epobirs

I have to dispute what you're saying. Find the MTBF on an older drive and a consumer one made today. The consumer drive MTBF isn't the same. The aforementioned Seagate drives have a 1,000,000 hour MTBF. Most consumer drives have a 400,000 hour MTBF with an 'office' duty cycle--not the 24x7 duty cycle testing of the past. When I bought the 80GB drive is was one of the largest capacity USB external drives available, and it was so new that was only available in USB 1.0. This was a top-of-the-line product, on par with other higher-end products of the time. I don't trust any drive from this decade for more than a year or two. I have two Western Digital 1gb drives that were manufactured in 1996 that were recycled after seeing duty in harsh environments, and they still work fine. And I have 4 failed drives from this decade--more than the whole history of my computing with PCs back to 1988. (I've only had one Maxtor lxt213s and two Quantum 4gb Atlas drives fail.) A $60 drive is built better than one that cost $1000? I think things have gotten better, but not enough to warrant a 10x reduction in cost without compromising quality. And this cost reduction doesn't even account for inflation. There's just no way. MTBF is a nearly meaningless factor in most situations. It's something for salesmen to exploit but has little bearing on real life. I prefer real world experience. During the 90s, much of my income was based on the rate of drive failures. You could build a business around it and many did. Today, you'd starve unless you're dealing in the super high-end of data recovery. The drives are manufactured in volumes two orders of magnitude greater than the 90s (they go in so many more places in addition to computers being so much more numerous), hold orders of magnitude more data, cost pennies on the dollar per gigabyte, and yet I'd starve if I depended on drive failures for my living. Data recovery these days is mainly about malware rather than equipment failure. The 500 GB Seagate unit in one of my machines has been running torrents almost 24/7 for three years and hasn't missed a beat. And that is a cheap consumer grade drive made in 2007. I consistently killed off drives from earlier eras with the same task. Have you ever wondered why drives haven't gotten any cheaper for nearly a decade? They've gotten better but the base price has stayed the same. Around the time the first Xbox was being launched I was part of a group of tech writers Seagate brought out to Littleton, Colorado to show off their facility there. There is a big cluster of hard drive development in that area due to IBM placing one of the first drive R&D operations there, with engineers who left to start their own companies staying in the area. Anyway, around the turn of the century, all of the bits that make up a minimal hard drive had been pretty much perfected. The single, one-side platter, single drive heade, read/write channel electronics, and the metal casing had all been cost reduced as much as possible until such time as some new process revolutionizes manufacturing. Nobody is holding their breath on that one. So, since then, just about everything has been refinements on the pinnacle they'd reached around 2001. Reduced process nodes for the chips, faster interfaces, improved densities, all of these made little difference in the cost to produce a minimal drive. One of the places where the companies can still strive for advantage is in manufacturing quality. Reduced defects and improved reliability make for a better net profit. This has had uhge benefits for the consumer. We now get immense amount of highly reliable storage for trivial amounts of money, at least from the perspective of somebody who used to use a hole punch to make double-side floppies out of single-sided floppies.

I'd never heard of Phantom of the Paradise until now... and after looking at the pictures google brought up I don't think I missed much. <edit> 93% on Rotten Tomatoes... seriously?? It was a great little B Movie. You don't know what you're missing. That rating is fully earned by those who know. One of my personal favorites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pa56msnwIY&feature=related

I really have to dispute this. Inexpensive consumer drives are built to standards today the industry couldn't dream of delivering in earlier eras. What was once reserved for the very expensive high end units is now just typical of the stuff on the shelf at Best Buy. I've been involved in data recovery as one of my jobs for nearly twenty years. The rate of drives just up and dying for no apparent reason is almost non-existent compared to what once passed for normal. The thing to keep in mind about that five year old 80 GB drive is that by that time it was a niche market item largely aimed at the corporate desktop market. For these machines the local storage needs are very low as most data is kept on the server(s). This market would be satisfied with 40 GB drives still but the drive makes will only do so much to accommodate this market. (Personally, the only spinning platter drive smaller than 100 GB I still use regularly is an old Apricorn 1.8" USB model that is very handy but quite obsolete.) Drive reliability is also a lesser concern for this market as the effort of replacing a failed drive with a new unit containing the standard image is trivial. So the likes of Del and HP keep those drives around to make the idiot CFOs think they're getting a bargain but nobody else should be bothered.

Actually, Jaws was a 1975 release. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073195/ Back then, there were only two theaters locally, and both only single screens. One of them kept Jaws for the whole summer, with Phantom of the Paradise as the second feature. The repeated exposure to the combination left me twisted for life.

Considering how minor the cost is for the unit and its whole library, how can you not do it? Anybody with a love of video games and history will more than get their money's worth and you can likely recoup your investment if you tire of it. I'm not aware of another home version of the Star Wars, making it worth the cost all by itself. Overall, it's a footnote in gaming history but well worth appreciating first hand.

The problem is that he's a long way from any definition of "everything" right now. I'd rather not see torrents with random collections of issues, where you have to have a cheat sheet to know where each issue is. I suppose it's possible to update a torrent to include more files, but then the new torrent file has to get redistributed. And right now my Byte folder is at around 7 gigs. 1975+1976 will probably be only about 1.3 gigabytes, but extrapolating just from the single 1982 issue that has been scanned so far (373 megs) we're talking over 4 gigabytes per year for the later years. The early 80s are the largest by far. Jerry has reflected on how they had to struggle for more content so as to not have ridiculous numbers of pages that were solely ads. Plus, certain writers were more popular with advertisers who would pay extra to have their material appear within the range of the Chaos Manor column or certain other places. By the end of the 80s and the 90s the size of each issue was less like a phone book, and getting pretty thin in the last years. Plus, as mentioned previously, the 80s is the only start to finish decade in the lot. Once a torrent is started, it can live on long after the creator has stopped seeding. Unless the tracker deletes it, it will continue long after newer editions have made it obsolete. But so what? Someone who downloads the first one and finds another with a couple more years filled in, so long as the files are the same, can use what he has already to immediately seed that portion of the newer torrent while downloading the material that is new to him. I do this with great regularity for the weekly comics collections that include many of the individual issues I've already downloaded. I'd just expect the title to reflect the incomplete nature of the set and the text description to be update to link to the newer version as it is created.

I take it you mean Ed *Dillinger's* desk? His computer program alter-ego was named *Sark*. It was a pretty cool desk, except for the keyboard. Sorry, iPad et al, but I don't care for the idea of typing on a touch screen image of a keyboard-- and the keyboard on Dillinger's desk was larger than life. But one good thing about "Tron" was that whenever Dillinger was typing something on that keyboard, you could tell that he really *was* typing the commands and responses that he was supposedly typing-- even if it was all for show (i.e., I doubt the desk really worked; it was undoubtedly just a prop, albeit an awesome one). In so many other movies, the characters don't even *try* to pretend to be typing whatever it is they're supposedly typing-- they just bang and flutter their fingers around all over the keyboard. Case in point: Montgomery Scott "typing" the formula for transparent aluminum in "The Voyage Home." Michael D'oh! The only thing I can imagine is I somehow connected to the 'Eureka' character Nathan Stark played by Ed Quinn. Which might make sense if I watched that show more and didn't need to go to IMDB. It doesn't have to be exactly that desk. Remember the era when that was created. Though keyboard feel was a big topic for discussion back then, a touchscreen keyboard was so out of left field then as to defy criticism. (Maybe it was mounted on a springy surface with simulated clicks like the Blackberry Storm. Heh.) When I saw that movie in the theater all I had for comparison was my Atari 800 at home. Wasn't no GUI on home systems then. That would just be a software upgrade provided the processing power was there. OTOH, that scene in STIV always kind of annoyed me. It seemed pretty insulting to the character that he was so surprised at what the era's technology was offering and lacked. He was obviously comfortable with a QWERTY keyboard, which seemed remarkable for a character not due to be born until centuries later. We already had pretty good voice recognition then in expensive systems and it became inexpensive a few years later. The real problem was that talking at length to a computer is really a drag. Try using the speech recognition bundled with most systems today to dictate a four page document. Even with 100% accuracy, most people will still find it far less fatiguing to type it instead, especially if they can type faster than they can speak. Speech recognition is terrific in its place but I'd hate to have a desktop with that as the primary input. (Unless you're just a figurehead and the MCP is really running the show.)

I would like to see 1976 (7/12 so far) finished, then 1975 (now complete) and 1976 could be put up in two torrents. Of course the big issues didn't happen until late 1977. Maybe it would be better to torrent later ones in half-year sets. I was looking at potential torrent sizes.. 75/76/77 combined would be about 3 gigs in size Total (28 magazines).. Seams somewhat reasonable for a torrent? Any worthy torrent client allows the user to select individual files to download or not download. Just put up the whole kit and kaboodle (has kaboodle ever been seen without the presence of kit?) and let people make their own choices. The most separation that should be needed is perhaps decades, once they've been filled in more. 70s, 80s, 90s, you get the idea. The 80s will be the biggest since it is the only complete decade and the height of advertising volume. So maybe two for the 80s. Personally, I'm good with just the one. I've seeded some as large as 40+GB on Demonoid.

Yep, I remember that. It seemed to me to have been inspired by Ed Stark's desk in the original Tron. I still want that desk.

1998. I know exactly where I was when I found out. I had just checked into a hotel room in Atlanta. I was there for E3, expecting to cover the cost of the trip by writing up some observations for Byte. The Sega Dreamcast, using WinCE to support the DirectX APIs for easy porting from PC games, was my intended main focus. I went to check my email via dialup to my then Netcom account and one of the messages was from Jerry Pournelle to those of us in his advisory group. At that moment I found myself on an unpaid vacation. Needless to say, I was pissed. Byte was actually doing well, circulation wise. The problem was that McGraw-Hills sales force had no clue how to pitch it when it came to advertising sales in a world where personal computers had become commoditized so far as the general public was concerned.

The Mindset issue. I must have read that one close to a hundred times. I was really fascinated with that machine.