sure you use high entropy passwords and use different passwords for every site. Managing this can become a problem unless you use services such as LastPass which stores all your passwords in the cloud under one master password. Now because this one master password is the ‘keys to the kingdom’ it’s worth substantially beefing up your protection of it with multi factor authentication.
All this cloud computing means that the device you are using to connect can be pretty simple, essentially just running a web browser or small app then all the hard work is carried out remotely. Obviously one main problem with this setup is connection to the cloud. A few years ago we were paying for wireless connections to the Internet on a per byte basis and if you were not careful you could quickly clock up a large bill for your cloud computing. Now we tend to have much cheaper deals and with the speed increase has made cloud computing a much more attractive prospect. If you are connecting from home on a broadband circuit then speeds are blindingly fast.
I started moving to the cloud in a big way about a year ago. But before that I have, since 2005, had all my photos in the cloud courtesy of Flickr. This blog is based in the cloud, I wrote this article using WordPress online. All my mail had been web based for many years and I found myself using GDocs more and more. In 2009 my cell phone data charges were at a stage where it was fast enough to cloud compute from a phone and the costs were minimal.
So what happens when we don’t have access to the net? Some programs such as Evernote keep a local cache of your work so a loss of connection is not noticed. With Google gears some of there services work offline then sync with the cloud when they see a connection again.
HTML 5 has provisions for offline services built into it and this will help a lot. I really hope that Google Maps will let you download a country or area for it’s navigation. Recently whilst driving in the UK countryside my phone kept losing a data connection and the navigation simply stops working. It’s also rather annoying that when you go abroad that’s when all this cloud stuff is at it’s most useful. Navigation, translation, web browsing & email etc.
Unfortunately because of data roaming charges I end up being scared to use my cell for fear of returning home to some huge bill. You tend to end up seeking out free Wi-Fi hotspots and binging on data before having to move away from this oasis of data back out into this, literally, foreign land, like some Borg separated from the collective.
Browsers are now almost becoming the operating system because of this cloud based approach. This is taken to the limits with Google’s Chrome OS which is essentially JUST a browser. This could be the best solution for you parents or grandparents as these units SHOULD be maintenance free. There is no local software to maintain, no viruses to worry about. Just boot up the unit, which should be very fast, and the browser launches and you are set to go. It is odd to think that as we advance in processing power the day to day devices we use may get dumber and dumber. At the moment most cloud based apps are not as good as installed ones, however services such as GDocs are getting better all the time and some services such as Photoshop.com are truly amazing and show the real potential of cloud computing.
My old cell phone, a Nokia 82, lasted me 2 years and is still a very capable phone, but with the Symbian60Operating System (OS) reaching the end of life and the appeal of a large touch screen display with much better web browsing became too much and I had to upgrade.
Years ago buying a phone was a process of seeing which one suited your needs best, it did not particularly matter what company made it as these were the days before apps. Nowadays I tend to find the decision is more Operating System or platform based, at least when buying a smartphone. It’s a bit like many years ago when buying a computer. Should you get an Amiga, Amstrad, PC or Mac? Each had advantages and disadvantages, but once you made your choice you had to live with it for a while.
Most of the main platforms ask you for some email details when you first run the phone. So if you have a WP7 unit it will ask you for a Live account then it makes it easy for you to sync with the Windows Cloud, Android asks you for GMail logon, Nokia an Ovi login and I am guessing Apple asks for an Apple email account. Then the phone will setup really nicely for these associated servers in the cloud. However cross platform may be tricky. I am a heavy Google user and have up till now had Nokia phones and this has worked with the help of 3rd party apps. But if you have a rival phone to cloud setup you may experience problems. Something else to think about when buying a new smart phone.
As far as I can see there are 3 platforms in the running, the omnipresent iOS from Apple, Nokia’s Symbian^3 or Google’s Android. It will be interesting to see what Windows Phone 7 does when it finally gets launched, but for now we can ignore it. Some early WP7 review can be seen here.
Nokia N8
The New N8 from Nokia which uses Symbian^3 looks extremely interesting and has a superb camera, sporting Carl Zeiss optics and a real flash, I am also familiar with Nokia and most of my past phones have been from them. However Symbian^3 is very new and I don’t like to buy any first generation device plus there are not a lot of apps out for it. You are taking a bit of a risk with this phone, if the new OS fails to entice developers you could end up with a smart phone with no apps. If this happens you have a very expensive phone that’s no better than a standard phone. I think Nokia have screwed up big time in being so late out with this new OS. Had they of done it 2 or 3 years ago the marketplace could be very different. Hopefully they will succeed, but we wont know for a year or two. It’s a real shame because I think technically the N8 is the best phone out of the group I was considering.
The iPhone is very slick and has a HUGE app market and I think is the top selling phone worldwide. However I don’t like Apples iron clad, bolted down and closed approach to everything, they even reserve the right to disable apps remotely on YOUR phone. They vet any add on or application and sometimes reject an app for no good reason. Recently Apple has attacked Adobe’s Flash (rightly or wrongly) and does not allow it on there phones. OK Flash is a pig but a hell of a lot of sites run flash and by not including it you are limiting your ability to browse the web. Surely the end user should be able to make a choice on what to install on YOUR phone? Apple seem to treat their customers like children in this respect. It does not end with Flash, Apple have blocked quite a few apps saying it ‘Duplicates Functionality’. Most of the time they do this because they lose revenue by allowing this feature, not because it’s in the users best interest. There have been some reports of poor reception with iPhones, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. There have also been stories of these phones exploding which I’m sure is a small number, but instead of Apple being open about it they seem to be busy placing gag orders on people. Recently it came to light that the new iPhone has some reception problem if held a certain way. Apples response to this problem was not good, first they denied there is a problem, then they acknowledged it is a problem, but it’s the user that’s at fault, they are holding it wrong! Nice.
There is a solution, buy an iPhone bumper. It’s essentially a rubber band that wraps round the edge of your phone, yours for only £19 ($29)!!! However as the front & back of the new iPhone is glass it’s probably good to have some protection. Why not try this ghetto solution. Mind you, I am guessing that the kind of person to covet a phone made of glass that you can’t hold, won’t display most web sites properly & costs a shed load of money won’t find the £19 rubber band an extreme purchase either.
This whole closed system and the ‘My way or the highway’ approach puts me off of this company & it’s products. In the words of Princess Leia ‘The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers’.
Awesome Desire
AWESOM-O Robot
Then there is the Android OS, only a couple of years old now but growing rapidly, plus there is a wealth of phones out now using the Android OS. It’s also very Skynet Google friendly, as you would expect from Android. In fact, it is so Google orientated I would not recommend this platform to people who do not like Google. As I use Google Mail, Docs, Reader & Calendar etc it made sense to use this platform. Lastly it has a shed load of apps, pretty much anything you can think of is available in an easy to use app store. So that was the decision for going Android OS and the HTC Desire just seemed to be a very capable phone at a reasonable price, it was either that or the Evo. HTC Desire specs can be seen here.
The phone itself is very fast thanks to the 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, it zipps along and having now had the phone for 3 weeks it has never locked up on me once. I have had an application or 2 stop responding for a few seconds then the phone shuts it down. This has happened perhaps 4 or 5 times in total, so don’t consider that bad, especially as I tend to have a lot of apps running at once.
My Desire is running Android v2.1 AKA Eclair, for some reason version releases are named after delicious foods in alphabetical order, Mmmmm Doughnut. Android v2.2 AKA Froyo will be out soon and as if the phone was not fast enough already; then new release claims to be 2~4 times faster. In various tests this has been proven to be true, it also runs rings round the iPAD for speed.
Navigation is either by the optical trackball at the bottom center of the phone or via the touchscreen. The onscreen keyboard is a joy to use and I can get pretty fast at typing on it, I’m looking forward to testing Swype when it comes out to see if this enables me to type any quicker. The screen can be turned 90′ to enter landscape mode and typing with thumbs then is the way to go.
When you first enter your Google login details on the Desire it starts syncing contacts, Mail & Calendar information. This is superb, it works so very well that your phone and within seconds you are set to go. This process would have taken hours on an old phone, transferring and converting data via third party apps, ugh! Plus you would tend to end up with duplicate events, contacts etc. None of that here, just fast and pain free.
The AMOLED display on the Desire is gorgeous, it very bright and colours are very vibrant. The refresh rate is also very good, watching media on it is a real pleasure. In direct sunlight however it’s almost impossible to see the display, you really do need to seek out the shadows to use outside on a sunny day.
One of the main reasons for a new phone was to get a better web experience. As I am moving more cloud based my old N82 could not really hack it as the screen was too small and did not support touch. With the Desire’s large multi touch screen with a very capable browser, which also supports Flash, I think I have only come across one site that would not work properly. Even complex sites such as Sky news works very well on the browser.
Navigation is excellent and helped with a digital compass. The GPS locks up very quickly and with Google maps it’s hard to get lost. The turn by turn navigation is also excellent. The map zooms in when you get to a junction and shows you the turn on Street View, so you actually see the turn you need to make, way impressive. The voice is a bit robotic as it uses the inbuilt text to speech but this has the advantage of it being able to say much more than ‘in 500 meters take a left’, it now says ‘In 500 meters turn left into Goodge Street’ etc. Small thing but helps a lot. You can also talk to the unit and say ‘Navigate me to xxx’ and off it goes. As it has access to all the Google maps data you can pretty much tell it any destination of shop/restaurant/cinema etc and it will find it. It is however a shame you cant download the maps and use them offline. When I recently went to Sardinia I had to take my N82 which had TomTom. Had I of used the new phone it would have needed to download the maps over the air, and roaming charges make that infeasible.
The phone is very smart in how it handles media. It makes it a breeze to send a photo as a twitter or email etc. If you add a new app that can handle a photos, such as Evernote for example, next time you take a photo it will have Evernote added to the list of apps to send the image too. It also has neat tricks such as when the phone rings, as soon as you pick it up the ringer sound reduces. When the phone is up against your ear it turns the display off & if you flip the phone face down it will only vibrate and make no sound. Although not amazing these small features show how mature the Android system has become in that these small attentions to detail exist.
The camera on the Desire is OK but somewhat disappointing when compared to my old N82 which could produce some stunning images. The N82 also had a Xenon flash which made it great for use indoors, the Desire had a bright LED but is in no way a replacement for a proper flash. The face detection is a nice feature but it can take a while for it to work. I hate the fact that it uses the optical track ball for a shutter button. It’s totally in the wrong place. You naturally want to press something on the top right of the unit, not the back right. IMHO they should have flipped the camera viewer upside down so that the volume rocker would then be on the top right of the phone and that could be used to trigger the shutter. There is no front facing camera which is a shame, but not a great loss.
The phone has some lovely eye candy like the lens flare effect on the weather app, raindrops on screen if it’s raining. Live wallpapers are fun, you can have moving backgrounds such as long grass blowing in a breeze or some semi useful wallpapers such as a map showing your current location. I would imaging these will drain your battery faster so I have not played with them too much. In fact my biggest fear with Android phones was the battery life, they have had some bad press for endurance. I was however very pleased to find out that on a full charge the battery lasts approx 9~12 hours with a fair amount of use which is very good for such a powerful phone. If you are not using it much during the day I have gotten 16 hours out of it. This is WAY impressive for a smart phone with a huge bright and colourful display.
I bought 2 spare 1600 mAh batteries + charger & cable off eBay for £20. The spare battery easily fits in a wallet, so if ever I am on a long flight or journey where I can’t charge the phone I should get 3 days heavy use out of it before I need to recharge.
Another nice feature of this phone is that it has a standard MicroUSB connector for charging and data, so wherever there is a USB port you can charge your phone. If you have the cable of course.
I love the way the Desire handles data connections. If Wi-Fi is available it will use it, when not it backs off to Edge, GRPS or HSDPA. With a little app called Y5 – Battery this automatically senses where you are using the cell towers and turns Wi-Fi on if you are close to a known good Wi-Fi spot. Talking about apps; the Android Apps store works very well and is easy to use.
There are other features such as an FM radio, Video camera, Proximity sensor, Digital compass, Ambient light sensor, Accelerometer, Bluetooth, 3.5mm Stereo headphone jack etc. Pretty much anything you would need on a phone is here. There is a slot inside for a MicroSD card and it can take up to 32gig. It’s a shame the card slot is not on the edge of the phone for easier access, you have to pop the back off to get to it. The phone also comes with some headphones with a neat remote to pause/jump forward or backwards a track & answer calls.
Just like the iPhone there appears to be an app for anything you can think off, here is a list (in no particular order) of apps I have found very useful:
Doubletwist. Loads onto your PC and phone and manages all kinds of media. If the phone cant play the file on the PC it will automaticaly get transcoded into something it can.
Remember the milk. Useful to-do list that is location aware. So it will remind you about something when you get to a certain location.
Listen. A Google podcatcher. Simple but elegant program. Like the options to only update if on Wi-Fi and on external power.
Y5 – Battery. Program that turns your Wi-Fi on when you get within range of a known network, then off again when you are out of range, thus saving battery life.
I summary if you need a smartphone and already have a Google email account then Android is a superb platform with a whole host of phones to chose from.
First off; what I am about to say, in a no doubt rambling fashion, is certainly going to be much better summed up by a famous Bill Hicks statement at the end of this blog post. So I won’t be upset if you ‘skip to the end’ here and just go to the quote.
I hate advertising in all it’s hideous forms, but especially loud, in your face, TV ads. BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE! TAKE TWO BOTTLES INTO THE SHOWER! HAD AN ACCIDENT? YOU CANT GET BETTER THAN A QUICK FIT FITTER. Yes, at some point you may need to advertise a new product to let people know it’s there, but they should ‘A’ be honest and ‘B’ not keep on going on about it. If it’s good we will come back and buy more, products or services will spread by word of mouth. It makes me suspicious if I see a shed load of ads for one product, if they need to promote it so much and spend all that money convincing us to buy it, whats wrong with it? Seriously. If its any good won’t it sell itself?
Many years ago I worked for an advertising agency, it was during the recession of 1990 so you had to take what jobs you could find. I used to edit together things called stealamatics (creating a commercial from films & TV to get an idea of how an ad may look) for creatives. Creatives are the people who ‘come up with ideas’ for ads, they generally work in pairs. I have worked with these people. On the whole they simply spend days and weeks trying to find what other material they can rip off. Makes you wonder why they are called creatives really. If they fail to come up with any real idea they generally just hire a well known actor or personality and get them to try and pedal their wears. This approach probably works best when someone famous says ‘I use product x and would not use anything else’ they legally have to sign a form saying what they have said is true. Call me cynical but I am guessing 99% of the time these people are lying. Even if they are not, why should you bother taking advice from an actor? They just take direction from other people and are told what to say and do.
An iPad queue yesterday
I believe it’s been said that zombie movies are an analogy for mindless consumers shopping. Certainly this behaviour can be seen with Apple fan boys. Look how many people bought iPads site unseen. Before the final specs had been released or knowing exactly what it would do and it’s sold out. When I buy something I have to sit down and work out the pros and cons and find the best product, then go out and find the best price, perhaps I am mad in this approach, but I think not. Apple zombies simply see ‘new product’ and place an order, amazing. Mind you this is the same group of people that scream with joy when a soft fabric iPod holder is released, seriously people, it’s like a sock that you put an iPod in, a sock! There is no reason to whoop it up.
I guess you could argue that at least an iPad is something that may have a use, even if it is severely limited and overpriced with other products that do more for less money. What totally confuses me is; who in the hell buys those ‘Build the Bismark’ magazines, and similar products?
GET THE FIRST PIECE FREE WITH THIS ISSUE. So this model, made of cheap plywood, is in 140 parts. So you need to buy 140 issues, one a week, over the course of two and a half years. ISSUE ONE ONLY 50 PENCE! Then issue 2 is £2.99 and all other issues are £4.99. So with the aid of mathematics that’s a shitty unpainted plywood model of the Bismark for £692.11!!! Just to recap, a plywood model for nearly £700!!! Whiskey Tang Foxtrot!
Now back to the actual ads. I understand that without ads it’s difficult for TV networks to make money. It can be done other ways like product placement, but this is tricky of trying to sell cars in a period piece. A subscription model is another way to achieve this, or if you are feeling particularly Orwellian follow the BBCs example and ‘create’ some license that everyone has to purchase on pain of a prison sentence.
So advertising enables us to have ‘free’ services that are funded by people that are suckered into purchasing whatever these people are peddling. SO what can we do to avoid this? You could pre recording your TV shows and skip the breaks and I hear it’s possible to download ad free TV shows from the internet. When I browse the web I use Firefox with AdBlock & NoScript which pretty much blanks out any net ads, this also helps in download speeds of sites as it does not bother downloading all the ad content. I don’t read dead tree newspapers but download them onto my eBook, which is also free of ads. So there are ways to defend ourselves against this barrage of selling.
Now a word from our sponsors…
Cash4Gold. An advert targeted direct to fucktards (sorry, there is no other word for them) who are stupid enough to send these people their gold.
Post Office. A superb example of ‘We have no idea how to make the post office look good so we hired someone old famous person and hoped that would persuade the blue rinse brigade people to use the post office’.
Virgin Trains. For sex starved women living in the sticks who’s leather jacketed boyfriend lives in the big smoke, use Virgin trains, they will pop your cherry luv, GIGGIDY GIGGIDY! Seriously, popping corks, Trains into tunnels? The only thing missing is her wearing a pearl necklace.
Phones 4U. Not sure what this ad is trying to say or how it’s supposed to make me want to buy a phone.
Tool Station. Enough said really.
Bill Hicks on Advertising
By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising…kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I’m doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan’s little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now.
Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: ‘There’s gonna be a joke comin’ up.’ There’s no fuckin’ joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself…borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something…rid the world of your evil fuckin’ presence.
This system requires two drives and mirrors all the data between them. So if you have two 120 Gig drives they each have the same data on them. Therefore any single drive failure is recoverable.
RAID 5 uses a minimum of 3 drives in the array. We now have parity being stored as well as raw data. Just like RAID 1; any single drive can fail and the data is still safe.
When computers were the size of small houses and there were very few in operation; most people accessed them via remote terminals, either in the same building or over large distances. These dumb terminals were effectively simple input/output devices and therefore needed very little processing power. All the main work was stored and executed by the mainframe and the results fed out to the remote terminal.
