Going to be very interesting to see how they go about implementing this. So much is different about the UI of Mac Os and iOS, that I'm guessing at the very least you'll need different views for each platform.
That'll be because Windowserver now uses Metal 2 to render UI, so if Apple's claims that it's 10x faster than Metal 1, then that's probably where the UI performance improvements have come from.
I personally own an entry-level Early 2013 Retina MacBook Pro with a i5/HD4000, and the iterative improvements they made with each major release really shine through. A machine that was previously described in every single review as underpowered on that department especially WRT Mission Control can now handle any number of windows I throw at it at a steady 60fps, including those blurs and transparencies which I previously had to disable back in the day, and even when compiling, say, GHC. As an extra bonus, the maximum video RAM on that machine was offset from 1024MB to 1536MB at some point (either Mavericks or Yosemite). Similarly, the Mid 2014 one (i7/HD5000) I use at work can handle the main display as well as external screens (including an ultrawide) without breaking a sweat. So much for planned obsolescence.
To add to this: the Nexus 5 was released a month after the 5S. That phone got its last official update last year, I believe. It was also discontinued a full year before the 5S.
Granted, the 5S started at 4GB for 500 USD and the Nexus 5 started at 16GB for 350 USD.
Still, it's hard to support the "planned obsolescence" argument.
How does your argument about Android vs iPhone affect my Mac vs iPhone argument? Macs have taken a performance hit with Yosemite, but have improved ever since, while old iPhones become more sluggish with every release.
I would generally expect new features designed for newer hardware to run worse on older phones. However, I'll agree that some releases are less about features and more about stability and performance.
Admittedly, I can't really speak to how older phones feel after some of the updates. The oldest iPhone I have is the original iPhone 6 and I haven't tried it on iOS 11 yet (currently using the iPhone SE, which _seems_ to run better on iOS 11).
I don't see how you can really say that sluggish is _worse_ than N/A. Worst case scenario, you just don't update, which is no worse than not getting the update in the first place.
Edit: clarity.
Edit2:
I realized I'm not really addressing your point.
I think there are some pretty big differences that make it hard to compare phone OS releases to computer OS releases.
Mobile devices have a much smaller margin for performance. They don't handle multitasking terribly well. These two things mean that the OS doesn't end up affecting the performance of a phone as much as apps and websites do.
One poorly developed app can destroy the performance of the entire phone (even without the app running in the foreground). None of this is true for a non-mobile device.
I definitely wish we would see more performance-focused iOS releases, but I don't think it has gotten to the "planned" obsolescence point as much as just "regular" obsolescence. Hard to say.
It could be less planned obsolescence and more that iPhone/iPad hardware has gotten many times faster over the past few years while Mac hardware has improved by 50% at best.
What ever happened to the 2nd wave that security experts were warning about, without the kill-switch code? Haven't heard any reports of this being found in the wild yet. Anyone else?
I don't think he was evil. So far as we know he didn't run underage sex trafficking rings, or flood US cities with crack.
I think he was complicated and damaged and did some evil things to people close to him. But he also had some exceptional talents, and he facilitated a lot of developments that probably wouldn't have happened without him.
Those don't necessarily cancel out, but it's reasonable to wonder where tech would have gone if he was still alive.
Yes, I too really miss how he talked police into raiding peoples homes, humiliated Apple staff, screwed over his friends, refused to acknowledge his daughter, downplayed the suicides in Apple factories, commited fraud, refused to get himself treated for his cancer and lied about it, routinely parked in the spot meant for handicapped...
I could go on but I think you get the picture. That he was worshipped is an absolute shame, he was not an asshole, but way worse. He was evil. He was the dark side of capitalism.
I find this take on Jobs fascinating because even though all your criticisms of Jobs are perhaps exaggerated in some respects they're all based in fact, but the conclusions you draw from them are outrageously false.
While all of those things were harmful and some even despicable I think evil is going way too far. A lot of people on the internet get frothing mad about this stuff, while the interviews I've read or seen with many of the actual people involved such as Woz, his daughter, ex-employees, etc put these issues in a much more forgiving and nuanced context. None of the people who actually worked with him or new him that I've seen had said he was evil, so excuse me if I don't take the word of random internet person on that.
>He was the dark side of capitalism
What the heck has any of that got to do with capitalism? Seriously. Would a Chinese or Russian Communist Steve Jobs have been a shining beacon of charity and humility? What does that even mean? Without capitalism he'd still have been a bit of an arse, but then we wouldn't have had GUI interfaces and modern smartphones until years later, and probably not as good ones either. We'd have had committee designed, party-approved People's Phones scheduled into a 5 year plan or something. But I don't really see how thats got to do with anything.
I attribute the fact that many people praise and almost worship him to capitalism. There are many elements that I somehow link with capitalism as well: Forcing people to overwork, harshly firing people for minor flaws, taking credit for things you didn't do, ridiculous overpricing, 'being creative' with paperwork, using factories with bad conditions for workers, etc. Of course these things are in no way exclusive to capitalistic countries.
Of course I am exaggerating and I don't know him. I have read his biography, some internet articles, and watched some documentaries, and this is the general picture I got. He seems to be a very charming guy when he needs you (e.g. you are his superior, or a skilled co-worker like Woz), but shits on you when he's your boss (e.g. fires you in the elevator).
I think that the reason I get so upset whenever somebody praises Jobs, is because I often see this type of persons getting a lot of success at the expense of people with a 'weaker' personality (like myself). I like Steve Wozniak a lot better and think that his personality shines through his actions. Wozniak was a teacher, financed a big festival, and tried to connect with Russia. This is in a sharp contract with Jobs and I can't stand people when they praise Jobs but don't know the guy who single-handedly built the first Apple computer.
No question Woz was a nicer guy, and he was cheated by Jobs, but without Jobs there's no way he'd be a millionaire today. Steve Jobs is one of the reasons we need employment laws and such though.
> There are many elements that I somehow link with capitalism as well:
I will absolutely accept that many alternatives to capitalism claim explicitly to solve these problems, but it seems like a very solidly demonstrated fact that none of the ones that have yet been tried actually do, and many of them exacerbated these and other problems by orders of magnitude.
Capitalism is about empowering individuals by granting them ownership rights and not reserving that right exclusively for the state, the Party, the sovereign or a religious authority, but anybody. To me Capitalism is about individual rights, it's just that some of those individuals form companies worth Billions of dollars employing hundreds of thousands of people and some don't.
All pretty trivial stuff compared to the massive positive impact the products he oversaw and introduced to the world have had. Mac and iPhone literally changed the world as we know it.
Without him, home computing would be very different today. His insistence on focusing on usability and bringing in the best of the liberal arts into a very science-centric domain was his genius.
I'd rather live in a world where 'poaching' agreements between employers didn't exist and factory jobs were better but we had to use a phone with buttons. I think if we had to choose, the corrupt baby boomer CEO stuff Jobs represented would be eliminated even if that meant a slightly less optimal computing experience. I won't even go into how Apple is less a computer company than a media consumption machine company, but that's an argument for another day.
I also will argue that Jobs gets credited for a non-sensical 'he's the liberal arts genius who showed us usability' argument, when in reality usability is an ancient field and, arguably, the most usable desktop was unsexy Microsoft's NT desktop which is still very usable and refined today. You can put a random grandparent in front of an NT4 machine today and have then be productive near instantly. Meanwhile, the very same grandparent is overwhelmed with apps, pop-ups, swipes, privacy agreements, notifications, etc on the more 'usable' mobile device.
Jobs deserves credit for his achievements, but if you let me trade Jobs for a better world for the actual working stiffs who bust their ass 50-70 hours a week in this industry, absolutely, I would make that trade in a heartbeat. I don't care about the cost to quarterly projections or other CEO chest-thumping. Jobs, regardless of his intentions, represents the classic heartless CEO in many respects and made almost no effort to fix these things. I hope today's SV leaders have more progressive views about work/life balance. I'd love to bury the baby boomer workaholic nonsense and factories full of suicidal people with Jobs. I hope society can progress past the 'worship our CEOs' stage.
Will be interesting to see what product categories they enter in the future. Currently they have cars and batteries, but there's got to be a good change they're planning on entering a new product category soon.
Also looking at the German standards for low or even positive energy homes I see a huge potential for energy efficient homes in the US (but also other markets).
The German Passivhaus standard just begs for factory prefab construction. I suspect a major factor is how one can reduce the cost of making the structure airtight.
Don't fully airtight structures need a lot of redundant safety systems to protect against just leaving a candle on killing everyone from carbon dioxide poisoning?
In the context of avar's question the active ventilation is a safety system.
A little bit of research indicates that candles are not all that different in oxygen consumption and CO2 production than a human and that a single candle (or person) wouldn't use up the oxygen quickly if the ventilation ceased.
As long as a failure of the ventilation system is obvious (so a window can be opened or whatever), it doesn't seem like it would be a major concern.
Well, a candle isn't enough to be a concern. But state of the art air tight passive houses include ventilator units that exchange air while retaining (or rejecting) as much heat as possible.
There are several companies in the US producing prefab Passivhaus homes. Typically, a building membrane is used as the airtight layer. Joints get taped, both in the factory and on site.
E.g. http://www.phoenixhaus.com
E.g. https://www.ecocor.us/prefab
Im waiting for the day that a "positive energy" trumps energy efficiency in germany. With solar prices dropping we may get to the point that it is cheaper to not insulate or otherwise reduce energy use and instead achieve positive energy entirely by slapping on more solar panels. Zero-carbon is a net measurement. You dont actually need to be efficient in terms of total energy use.
This has already started to a degree, as people trying to build net-zero homes find that at a certain point the cost (in money/effort/carbon/energy) to add further insulation exceeds the cost of adding heat to the home via adding solar PV. I believe retro-fits of older homes hit this point earlier, since it can be harder to insulate them beyond the low hanging fruit.
Obviously as PV price continues to drop, this point will be met earlier and earlier.
Ive observed this already in off-grid situation where the priorities are different (no net metering, power not used/stored is power abandoned) but when it hits the mainstream it could make a real dent in home construction/insulation biz.
I doubt that will ever happen. 1) Insulation is essentially passive for the lifespan of a building, PVs and other solar tech + associated heating & cooling systems need regular maintenance, cleaning, replacing etc. 2)highly energy efficient buildings provide better comfort and indoor environmental conditions than a poorly performing building with lots of active heating / cooling etc. 3) insulation works day and night, all year round, PV only produced electricity when the sun shines. There is a big gap between what PV can supply and day/night demand and summer/winter demand. Storage might get to the point where it can bridge the day/night supply/demand gap, but seems unlikely to bridge the summer/winter supply/demand gap.
A lot of the technologies in better home construction are usually out of reach for low income families and low income areas. Add in the number of trades that are included in building houses, and I would imagine a lot of push back on getting some of these technologies implemented at a low cost.
I do still believe there is a huge opportunity for companies to disrupt the building industry with modular housing and other economic choices for people who really can benefit from this.
I don't think of tesla as a "car and battery" company but as a "portable battery (the supposed car) and a home battery" company.
They already partner with (or own) SolarCity so really their overarching business is as an energy company. They collect it, they store it, and they transport it.
All they need is a logistically easier way to transport it than traditional power lines which I'm guessing would step on some toes. So their next step might be something like WiTricity. That way, they can bypass physical infrastructure.
> I don't think of tesla as a "car and battery" company but as a "portable battery (the supposed car) and a home battery" company.
If they really want to be in the business of making batteries, they should get out of the business of making cars as quickly as possible. It's an expensive distraction.
It's extremely difficult, the R&D costs are enormous, scaling up is difficult, thousands of little things can sink you, and once you sell a product, you will be on the hook for it for the next decade.
To me, it seems that they are a car company with a battery side business - it makes a hell of lot more sense then being a battery company with a car side business - for the same reason that Exxon-Mobil isn't an oil company with a jumbo-jet-manufacturing side business.
Which would be a terrible idea. since both energy, and energy storage is a commodity. GM may as well merge with United Fruit Company.
The only two gains I could see would be diversification (But then why not merge with Bank of America? Or Google?), and an integrated logistics system (Except that logistics for electricity and gasoline are long-solved non-problems - and have nothing to do with auto manufacturing.)
There's a concept called "grid parity", where solar PV can deliver energy for the same cost as your utility would charge you for it's provision. This is considered a tipping point, where the economics starts pushing things along harder rather than relying on idealism. It got talked about for years as a goal, but now we've passed it in various parts of the world (starting in those with the combination of lots of sun and high priced utilities).
There's another concept that builds on this called "god parity", which points out that simply distributing energy via a grid has a cost (sometimes more than half of the cost you pay), so if you imagine that you had a tame god that could generate infinite energy for free, but you still had to pay the distribution costs, then if current trends continue, then PV plus batteries would still be cheaper than paying for a grid to deliver "free" energy to your home. It's perhaps not a coincidence that Tesla provides both of the items needed to make this happen, PV and home energy storage.
>All they need is a logistically easier way to transport it than traditional power lines
what flaws of traditional power lines are holding Tesla back right now? It's not a subject i've ever really thought about, but i was under the impression that high-voltage cabling was a pretty efficient way to transport power.
Actually it's around 6% loss in lines and transformers: 2% in transmission and 4% in distribution.[1] This works out to be quite a lot. In some high-intensity areas, Ohm's law losses can use more energy than refrigerating a superconductor over the same length. I'm not sure that there exist ways of increasing efficiency here, but getting another percent or two of global energy production for "free" would be amazing.
But I'm not really sure that the distribution network is holding Tesla back right now. With some SolarCity and a PowerWall, you're going to be able to go off-grid. In theory. The idea is to be a total alternative to traditional energy companies and utilities.
It's a fairly minor thing, but if I had to guess I'd say a Tesla branded inverter for PV systems. Their electric vehicles and the Powerwall 2 incorporate inverters already. It wouldn't be a stretch to start offering them for PV systems too, now that they've got SolarCity. (But there doesn't seem to be any really compelling reason not to continue using third party inverters for PV, so who knows.)
> It's a fairly minor thing, but if I had to guess I'd say a Tesla branded inverter for PV systems.
Responding to a question from an analyst during the company’s quarterly results call, Musk said:
“…There's no question Tesla's going to do integrated inverter. It's the logical thing to do. I think we've got the most advanced inverter engineering team in the world, and so it makes sense to, just as we do the inverters on vehicles, to do it with solar as well and have it in a very tight package at a cents per Watt level that is, I think, probably twice as good as anyone else. I think maybe better than that.”
They will do this. Tesla branded panels, inverters, batteries, car chargers, apps. All seamlessly integrated from one company. I'm curious whether they'll get into DC optimizers.
Thinking about the political situation, what kind of new industry can Tesla enter into, that will create plenty of jobs, and would be greatly helped from Musk's relationship with the President?
Boats. Was actually told this first day I started working there. Won't be going into production until after pickup truck is out in the market. Looking at early to mid 20's time frame.
I have the same to say even for the iPhone 5, which I'd been using for several years and was recently a delight to use with iOS10.
I actually just bought myself an iPhone 5s to replace it because the iPhone 5's battery life finally became unusably short after many years, but I didn't want a big phone to replace it. My 5s is also performing very well with iOS10.
My 5s is a second-hand refurb, markedly cheaper than the SE, which I was reluctant to buy after several of my acquaintances complained of the device expiring days after purchase.
My comparably old Android phone won't even allow a software update and is still on Android 4. My partner prefers Android and has a Moto G (and has a tendency to drop phones hence why I suggested something cheap to replace) and it also won't update to the latest Android version.
So while the Pixel might be the shiniest, I would be reluctant to invest in something which will not have the effective lifespan of an iPhone.
I really wish Google would make a great Android phone so I could have better integration with my Chromebook and G-Suite. Android phones can be used to unlock Chromebooks in lieu of password entry, which would be a cool feature. I use G-Suite for my business so it would be better for that too. I've never owned a Mac computer and I've little loyalty to any company. The iPhone 5s was simply the apex in terms of phone-to-pocket-size/toughness/tactility/features (for me personally).
> the SE, which I was reluctant to buy after several of my acquaintances complained of the device expiring days after purchase
As a counter point, myself and 2 friends all have the SE, and we all love it. iPhone 5 form factor, better battery life and equal performance to the iPhone 6s made it the winning choice for all 3 of us.
Of course it works well for many buyers. In my mind, it was still £300 more than I paid for my 5s and I had no further demands of the iPhone 5 besides a longer passcode.
I also own a 5S. While I can't say it's as fast as the day I bought it (I got it second-hand with iOS 9 loaded), it's certainly faster than the 3GS it replaced! The 3GS in turn, was a replacement for my Motorola Milestone (Droid in the US) which, despite being released the same year, received a grand total of one major OS updates and then was dropped.
iPhone 5 for my wife here. Working alright too. Older hardware used to be really crippled by each new iOS release. (we had iPhone 1 and iPhone4 before), no such problem nowadays.
One thing I find surprising is that most geeks seem to be all for Self-Driving cars, yet are heavily against government surveillance. Yet self-driving cars are not only going to offer up much more surveillance data, but also offer a potential 'kill switch' backdoor that would allow nefarious agencies to drive you into a brick wall at 80mph and make it look like an accident.
Once manual cars go away completely, you will not only loose control of your data, but also the certainty that your motor vehicle isn't going to act against you.
If the security services target you, and truly wish to kill you, current methods will more than suffice.
The Israelis like magnetic mines, the Russians polonium, the Yanks... Well to be perfectly honest I'm not sure, but it almost certainly involves some combination of clandestine airpower, special forces operations, OCO, and morbid obesity.
Right now, the chain of devices that can track and kill you is enormous, from your router to your standard ICE Jeep. You're most likely already being tracked on traffic camera, the electronic toll system, cellular towers, passing Wifi, and the endless set of embedded Linux devices that you don't even consider.
If you are targeted, there may be many obstacles to your removable from the board, including political, economic, or legal ramifications.
I fully agree. The crux of my argument is that self-driving cars aren't inherently any more hackable or trackable than existing vehicles with existing available data connections through cell, emergency communications, OTA updates, or usb if local.
One could, in theory, use the fly-by-wire steering, traction control, or ABS systems to simulate a pretty convincing crash. It would be fairly straightforward electronically through the onboard processors in existing cars, and would be practically untraceable.
Yes, I would say a car that can do anything from centrally provided instructions is inherently more hackable than a car that is disconnected from everything and can't do much more than keep its speed on the highway.
That's fair. But what I see is that the car fleet will head towards OTA no matter what we do.
Forgive me for my cynicism. If you've ever worked with embedded systems... Well the state of consumer security is so bad I'd be shocked if someone hadn't already been killed in this way.
The Bluetooth alone is a nightmarish enough vector already. And local installation is very possible.
> The Israelis like magnetic mines, the Russians polonium
I don't understand how either of those work, but they don't sound discreet. The ability for a state to assassinate people at will and make it look like an accident is entirely different from "yeah, but the government could also shoot you with a drone at any moment".
The magnetic mines are exactly what they sound like. Someone drives by on a motorcycle, slaps an explosive on the side of a vehicle, and drives away. Not very subtle, but apparently very successful in taking out Iranian nuclear scientists.
Polonium is actually fairly clever. It's a radioactive material that acts as a slow-moving poison.
It took a while for Western physicians to diagnose, so many domestic leaders, political dissidents and even foreign heads of state (Arafat may have been killed in this manner) fell victim to it.
I'm a proponent of self-driving cars, but I do really struggle with this. Nefarious governments are one concern, but my larger concern is the complete joke that is computer security in 2016. For the most part this means the worst case is people lose some private data; bad news, certainly. But car companies have already proven they can't handle security, and now we're building Internet functionality into cars. What happens if some sociopath like Auernheimer decides to kill a few people for laughs?
Will they kill more than 16000 per year? Because that's how many it would take to make it worse than today, even assuming that self-driving cars only halve the current numbers.
I agree with you, but I have confidence that those security issues can be resolved -- by just removing the network connections, cellular backhauls, etc. if necessary -- while the alternative represented by the status quo has basically ceased improving.
We've spent decades with passive, and more recently active, safety improvements, and the results have been good ... but in the last few years the rate of improvement in fatalites-per-mile has tapered off. It seems that all the low-hanging fruit is basically gone from that particular tree, and we may well be pushing into a zone where cars are perceived to be safe enough that further safety improvements might lead, perversely, to less safe behavior (the "football helmet" problem). At the very least, making modern manually-controlled vehicles significantly more safe seems like a very serious challenge.
On the contrary, we know that autonomous vehicles can be much more safe than manually-controlled vehicles, just by virtue of not being run by a person who may be drunk, high, emotionally impaired, tired, distracted, medically incapable of driving, etc. Right there you remove a bunch of leading causes of crashes. Given our failure to eliminate those problems completely (we made some progress on drunk driving, sure, but not much on the others, IMO) given decades of effort, we should consider that building secure computer systems might be a more tractable problem.
It will take a lot of effort to ensure that the car manufacturers don't do obviously boneheaded things (like allow over-the-air software updates), but I have more faith in our ability to quickly fix machines than to change human behavior.
The "kill switch" is more likely a way to control the movement of the population. With the flip of a switch, whatever areas can effectively become "no-go" zones.
Surveillance will probably be a big factor too. The government will surely know who's in the car and where they're going...all in the name of "safety" or something.
It's no wonder that government types are so gung-ho for this...all in the name of "safety" of course.
To be honest I'm less concerned with nefarious governments, since they already have countless ways to track you and kill you if they really want to. And for the most part these days they don't even have to be discrete about it because of how little ability people have to push back.
I'm more concerned about what corporations are going to do when they have complete control over your movements. Especially with someone like Google getting in on it. They'll have control over what information you have access to, your communications, all your data, and now also your ability to move around. And once they have this data the US Government (at least) will have complete access to it too.
Although to be honest I'm even less concerned about that then I am the big problem. What happens when our countries economy completely collapses because a huge chunk of the current workforce is no longer needed? And I'm not talking utopian UBI day dreaming solutions. I mean real, tangible, short term solutions to dealing with 20%+ unemployment? In a country that can't even get behind something like universal healthcare ...
> I mean real, tangible, short term solutions to dealing with 20%+ unemployment? In a country that can't even get behind something like universal healthcare ...
We'll do the same thing we did in the 30s when unemployment threatened to become socially destabilizing: we'll create work for those people. Either in the form of some WPA-ish scheme, or mandatory military/national service, perhaps. In the US it will likely be the former, because there's a sort of social collective memory of the concept in the context of the Depression. Having done it once basically greases the skids involved in doing it again.
What I think people don't really appreciate is how mild recent "depressions" have been relative to the 1930s; we haven't seen 20+% unemployment in this country since WWII, so lots of things seem politically impossible. They aren't; it's just that the necessary conditions for them don't exist right now. But if we were facing the same set of problems again, there's no reason to think that we wouldn't reach for the same set of solutions.
Though personally, I don't see any of the automation technologies that are on the horizon right now leading to 20% unemployment. Most automation technologies have typically underperformed expectations in terms of headcount reduction, with niche exceptions in certain industries. I suspect automation will follow that pattern: you'll see a few industries or job functions get decimated (long-haul truck drivers, potentially), a bunch of new jobs get invented (remote backup driver, automation systems technician, etc.), and a bunch of other jobs get reshuffled, expanding or contracting based on costs (lower transportation costs might lead to more shipments, more need for loading/unloading workers, supply chain management types, etc.). Plus, the time horizon on many of these systems is approaching a significant fraction of a person's career. Someone in middle age, driving an OTR truck today, probably won't have too many problems riding that particular horse all the way into the sunset of their retirement (although at the end of their career they might feel a bit like John Henry, looking for those particular jobs that the machines have a hard time with). Someone who's 18 and looking for a career ought to beware, though. And it would be fair to ensure that public funds for education and job training are matched to expected job availability in the future -- it seems too often that we train young people for jobs that are on the verge of disappearance, and then blame them for taking the bait. That obviously shouldn't happen.
I suppose this depends. If you have open source technology that isn't reliant on a cloud service to figure out how to drive, potentially we could be okay. Though a lot of companies are treating cloud tracking as a given right now.
Self driving cars are no easier or harder to track than normal cars. They don't need constant over the air connections to some central server, so it's just the standard license plate readers or built in tracking systems.
PS: On star does everything your suggesting and it's already in million of US cars.
Very rarely to things have upside with no downside. "Geeks" are clearly aware of both the upside of autonomous vehicles, and the downsides presented by advanced, always-connected tech and the monitoring that comes with it. Thus, the advocacy for privacy, strong encryption, no backdoors, and the fight against government surveillance is the responsible approach to advocating for a bright, advanced future where tech serves us, rather than consumes us.
This is nice and great that it loads quickly with no bloat or distractions. Not sure about the domain name though, as it's not immediately obvious what the site is for.
Backblaze is such a great company. Not only do they offer almost unlimited backup for just $5 a month, they also publish extremely useful articles such as this one.
Good to see Seagate has improved the quality of its product significantly, but a 3.5% failure rate still seems rather high. How old are the drives in question?
Does anyone think that these reports have shamed manufacturers into decreasing failure rates?
When the FCC started doing reports on internet speeds, ISPs took notice and in the second report, an ISP's actual speeds better matched advertised speeds. It would be awesome if these Backblaze reports were likewise improving hard drives.
I'm actually wondering if one of the reasons that they're having trouble buying WDC drives is because WDC keeps trying to add a clause into the purchase agreement saying BackBlaze can't release information about WDC drive failure rates. Anyone from BackBlaze able to comment on that?
Brian from Backblaze here - so far none of the drive manufacturers have done anything like that. Part of it is the manufactures flatly refuse to let us purchase from them directly (based on we need an order of 10,000 of the same drive in one purchase to buy direct). So the manufacturers have zero control. We always go to one of the hundreds of resellers or distributers out there (like CDW or Ingram Micro). Since we buy from the resellers, the resellers just want to make money, the resellers don't care if we report drive stats.
Have you guys thought about becoming a reseller as another line of business? In the post it says you need about 1200 drives a month (if read that right) so you could buy 10,000 from the manufacturer, and then sell the extra as Backblaze Approved(tm) or some such. I'd much rather buy a drive I know you guys have put through its paces, especially if I knew that purchase would help fund more data and research, by supporting your business.
I have suggested it. :-) There is no transparency when purchasing drives, in that we don't know what percentage of the price of the drive goes to the reseller (like CDW) and what percentage goes to the manufacturer (like Seagate). I proposed becoming a reseller just to cut CDW out and pocket the profit margin that CDW lives on.
DISCLAIMER: I have not run my brilliant idea past any lawyers, so it may not be legal. We have not done this (yet).
> buy a drive I know you guys have put through its paces
Are you talking about some kind of burn-in at Backblaze for units sold to get past the infantile failure region? Or just Backblaze-as-drive-retailer but they specifically endorse this model because they have good experience with it?
I've actually been backing up to Backblaze for about a year now but (knock on wood) haven't had to restore any data. That said, one of my drives has been acting up in the last few days so that moment may be at hand (though I also have it backed up to a second local drive).
You don't have backups, unless you can do restores. So you have to practice doing restores.
For my servers at work, we're using btrfs snapshots and send/receive to the backup host. So restoring files is just going into the appropriate snapshot directory, and copying out the files of interest.
If your backup scheme is any more complicated than that, you need to practice it at least a few times per year so that it is completely familiar.
Hilarious story from the old days...
We were doing backups to QIC tape drives. At one point, there was a lightning storm. The servers were plugged into UPSs with power protection though.
However, when running a backup, I noticed that the tape drive sounded a little different. So I check one of the backup tapes... the tape drive would no longer switch over the tracks on the tape. So it was just overwriting the same track again and again. Corrupted backups. Worse yet: silently corrupted backups. No messages from the OS about a hardware problem.
That could have been bad news if it wasn't caught quickly.
> You don't have backups, unless you can do restores. So you have to practice doing restores.
100% - I worked hard to make sure that was in the Best Practices sent out to every person that signs up with Backblaze. Restoring is the most important part. So far we have over 200PB of backups, but the stat that I like even more is that we have restored over 10 Billion files.
I realize this is slightly off topic, but I want to nerd out for a moment re: your comment on hearing something wrong with the tape drive; a skill I always felt was under-recognized for how much of a "superpower" it gives you, that being how critical sound is for a good sysop. Broken AC belts, bad hard drive backplanes, boot cycles, all things I've run into where the sound was the cue; detecting an unalerted tape drive failure is the icing on the diagnostic case.
Audio is an incredibly rich feedback mechanism for all kinds of mechanical processes. And the fascinating part about it is that our brains process it so effortlessly. If the data your ears can analyze from your car were presented visually, perhaps as a scrolling FFT spectral graph or plots of a host of sensors, you'd never notice a momentary misfire or a tiny change in pitch. It would be complete data overload! But even untrained ears can pick out errant noises.
I had another incident like that earlier in my IT career.
I was a 'terminal room consultant' in college... back when we had serial terminals hooked to Unix systems. Part of the job was the care and feeding of a couple printers, a big ol' line printer (green bar paper) and a Printronix graphics printer (dot matrix, for printing out fancy lab reports you wrote up using troff).
So over time, from loading paper and clearing jams, I had accumulated hours and hours of hearing these two guys chatter as they went about their business.
At one point, I noticed that the Printronix printer sounded funny. Just off, in some way. So I call it in for maintenance, but they don't seem to care what an undergraduate punk thought about printer sounds.
Sure enough, a week later, I see it is down and taken apart for repairs.
Your ears, your nose, all your senses should be used for debugging and general investigation.
Here in the HGST EMEA lab, you will often find an engineer listening to a drive spin up with an induction pick-up and amplifier, muttering something like "Yep, this one's running firmware XYZ", or "Hmm, sounds like this one has the older, unmodified ramp".
> You don't have backups, unless you can do restores.
Bingo, I was just explaining this to someone yesterday. Testing the restores MUST be part of the backup strategy. If your db data is small enough to have it all in your test environment, I often try to test the restores by restoring to the test db and then using that db for the test environment until the next test restore.
I had a drive fail a couple years ago and restored it with Backblaze. The one gotcha is it wasn't a bootable backup, so it was still a pain getting my system back to something approximating what it was before. Since then I've added a weekly bootable backup to a local USB drive. Not failsafe but good enough for my needs.
> I've actually been backing up to Backblaze for about a year now but (knock on wood) haven't had to restore any data.
Yev from Backblaze. Please test a restore. We have that as part of our best practices. Why? Hopefully you won't but if you DO need a restore, it's likely that you'll be in a heightened state of panic, so familiarizing yourself with the process before hand make it go more smoothly! It's pretty easy, though we are currently working on ways to streamline it even further :)
Brian from Backblaze here. Let me elaborate on what Yev said.
When customers are doing a restore, almost by definition they are not having a good day. For example, this could be somebody who just had a $1,200 laptop stolen, and now they might lose every photo they have of their child who died last year. Real example. :-( So they show up to the Backblaze website freaked out of their minds, and they FORGET THEIR PASSWORD or something silly and minor like that, and after guessing a few times our support guys get a flaming hot chat session with a person using more four letter words than not accusing Backblaze of not having their restore.
When we resolve it all (help them with the "recover password" feature) then we usually get a happy customer for life who apologizes for losing their temper earlier. I always find it amusing when they think they are the FIRST customer to ever lose their temper under such a stressful situation. Usually it isn't even the first one THAT DAY.
TL;DR - you only restore when you are freaking out. And that's Ok - your worst day is the day when Backblaze has to be the best.
Yev from Backblaze here. Let me elaborate on what Brian said.
A lot of our customers also restore just for fun or out of convenience. But yea, if you're one of the ones that's doing it out of necessity after a crash or theft, knowing how it works makes everything go a lot smoother.
I back up to a local external drive, and also to BackBlaze. External drives are so cheap these days that the ease of handling your restore yourself is worth it to me. BackBlaze is just an offsite back up so when the house is burning down, I can grab the kids instead of pictures of the kids.
My alternative: buy 2+ external drives and a fire/water proof box. Keep one drive unplugged and in the box when not backing up. Keep other n-1 drives elsewhere and swap with the local occasionally.
I have one at work, and another at my parent's house, more than 100 miles away. In case of a literal blaze and/or high water, even the local drive should be fine. If all drives are gone from a single catastrophe, I figure I (and everyone else) have more serious things to worry about, like what's for dinner.
That's what I do. I've got local Time Machine backups (which I have restored from in the past). So far I just haven't had to use my Backblaze backups but I think I'll test that this weekend.
Look on the left nave for "View/Restore Files", browse to one file you know you changed recently, and check the checkbox by it (and maybe a few other files) and click "Continue With Restore". Done!
Within a few seconds you can go to "My Restores" (on the left side of the web browser) to download the restore!
I just assume that anybody who uses backblaze and is serious about their backups just uses it as a true DR. They keep a local backup which will be used for 99% of restores. BB is just for the case where you lose the backup as well. I honestly don't know how they do it at $5/user/month. They must have a ton of very light users to offset the whales.
> must have a ton of very light users to offset the whales
Brian from Backblaze here. Our new B2 product is priced at half a penny per GByte per month which accurately reflects how much it costs for us to store your data including a small profit for us.
So the $5/month is profitable for us up to a 1 TByte backup. We have about 25 customers with more than 50 TBytes in a $5/month backup, and yes, we lose money on them (which is FINE - they often recommend us to friends with less data). On the opposite end, we have about 20,000 customers with less than 20 GBytes backed up where we are massively profitable on those particular customers. Interestingly enough, my 84 year old father is in that demographic - no digital music, no digital movies, a few digital photos and a Quicken file. Last year he lost a hard drive, we restored his files from Backblaze. :-)
In between the 50 TByte and 10 GByte customers is a big bell curve with the bulk of our customers basically paying for their own backups.
A different way to think about it is the vast majority of people store files inside their laptops and are happy. The maximum size hard drive you can configure in a laptop today is probably about 1 TByte (the 2 TByte laptop size drives are just starting to appear), so by definition we're profitable on people like this. Technical people think everybody is like them and has a 16 TByte RAID array filled with all the Linux ISOs and movies. :-) But really most people have less than a TByte of personal data.
That describes me as well. I figure Backblaze is a cheap extra pair of suspenders which is both DR and gives me an additional backup made in an independent way. I have pulled older versions of files off Backblaze a couple times when I've needed to but, now, Time Machine pretty much takes care of that.
I also keep a periodic backup in my office as well as various less systematic backups in various ways. I'd recommend anyone keep at least a couple of backups made with different methods. You never feel more exposed than when you need to use a backup and realize you only have one copy of all your data. Hope nothing else fails or you do something boneheaded with the restore.
I had a drive fail last fall and used the restore portion for the first time. I actually opted to use it over my local time machine backup and am glad I did. It was just a matter of selecting the files online, waiting for it to create the download, and then doing so. Much more painless than my other options.
The restore process on their consumer process is simple, but takes some time.
You logon or use their app, choose the folders/files you want to restore and await an email from them letting you know when the folders/files are available for download.
Or they will send you a thumb drive (or a bigger external), with your files on it. Obviously the use cases are different, one is "oops, I deleted a folder" and the other is "my machine is a heap of slag".
The only problem with blackblaze is that they are on osx and Windows only.
I'm using Linux so the only cheap backup is from crashplan, kudos to them that they support us.
I think a big part of the deterioration of musical quality is connected to three major factors:
1. Recorded music has meant less need for such large numbers of musicians, as a result the pool of potential talent is lower. Much less live music is performed as a result, as a result the pool of musicians with great live musical abilities has gone down.
2. Multi-track and then computer recording has made it possible to make much more 'effects' based music, which wows the ears sonically, but requires less musicianship to back it up. The large producers of pop music has largely clung to using these techniques to give their music a unique 'modern' sound, largely fueled by the latest developments in technology.
3. The ever progressing corporatization of the music industry.
I think all of these could be used to justify why music has gotten better:
1. Only the most passionate musicians do it as a profession.
2. A producer doesn't have to chase that perfect accordion sound and manage to record it withouht distortion anymore. Which means it's increasingly about musical ideas and less about mechanical skill.
3. Corporatization always has element of specialization. Which has yielded lots of good on on other fields.
4. Lowered attention spans. It's true across all media, our culturally induced ADHD rewards novelty hits, least common denominator styles, and especially demotes things that require more than 15 seconds to process and understand before moving on. It's not just music it's clickbait headlines and superhero movies too.
One could argue it's more about the "thrills-per-minute" counts going up. I'm not saying I totally agree, but it is at least evident to me that movies from past decades spend a little more time between "thrills" than your average modern film.
