Takata

Budget (including currency): Nothing over the top, this data isn't "critical", but I'd like to keep it. Country: NZ Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Cold storage, ie, offline storage / archival storage, of large video files and old games. Will probably not turn on more than once every few months. I currently have a few USB external HDDs (1TB > 10yrs old, 1.5TB ~ 10yrs, 5TB ~ 5yrs), and a spreadsheet to manually track a few hundred folders, ie, which ones are duplicated on which drives. I'm looking for a better solution. Idea: 2 8TB Seagate Barracudas or WD Blues, the second one as a backup for the first. If I want to expand, then, 2 more of whatever is cheapest per capacity at the time. 1 or 2 HDD enclosures (https://www.orico.cc/usmobile/product/detail/id/3518) because this seems to be noticeably cheaper than buying an 8TB external drive. The only shortcoming I see with this idea is "bit rot". Not sure if I should even worry though. On one hand, Linus seems to blame this for problems with two of his petabyte vault servers. On the other hand, a couple of reddit posts claim to have used md5 hashes to detect no bit rot in 0.7TB, and almost none in 70TB, after 5 years of offline storage (and in the latter case, it was in video files and didn't prevent playback). -although what doesn't make sense to me there, is that by the time there are undetected errors that defeat the HDD's error checking, there should be plenty of uncorrectable errors (or does the HDD firmware just make its best guess as to what the correct data is, thus making "undetected" and "uncorrectable" errors the same thing?). I'm guessing the simplest way to improve this is with some sort of DAS device like a QNAP TR-002, which can run RAID1, and correct any problematic data on one drive with the good data from the other. In this case, I think I upgrade to Ironwolf or Red drives just for their firmware. ...but then I don't really have a "backup" if both drives are in the same box, and I'd really like to be able to use one drive on its own without another present, and without the DAS device. Then, I guess the way to do this while keeping the drives apart is to store an md5 hash of every file, then recompute the hashes in 2 or 3 years to figure out which files have changed, and which drive has a good unchanged copy. If anyone knows any reliable software for tracking files and folders on multiple offline storage devices, that'd be nice too. Or I can probably hack together a python script just to traverse a drive's folder structure and dump folder and file names and sizes, if it comes to that.

Wow, Linus, that's one hell of a poisoned chalice you handed Mr Mindchop.

Latest video from Extra Credits suggests that kids racking up thousands of dollars on their (or their parents') credit card isn't the real problem, since there are enough ways for a parent to prevent their credit card from being misused, even without help from Xbox features. It's the people who are depressed, or addicted, or impulsive who are the real victims. Kids generating insane credit card bills are just the most likely case to be reported on the news, and the easiest case to score political or PR points from. Aside, if I add up the cost of all of the games and consoles I own, it doesn't come close to the $8000 mentioned here, although this was back in the days before consoles could do micro (or in this case, macro) transactions.

I thought IBM's Aquasar did this years ago, but after looking at it again, it looks like they might have only done microchannels in the copper, and not in the silicon.

Could have done this quietly... Then they'd save bandwidth by not carrying ads, customers are unlikely to complain about their missing ads, and Google and Facebook would have no idea their ads weren't being delivered. Instead, they disclose everything publicly, and suggest that Google should pay them for transporting ads, which obviously isn't going to happen.

That still leaves him paying for land before he knows if it can get internet access, which I assume is not cheap either. Will they even try to provide cable internet access to an empty lot? ...let alone, an empty lot that you don't own? Sure, forcing them to try to provide service to an empty lot provides an opportunity for problems like this to surface, so it gives you a chance to avoid them. What kind of company gives a written assurance that results in them compensating you the value of your house if they're wrong?

It's impossible for Asetek to satisfy the entire AIO market by themselves, so they license Corsair (and NZXT, and some others?) to help, with the condition that Asetek gets a small percentage of the revenue from sales of products with their patented invention. The cost of R&D isn't negligible, so it isn't fair for Cooler Master to reverse engineer a product and sell it, while Asetek had to develop it before it could sell it. Fair assumption: reverse engineering something is a lot cheaper than developing it. Since Cooler Master has benefited from Asetek's prior work, they should pay for that benefit. Sure, Asetek could propose an exorbitantly high licensing fee, preventing Cooler Master from entering the market, which would create artificial scarcity in the AIO market, which probably won't hurt Asetek since they and their licensees can just sell AIOs at higher prices, but will hurt the consumer since they have to pay more. The fact that there are at least 2 design-arounds of this patent (Swiftech, pump on radiator, and Antec, pump on fan(!)) suggests that the license fees were so high that it was worth doing R&D all over again just to avoid patent infringement, which seems wasteful. I'm open to the argument that patent holders have too much power to claim an exorbitant fee for licensing their patents, but no-one is really willing to regulate what the fees should be, and you have to give them something for using their invention. Unfortunately, we live in a free-market world where a anything is worth whatever its owner can sell it for, and if they don't like that price, they can just hog it for themselves, which gives the patent holder power when negotiating licensing agreements. If you contend that we don't have to give the inventors anything, then imagine that Asetek incurs a lot of R&D costs before selling their AIO, while Cooler Master incurs far less R&D costs by reverse engineering Asetek's AIO or reading their patent documentation, and ask yourself, is it fair that Cooler Master gets an advantage from not developing the AIO, and just manufacturing it with free help from Asetek? Patents are there to bridge the gap between high R&D costs and low manufacturing costs. Unfortunately, when R&D costs aren't actually that high (or maybe when R&D is done inefficiently), the patent system becomes open to abuse. I cringe a bit when American politicians point at high numbers of new patents as a statistic that suggests their technology industry is doing well. >.> Again, patents are not forever. They only last 20 years, which I think is a little long. Not everything needs patents because not everything has high R&D costs.

Not eternity. Only around 15-25 years, which still sounds a little long in my opinion. Some authentic R&D went into cramming the reservoir, pump and water block into one unit that works effectively enough to compete with separate water cooling parts; an amount of R&D that justifies a patent. It's not like Asetek patented an idea without producing working prototypes, without selling it to consumers, or without licensing it to other companies. The main problem here is Cooler Master and Asetek failing to reach a license agreement. >.>

Eh? Does 3.5 really exist? Although I don't imagine a court would take that action over anything less than a patent for a cure to a deadly pandemic disease. Some might say that encouraging people to "design-around" patents is a good thing because it forces the exploration of other, possibly better solutions, but I think it's more a waste of R&D time. Ideally the original patent would be licensed on terms that both parties could agree to. Not sure if I should blame Asetek for setting the price too high, or Cooler Master and Swiftech for failing to find a way to make a profit after whatever the licensing fees would have been. At least Corsair seems to have succeeded in licensing the patent... But on the other hand Swiftech chose to design-around by sticking the pump on the radiator. I'll agree that most of the problem is that the bar for patentability is too frequently set too low, and obvious but useful stuff gets patented.

Doesn't sound good when the patent system forces companies to waste time designing something different when the existing design is perfectly fine, but its use is restricted by a patent that will only be licensed on Asetek's terms. I think it's more because Corsair is licensed to use Asetek's cooler design. The court ruled that Corsair was permitted to outsource the manufacturing to CoolIT.

I get it, the idea of integrating the water block, pump, motor and reservoir into one box small enough to fit over a desktop CPU is probably patentable. It's a significant improvement over having a separate water block, pump and reservoir since it'll probably be cheaper. However, do we gain anything by giving Asetek the authority to control the market on AIO coolers? Are we supposed to believe this product would not exist as soon as it did if Asetek couldn't control the market in the way that their patent allows them to? I contend that patenting something is just an afterthought, and even if it couldn't be patented, some company would invent it, market it, and compete with other companies anyway.

This appears to be a simple case of patent infringement when you put the two designs side by side, but I don't see any simple benefits from the patent's existence. ...Unless I'm supposed to believe that Asetek's (or some other company's) development of this type of AIO was contingent on them being able to get patent protection, and that without patent protection, AIOs wouldn't exist as soon as they did. I'm open to this possibility... Maybe this will force Fury X2 to use an Asetek cooler. Maybe Asetek was mad that AMD didn't use something from them for the Fury X. Asetek will have a monopoly on cooling solutions for top end AMD cards unless AMD cools them with air (probably not feasible), integrates the pump and reservoir with the radiator (unless someone has a patent on -that- too), or uses separate waterblocks, pumps and radiators (probably too expensive).

They probably don't want to kill a company after pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into it to save it. Also, jobs and future tax revenue.

Is meeting Mark Zuckerberg considered something to be jealous of? You didn't get arrested. Not that I'm saying he deserves everything he ended up getting, but getting arrested is kind of a big deal.

A little bit of a let-down that the clock was already as put together as it was before Ahmed got to it, but taking stuff apart and putting it back together without breaking it is a useful stepping stone if you ever want to design something like that. Plus he let the 80s keep their faux-wood textures. Once you have determined that the device is not a bomb, you can no longer claim a real bomb threat, you can only claim a hoax bomb threat. For that, you need intention, and the intention just isn't there. The handcuffs, the arrest, the taking him down to the police station, the fingerprinting, all over the top. These actions are all only associated with real criminals. They have to understand that innocent people subjected to this treatment may feel a little terrorized, and not unreasonably.

Well then maybe you should have started an evacuation and called a bomb squad instead of wasting time calling the regular police for a second opinion.

Supposedly the one on the right is a Honeywell Demo Kit, so it kind of undermines your point. See http://www.symbioticpublishing.com/BS/articles/MaltaOuter.shtml. EDIT: Some other sources say it's a demolition controller. Zooming in on the image, it says "Charge Demolition M112" on the bottom. ...there's a lot of doubt as to what this is, but I haven't seen a link to any case of someone trying to blow up an airport or public location with this thing.

Hey, he also sounds like a really good electronics engineer for his age if he put this together in just a few hours. The treatment also seeks to outweigh the impression that he, and people like him, might have gotten that says they shouldn't build these sorts of things, or they shouldn't show them to their peers, since they might be suspected (on some level) of terrorism. Sure, he got released after a few hours, but getting arrested, even just for a few hours, is something to be avoided.

No... it's blatantly obvious that this is _intended_ to look like a gun. Some stuff goes viral and some stuff does not. ...or you could say some stuff goes more viral than other stuff. Deal with it. >.>

It's a little different. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W16_engine and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR6_engine .

Interesting point about the lack of an evacuation. If they actually believed it was a bomb, they would have evacuated the school. That they did not evacuate the school suggests that they already knew it was not a bomb, but took the heavy-handed approach that would only have been justified if they believed it was a bomb. Why is everyone calling it a suitcase anyway? It's probably only a few inches long. While the photo does not include a ruler for reference, the line of pins at the top of the board probably have a 0.1 inch pitch.

You will find something equally suspicious-looking in many battery-powered consumer electronic devices. He's got himself into quite a whirlwind, getting invited to the Jet Propulsion Lab, Google, Whitehouse, Autodesk, and others. No-one got shot, so I seriously doubt it.

You realize we don't have an image of the confiscated device, so we can only guess what it looks like from some of the other circuit boards we see him with (which is hardly reliable), right? ...seriously though, even if the English teacher, principal and police officers were stupid enough to think a student's electronics project was a bomb, the engineering teacher should have been able to set the record straight. Maybe he was paranoid that it was a bomb too? Or maybe he was just reluctant to argue an opposing view against the principal and five police officers out of fear they'd accuse him of being the boy's accomplice? EDIT: Well now we do have an image.

Compare these similar stories, although they take place in airports, in which we have grown to accept far more scrutiny of our belongings and ourselves in the name of safety and security. http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/368509-tsa-thought-my-gpu-was-a-bomb/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3224962/What-thinking-Airport-evacuated-teenager-tries-alarm-clock-designed-look-like-BOMB-plane.html -He kinda deserved this one. The device _was_intended_ to look like a bomb, and certainly does, at least a lot more than this clock and that video card. You probably wouldn't want to have that name either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones

Why do we not have a photo of the "clock"? Are the officers and teachers making a futile attempt to conceal their stupidity, with which they identified a circuit board not materially different from one you would find in any electronic appliance, as a bomb?