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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Today? Of course. But until recently that wasn’t the case. Longevity though.

    We got prediction of sector failure rates on HDDs and magnetic tapes down to a science. Makes archiving really easy as you know with statistical significance how often to test, copy and move data, to preserve it virtually forever (as long as there is someone maintaining the archive).

    Solid state memory can be extraordinarily dense, but the denser it gets, the more it’s prone to corruption and failure. Worse still, when solid state fails, the whole storage unit becomes obsolete, and data gets nightmarishly hard to extract, maybe even gone forever. Only with very rare and specialized workshops that have the equipment to do it. On the other hand, I’ve seen technicians recover data from tapes that were literally in a fire, right there on the field with bog standard equipment.

    When you factor in that the average cost of a terabyte of magnetic storage is less than half of the average cost of a terabyte of solid state, then a few cubic centimeters of space per unit become practically irrelevant. Corporate settings actually prefer more smaller storage units than larger, as they cause less trouble when they fail. Redundancy is a numbers game.



  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoMemes@sopuli.xyzRIP obsolete tech
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    3 days ago

    We definitely did not gave up on discs. They may no longer be mass consumer oriented. But bluray for backup, archiving and data transfer are still a thing. Nothing beats the bandwidth of a plane filled with hard drives. The media itself is not relevant, magnetic tape is still available and used to this day. The first time I held more than a terabyte in my hand was in a data tape cartridge. Consumer hard drives hadn’t gotten there yet. Even today, new optical media is being researched. There are fascinating breakthroughs on laser engraved crystal storage.

    Anyways, I just wanted to remember that wasteful mass consumption media is not representative of humanity as a whole.




  • That’s still a common structure used by billionaires to justify reaping millions of dollars in revenue and still claim, “but I own a non-profit”. Also, to say the nonprofit controls the profit part would require the governance and the management hierarchies to be separate to avoid conflict of interests. But this has never been the case. Now they’re becoming a public benefit company, it will be even less the case, with both boards being one and the same. This will effectively keep the good-will façade while allowing them to lift the profit caps for their friends. It’s all PR bullshit.






  • Beware, Gnucash is meant to be pro level accounting software. Is not a simple ledger or a tech/crypto gateway. I also use it for my personal life, but there’s like 30% of features I don’t use because they’re business accounting stuff I don’t need. It predates the cloud, it cares not for the latest trends, it crunches numbers and spits out reports. That’s part of what I like about it. It is not simple but it also isn’t bloated.


  • But, houses have locks on the doors. The whole point of the house is to be a safe for people. Security is all about the threat model, your risk assessment should inform the security measures that make sense in the security/convenience continuum. Not everyone will be equally well served by the exact same risk mitigation methods.

    The point of whole disk encryption is to delay or nullify physical device control. If your disk is not encrypted, but you have a single encrypted file a bad actor wants to access. If they get physical control, then it is game over. They have all the time and power in the world to crack down that one file. Now, most people don’t have any one file(s) like that, but instead are worried about their private life in general. Without encryption, physical access to the device means total access to their entire life, the house had no locks and the thieves just waltzed in and took everything of value. Whole disk encryption is opting for a sturdier door, with better locks. Physical control is still bad, but access is orders of magnitude harder. Sure, if you lose the only key to your house, you better be prepared to break windows or walls to get in, but that is a user responsibility.