My wife is in the market for large, cheap drives with decent performance to store sequencing data, so I ordered and tested a 2 TB Western Digital Red NAS (WD20EFRX—no link because wdc.com is broken at the moment). The Red series seems to be a halfway point between the WD Green and WD Black series: like the Green series, they have 4096-byte sectors and IntelliPower (i.e. variable rpm), but they are designed for 24×7 operation and seem to have far more consistent performance—although not quite on par with the Black series. Continue reading “Benchmark: WD Red NAS”
Progress
Amazon‘s recent acquisition of Liquavista has engendered speculation about a color Kindle. It also made me go “I told you so”.
There is an oft-repeated but apocryphal story about USPTO Commissioner Henry Ellsworth (some say Charles Duell) suggesting that the Patent Office should be shut down because “everything that can be invented has been invented”. While neither of these men ever made any such claim, a similar sentiment is surprisingly common even among technically literate people.
A while ago, I got into a discussion about emittive (CRT, LED) vs transmittive (LCD) vs reflective (eInk) display technologies. My position was that a) emittive and transmittive displays are stopgap technologies and b) high-resolution, low-latency, full-color reflective displays will be commercially available within a few years. This was immediately dismissed because, and I paraphrase, “there’s no way you’ll get the ink beads to turn fast enough”.
Chew on this for a bit.
Imagine that it’s 1880 and I tell you that “within a few years, it will be possible to travel a hundred kilometers in mere hours”, and you answer “no horse could possibly run that fast”.
Now imagine the same scenario in 1890, a few years after automobiles became commercially available.
Now imagine the same scenario in 1900, when high-end automobiles were capable of sustaining speeds of 50 km/h and above.
In the first scenario, I am looking at experiments and proofs-of-concept and hoping, fingers crossed, that a breakthrough is imminent. In the second, I am extrapolating from currently available technology and recent advances. In the third, I am simply predicting that today’s bleeding-edge technology will soon become widely available and affordable.
When I had that conversation about display technologies, black-and-white electrowetting displays were already in production, and, although I did not know this at the time, Liquavista had started shipping color EWD devkits to OEMs. They are expected to enter production this year.
I told you so.
Hurtigruten mener seg hevet over norsk lov
Hurtigruten har i flere år, med ujevne mellomrom, sendt reklame til min Gmail-adresse. Så langt i år har jeg mottatt fire såkalte nyhetsbrev fra dem.
Jeg har aldri reist med Hurtigruten. Jeg har heller aldri bedt dem om noe pristilbud, prospekt e.l. som kunne oppfattes som et ønske om å motta reklame. Jeg har aldri kontaktet dem – bortsett fra de gangene jeg har bedt dem om å slutte å sende meg reklame.
Dette er et klart brudd på Markedsføringslovens §15:
I næringsvirksomhet er det forbudt, uten mottakerens forutgående samtykke, å rette markedsføringshenvendelser til fysiske personer ved elektroniske kommunikasjonsmetoder som tillater individuell kommunikasjon, som for eksempel elektronisk post, telefaks eller automatisert oppringningssystem (talemaskin). […] Krav om forhåndssamtykke etter første ledd gjelder heller ikke markedsføring ved elektronisk post i eksisterende kundeforhold der den næringsdrivende avtaleparten har mottatt kundens elektroniske adresse i forbindelse med salg.
Hurtigruten mener tydeligvis at de er hevet over norsk lov.
Jeg klaget dem inn til Forbrukerombudet for drøye to måneder siden, men har ikke fått noe svar. Klagen min er heller ikke journalført, hvilket i seg selv er et brudd på Offentlighetslovens §10 og dertil hørende forskrift 2008.10.17 nr 1119. Sic transit gloria mundi; Forbrukerombudet pleide å være flinke til å følge opp spam-klager, men for rundt halvannet eller to år siden sluttet de å behandle dem «på grunn av stor saksmengde».
Nineteen-ninety-six
1996. The Spice Girls rock (pop?) the world with Wannabe. Will Smith kicks alien butt in Independence day. DVDs become commercially available. Scientists clone the first mammal. Ebay opens. Three important standards are either released or reshaped into their current form: MIME, Unicode and IPv6. 17 years later, a shocking amount of software still does not support these standards.
sigh
Windows Backup slowdown
My Windows 7 desktop is set up to back up to a Drobo B800i (over iSCSI) every night at 04:00, using Windows Backup. Even though it only uses about 700 GB of its 2 TB mirror, and only backs up a small fraction of that, backup jobs routinely took 15 hours or more. It could have copied the entire disk in half that time!
I set about hunting for a solution. One suggestion that turned up repeatedly in Google searches was to turn off the Background Intelligent Transfer Service. BITS is basically a download manager designed to only run when there is little or no other network traffic; among other thing, it is used by Windows Update to download patches. I couldn’t understand how this could help, but I had no better ideas and nothing to lose, so I stopped BITS. The next backup job completed in 45 minutes.
Patch Tuesday came along, and I rebooted the computer. Since I had only stopped BITS and not disabled it, it started again when the machine booted. Backup jobs slowed down again. This time, I disabled BITS, and I was back to sub-hour backups.
This makes absolutely no sense. BITS wasn’t even downloading anything; as far as I know, the only program or service I have running that actually uses it is Windows Update. BITS was slowing down backups just by being there. I don’t remember having this issue when I ran backups to an eSATA drive, so there must be some network-related interaction between BITS and iSCSI, but I have no idea what.