It's easier to recover corrupted media if you know everything about the underlying format and protocols. As an example, I was able to recover a partition that was partially overwritten by just a few sectors by finding a backup copy of the superblock and writing it into the correct place armed only with hexdump and dd. That would have been impossible without detailed info about ext2/3/4 available.
Also look at the floppy imagers people have made, that operate at the magnetic flux level.
> It's easier to recover corrupted media if you know everything about the underlying format and protocols.
Sorry, I'm still not sure how knowing the LTO spec would be helpful.
You are basically asking for the "Layer 1" documentation of how the tape head write to the tape media? Given that you can only access the media via a drive, wouldn't it be sufficient to simply know the SCSI commands (T-10 SSC-x) to send? You'd then have to know the file format of the backup software (e.g., tar).
The parent commentor is probably talking about, in this case, wanting to know what would be required to write their own “external” tape drive firmware/driver, to post-decode an analogue flux reading (ala https://applesaucefdc.com/) of an LTO tape into the same digital data-stream that the drive itself would output. I.e., what would be required to write an “LTO tape drive emulator” to interface with hardware/drivers that expect to be talking to an LTO drive (perhaps in the context of emulating that software itself.)
Why? You're not expected to find a tape in the attic 40 years from now and insert it into a drive you just bought at Fry's and restore the data from it.
If you do care about the data on any given medium a few years from now, you copy it then to a current medium. And so on.
This works fine as long new media are cheap, easily available and higher density than the old. As has been the last sixty years. If this progress ever halts or reverses (due to some man-made or natural disaster, including a major economical recession), we're screwed.
Doesn't matter what is expected to happen. Some time in the future someone needs to recover data from some old medium, proprietary format hinders that effort significantly and unnecessarily.
Not to mention the closed format causes reduced competition in making better or cheaper devices, which is another downside.
"That would have been impossible without detailed info about ext2/3/4 available."
Try telling that to IKARI+TALENT, Legend, Skid Row, PaRaDoX and all the other cracking groups from Commodore64, Amiga, ATARI ST, PlayStations, Nintendos, groups which competed on who is going to one-file a program or convert a secret disk coding format to a regular filesystem, with all the protections disabled and the programs bug and NTSC+PAL fixed while they were at it...
They competed on both quality and speed, as in who will be the first to 0-day the program which had to work 100%. Whoever got the 100% crack first won, anybody else's crack would get nuked. Them's the rules.
So, either we have gross incompetence across the entire information technology industry in general if it's impossible or slow, or the people disassembling custom filesystems and protections, bug fixing binaries and adding custom speed-loaders in record time are from another planet. Which one is it?
I've no idea who Usain Bolt is (or what it is, if it is a thing), so no clue what you are attempting to tell me with that allegory. No rows returned from the database. To me, it looks like
"cats are furry. Your argument is invalid."
Now, is "Hacker News" supposed to be where the information technology elite gathers, or is that a gross misnomer these days?
I don't think it's grossly unfair to assume people know the name of the fastest human being in the world.
It's also fine not to know, but your comment assumes we know who or what, for example, "allegory", "database", "cats" and "misnomer" are. My point is that every discussion assumes some knowledge, and if you lack it you can just look it up, or ask, without making allegories about cats and databases and huffing and puffing about information technology elites.
I mean, there is hella replacement for craft: industrial precision. Like you can write fucking fast code now without having to ASM that shit. And no one is building a revolutionary microprocessor with his hands. That shit is going in the machine.
No, I'm making a point: if "Hacker News" is supposed to be where the information technology elite is, then what kind of "elite" is it if editing a filesystem in situ is considered impossible without the source code? Or is anyone who can turn on a computer these days and boot some kind of an OS program to dabble with the computer a hacker now, so the bar has been dropped to the ground altogether? Are we now all inclusive here too, is that how bad things have gotten? Maybe I'm completely wrong, and hacking has been changed so nowadays it's completely disassociated from being competent?
I’m curious how they do competitive analysis. They want to be faster than gmail but how do they measure? I tried to take a high-speed video of gmail navigating from thread list to thread but it was not conclusive. Gmail collects a ton of client-side timing data and I wonder if anyone has ever just intercepted that.
It is unlikely the performance can be your long term selling point, when you do not own the full stack. They still have to interact with gmail through an API, while gmail app itself can process everything server-side. I think there is a place for $50/month email, but you need to own the entire stack, not just build a fancy email client.
Email is beautifully asynchronous so the time spent interacting with the underlying API is not important unless it’s horrifically sabotaged for third party clients.
LTO doesn't suffer from those things. Shock can destroy the case and dislodge the leader pin of an LTO cartridge but AFAIK it can't damage the data on the tape. Water is bad for the transport but as long as you dry your tapes out they should still work. The operating specs for LTO are crazy, you can read and write them under all practical atmospheric conditions.
As will very dry conditions. The IceCube neutrino telescope at South Pole used LTO-3 tapes to store data until they switched to only hard drives around 5 years ago. At that point, the newer tape drives had been tried (IIRC LTO-5 was the industry standard by then) but they never seemed to work, presumably because the humidity on station is incredibly low. It was considered more reasonable to keep the old LTO-3 equipment in use, versus building a humidor for the tapes and drives.
several garmin watches have had this feature since May (I think) of this year, requiring a paired garmin compatible phone, actively running garmin app, to work; sends text to selected contact about “incident.” Doesn’t appear to contact emergency services.
The 2015 Garmin Edge Explore 1000 bike computer has this feature. By all accounts it was/is implemented poorly and triggers erroneously all the time. If they'd made it call the emergency services they'd have got in a lot of trouble.
Apple don't deserve any credit for the idea but deserve something for doing it well.
If there's one thing Apple does well is reinventing the "wheel". Every single one of their product seems to be an improved iteration over some predecessor, I don't have any Apple devices though, I might be wrong.
Poor wording I suppose. My garmin is prior to that one, and has fall detection by using my phone via Bluetooth. Not sure who had it first, but definitely before that 2019 Verizon model.
Kinda. The part that they're referring to is it being Garmin's first device with cellular capability. But it's definitely vague around fall monitoring too.
I'm referring to this sentence, which has nothing to do with cellular capability:
> Like the latest Apple Watch, which has a built-in fall detection system, the new Garmin watch also has a safety monitoring feature, which the company calls incident detection.
You're right but it says that the contractors who unionized work for an IT outsourcing firm.
Google has kind of a random relationship with various classes of employees. There are contract cooks and janitors and whatnot but they made the physical security guards full-time.
It doesn't. Where does the USW come into the picture, if PATP is affiliate of the DPE, considering that USW is _also_ an affiliate of DPE? I don't get it and I wished the article explained it.
> Where does USW come into the picture, if PATP is affiliate of the DPE, considering that USW is _also_ an affiliate of DPE?
The PATP is a new chapter of United Steelworker’s union. Why steelworkers? Because the union isn’t just a steelworker’s union, although it retains that name in common usage for historical reasons (and also because it’s short enough to say). The union’s full name is The United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union. Years of erosion of union strength and membership in the US has led to a lot of union mergers.
The PATP is not part of the DPE. The DPE is a branch of the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO is a federation of unions — a metaunion, if you will. The DPE helped the PATP organize, that’s the DPE’s job. But the DPE isn’t a union itself, it’s an umbrella organization for professional employees represented by the AFL-CIO’s member unions.
Toyota doesn't even bother trying to market the Tundra outside the Americas, since cowboy cosplay isn't terribly popular abroad, so it makes sense that they are made here.
It's made sense to build Japanese and European cars in the US for a very long time. Honda has had 2 plants in Ohio for at least a couple decades now, and Toyota, BMW, and others have had plants here for a long time too. The US is the world's largest auto market, and US labor rates are lower than Japanese or German labor rates, plus there's a savings when you don't have to ship a 3-5000 pound object across an ocean, so of course it makes sense to build the highest-volume models here where they're bought (especially models that don't sell outside the US).
As for "cowboy cosplay", the Tundra doesn't make much sense elsewhere because gas prices are generally higher in other industrial countries, and in less-wealthy countries with low gas prices (like the middle east) they buy smaller trucks (and wealthy people there don't buy trucks at all), so a large pickup truck obviously isn't going to sell well there. America is just a unique place where 1) gas prices are low, incentivizing buying larger vehicles, and 2) personal wealth is high enough for middle-class people to afford a very large truck, and 3) owning a truck for use as a commuter vehicle (rather than a utilitarian vehicle) is esteemed for some odd reason.
I've owned 4 cars in my life, a crappy 1995 Dodge Neon (May She Rest In Peace), a Jeep Wrangler, an F-150, and a 3-Series BMW. By far the most enjoyable driving experiences were with the Wrangler and F-150 - because of the height of the cab. Sure, the BMW drives "better" and has tighter steering and suspension etc, but sitting at that height gave you a view of the road that not only made me feel safer while driving it also was just more comfortable (I'm tall, 6'3"). I was in the military with those middle two cars, and they obviously had other utility for me than the comfort. It isn't just "cowboy cosplay".
The Wrangler is an utterly terrible vehicle by every measure, except for one, and only one thing: going offroad. For any other use-case, it's the worst pick. It sucks for fuel economy, reliability, value for money (they're expensive), interior quality, stability (wheelbase is too short), towing (again, the wheelbase), comfort, etc.
The truck at least is good at towing and carrying stuff, but how often do you really do that stuff? For most truck owners, almost never; that's why I was talking about using them as commuter vehicles being odd. You don't see this much in other countries, and even for actual work use, they tend to use vans instead of trucks. It's mostly Americans who love trucks (and some middle easterners, who have found Toyota trucks are an inexpensive and reliable platform for mounting a machine gun).
If driving height were really important to you for a commuting vehicle, you'd get an SUV or CUV. Something like a Honda CR-V has ride/seat height along with a much more comfortable cabin for passengers, and a more sensibly-sized engine for good fuel economy, plus an overall smaller size so you aren't hogging parking spaces in lots with smaller spaces.
This is what I was referring to (and what someone else here coined as "cowboy cosplay"): Americans buy vehicles that are entirely ill-suited or excessively large for what they're actually using them for.
> owning a truck for use as a commuter vehicle (rather than a utilitarian vehicle) is esteemed for some odd reason
That seems like an odd way to put it. I drive a truck as a commuter vehicle because I can't afford to own and insure a second vehicle as a 'utility' vehicle, nor can I afford for my only vehicle to be of low utility
Thailand is a huge market for pickup trucks, though more often of the smaller variety. The HiLux is made in Thailand (and exported to places like Australia from there).
I doubt "cowboy cosplay" is a primary driver of pickup sales in the US so much as utility and affordability (the US has wider roads and cheaper fuel than Europe).
I think it's wrong to discount the strong cultural element to the ownership of pickup trucks in the US. Listen to a bit of country music and count the name-drops of pickup truck models, or drive down the road and count the lifted pickups -- there's more than just "utility and affordability" going on here.
A family member is starting the search for a new vehicle and is expressing interest in pick ups. It was surprising at first to me since he hasn't owned a truck in 20+ years, but then I was over while he had his country music on (he started listening to it almost exclusively the last few years) and I noticed how much they talk about trucks and it kind of clicked for me.
Affordability? Have you priced out F-150 sized trucks lately? The F150 starts at $28K, but you won't find one at that price. They typically average closer to $40K. Tundras start at $33K, but they too typically sell at over $40K. And both guzzle gas like it's going out of style.
