I, too, love Backblaze's reports. But they provide no information regarding drive endurance. While I became aware of this with SSDs, HDD manufacturers are reporting this too, usually as a warranty item, and with surprisingly lower numbers than I would have expected.
For example, in the Pro-sumer space, both WD's Red Pro and Gold HDDs report[1] their endurance limit as 550TB/year total bytes "transferred* to or from the drive hard drive", regardless of drive size.
The endurance figures for hard drives are probably derived from the rated number of seek operations for the heads, which is why it doesn't matter whether the operations are for reading or writing data. But that bakes in some assumptions about the mix of random vs sequential IO. And of course the figures are subject to de-rating when the company doesn't want the warranty to cover anything close to the real expected lifespan, especially for products further down the lineup.
Over 40 yrs ago, I had a programming assignment in college that I wrote in Lisp. My Prof, a non-Lisp-er, asked me to rewrite it, expecting C or Pascal. But I took him through my Lisp code, and was able to argue for the 'A' on that assignment. I might have created a Lisp-er in the process.
And they've done it before[1], about a year ago. This used to be a great source for free (not illegal) content, though it was clear that some links were bad.
Linux Mint comes with Hypnotix that contains free feeds for 974 TV channels world-wide, and 171 US-En Movie channels. Of these are nearly all of Pluto TV's channels, many of the free movie channels available on Roku, and even a few channels I can get over the air.
Given my browser's built-in privacy 'stuff' (plus uBlock Origin and uMatrix), and the block lists in my firewall, the funny thing is that I leak the most PII data watching OTA TV via the HDHomeRun app on my phone (I prefer their app to VLC on my phone). MPA needs to take a time-out, maybe catch up with technology.
> MPA needs to take a time-out, maybe catch up with technology.
Look it takes a lot of time and effort to make 12,000 completely indistinguishable superhero movies a year. They can't stay up on every little thing like "advances in technology", "changes in social attitudes", and "what legally constitutes piracy".
Back in the early 2000's, I was involved with bringing up, diagnostics, and bench-marking large-scale supercomputers. Would occasionally tell management, with a day or two of notice, when would be a good time to schedule maintenance, rather than attempting to run customer's application codes. Back then, I was using spaceweather.com, a somewhat simplified and sensationalized version of the spaceweather.gov.
On days when I knew what was coming, it was (almost) fun watching ECC single-bit error counters ticking up across the O(100k) nodes...like watching popcorn pop in a hot pan.
I'd love to A-B these to my trusty old FiiO X5 with Sennheiser HD-650's (at home) or IE8i's (when exercising). Hearing the sound-stage and subtle do-dads buried by lesser set-ups is a pet-peeve of mine.
A very important, perhaps dominant, factor in all of this is how the music was ripped/encoded. Except in my car, for which I did separate rips, I don't bother with MP3-320. For the X5, having 200 CDs ripped via WMA9 locks me in, until I can find a week or two to re-rip to a more modern lossless format.
I grew up on vinyl via my (crazy/rich) older brother's Class A/B stereo. I'm spoiled, and feel sorry for the people today that think MP3-120 is "good enough".
> Sennheiser HD-650's (at home) or IE8i's (when exercising).
I prefer the 900N outside, and the 1000XM inside.
To exercise with some music, I'm waiting for good neckband headphones with active audio cancellation: ideally something like the Anker Soundcore Life U2 - same form factor and USB-C plug, but with LDAC, AptX HD and a quality at least on par with the Shure AONIC.
Yes I'm super picky :)
> Hearing the sound-stage and subtle do-dads buried by lesser set-ups is a pet-peeve of mine.
Oh so much this!! I'm hearing instruments that I hadn't noticed before! The first week, I thought it was in my head, because some of the tracks I've been listening to for years started sounding different!!
But no, the Sony is that good. Again, it's worth every dollar.
> I'm spoiled
Now I'm spoiled too :) I just can't forget how much better it made my favorite tracks!
TBH, the Sony has been my best purchase of these last few years: it has even rekindled my interest in music.
Right now I'm exploring "pop urbaine", a very interesting genre that I didn't even know existed.
I fired IBM from my life "for cause" a few years ago after 32 years at Research.
This comment is overall correct, though there were some isolated pockets of truly amazing/wonderful (some classified) things to enjoy working on since the mid-2010s.
But, when did Sloths lose their energy? I have seen videos[1] of Sloths crawling/slithering slowly across a road, and cannot imagine they were ever a formidable or challenging target for (pre-)humans.
I don't know the answer to your question but I wouldn't compare modern sloths to ancient ones. They're each adapted for completely different environments.
That's exactly the point of the question, though: when/how did sloths transition from "ancient" to "modern"? If ancient sloths were massive and formidable prey, as per the article, what happened? Were there always smaller and/or slower sloth varieties, and we just killed all the giant ones?
EDIT: As always, Wikipedia comes through [1]. There were species of different sizes, with tree sloths always being smaller than ground sloths [2], the giant of the article
I use an Asus RT-68P. The EULA did scare me off from running all of the services listed in the article, with the exception of "Web History", where I do not recall having seen any indication that my history would be leaked. But, regardless I just turned off that function.
I agree with the author's disappointment in Dynamic DNS support. But, I followed instructions on the web[1] and added a cheap USB thumb-drive to run a script on every router boot. This script sets up a cron job that supports DuckDNS.org, and fixes other annoyances like turning off all the router's LEDs.
My favorite teacher in grade school, and echoed by my favorite teachers later in life, told me that the most important thing they are trying to teach us is how to learn because we'd all be learning for the rest of our lives.
I still strongly agree with that sentiment, but the difference/problem with learning as an adult is two-fold: why I am learning, and how much time I have to learn/apply that knowledge.
There is a difference in learning material to 'ace' a midterm/final exam, versus learning something to figure out a novel way, or picking up a new technology, to accomplish some task (e.g., at work). Part of the difference is who decides what can be "pruned", and especially when. I think back on all the 'stuff' I knew I would never need again once the final was over. Admittedly, I wasn't always correct, but age and experience increased my hit rate, and what subjects I under or over estimated could be whole other threads.
I am retired now, but have gotten into learning, mostly just for fun, some of the most complex (nasty) subject matter that I never had time for before. If I want to go off on some tangent, or deep dive, I can. The amount of free (or inexpensive) courses out there is wonderful and exciting.
For example, in the Pro-sumer space, both WD's Red Pro and Gold HDDs report[1] their endurance limit as 550TB/year total bytes "transferred* to or from the drive hard drive", regardless of drive size.
[1] See Specifications, and especially their footnote 1 at the bottom of the page: https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-r...