A great book is "Strategy and the Fat Smoker". It's written by a consultant but points out an obvious point: the quality of the strategy itself is not nearly as impactful as the ability to execute. The author compares this to being a fat smoker who won't change their habits - knowing the right strategy is insufficient.
The read failures are also attributed to other parts of the system, which for the end user still end up in failed reads. The author links to a sales PDF from Quantum.
e.g. the robot dies, the drive dies, the cartridge dies, the library bends, the humidity was too much.. multiplied by each library, robot, drive and cartridge your data is spread across.
Or, a fun little anecdote, the cleaner had access to the server room and turned off the AC of the server room, most disk drives failed, and the tapes melted inside the robots.
I'm not sure you can distinguish those.
It is IBM, and IBM has a preference for who its customers are.
So do enterprises, who like the sound of "no one ever got fired for..."
And it's also because the market is pretty small (at least in terms of sites) - there's just not that much total accessible market for any competitor.
there are a couple tape makers, regardless of how many companies rebadge the product.
afaik, there are only 2-3 drive makers too.
but don't forget that tape doesn't make much sense (in its market) without the robotic library. there might be some off-brands that sell small libraries, but the big ones are, afaik, dominated by IBM.
I'm just talking about single drive units you manually swap tapes on. That would still make an excellent long term cold backup for me even if I did have to swap the tape s once a week but they're still 4k+ unless I go all the way down to LTO-5 tapes that are just ~1.5TB which could be good enough for critical things but not really helpful for backing up everything.
A lot of things are stated as conclusions in this article, where SOTA has reversed or in some cases invalidated the conclusions. Unfortunately they are not published, and will probably remain trade secrets for another decade.
The biggest conclusion that is invalidated is that your archival workload cannot be bin packed with your hot workloads. With the ever reducing IO/byte of HDD, this has radically changed where the bytes go.
Another example is the cost of IO when your backups are not perfectly coalesced. If you're striping writes across datacenters, into objects which are sharded across clusters that encode across many drives - your backups get extremely fragmented.
The IO for your backup suddenly becomes HUGE when compared to the size of the end object you wish to read. This makes things like tape nasty - sure you can read at incredible linear speeds.. but that's only worth it if you actually wanted to restore the exact TBs that are on the exact cartridge your drive & robot picked up.
> If you download or print from Google Docs, you'll only download or print the active tab. If you want to download or print all tabs at once, you can do it from Google Drive
This is multiple documents, barely/mildly organized. I have yet to see someone use these tabs at work though, so maybe everyone is rejecting them as poorly implemented organization. What am I missing about Tabs?
"document-based workflows" are a good idea[0] but I think this is a terrible execution of it.
It's the same concept as tabs in Sheets/Excel, which I've never heard anybody complain about. It's a nice UX to be able to focus on one thing rather than deal with scrolling. E.g. one tab for agenda items, another for meeting notes, another for action items assigned to people.
But also for things like chapters, where a document is just too long for scrolling otherwise.
And the reality is that probably 99% of Docs never get printed or downloaded/converted. If an org uses Google, everything usually just stays a Doc, except occasionally when dealing with external folks. (I do find it a bit weird that you have to go to Drive to print/convert all tabs at once, but it's not exactly difficult. Still, I hope that will get fixed at some point.)
The hamfisted attempts to ram new features into docs/excel recently have made me wince. It's like (read: it's because) they're afraid to change the winning formula, so any new feature is buried in some submenu and is treated as a 2nd class citizen throughout. They then try to surface these new features via a suggestions pane which is doomed to irritate users because it feels like you're doing something complicated when you try and use it, and half the time it causes standard functionality to not work as you'd expect.
It's crazy to me, half the people on HN complain about Docs being stagnant and not adding enough new features, and then the other half complain about too many new features? It's like there's no winning.
FYI, tabs are not "buried in some submenu", they're shown on every new document. They're not "treated as a 2nd class citizen throughout", they're an obvious "1st class" feature.
o1 said: It appears the points have been deliberately arranged to form a stylized figure rather than showing a conventional trend. In other words, there is no obvious linear or monotonic relationship between steps and BMI, and the red‐blue (female–male) split is intermixed throughout the shape. From this visualization alone, one cannot meaningfully conclude a correlation or difference in BMI by gender or by step count. Instead, the data are displayed in a pattern that resembles a cartoon character, suggesting the layout is artistic or contrived rather than reflecting a standard distribution.
o1 pro: It appears the data have been deliberately arranged to form a stylized humanoid figure. In terms of actual trends, there is no obvious linear or nonlinear correlation between steps and BMI, and the female–male color split seems fairly uniform across the shape. Visually, BMI spans roughly 15–30, while steps extend up to about 15,000, with no clear clustering or separation by gender. Within reasonable confidence (e.g., an estimated R² near zero if one were to attempt a linear fit), there is no discernible predictive relationship between steps and BMI in this plot.
In many cases maximizing profits increases supply through efficiency, especially in the case of things like food. Increased supply is usually considered a safer place than a lower supply if it's vital.
Every step you take that makes food more expensive, some use cases of food are no longer possible (say, free eggs in all elementary schools or something).
How many of these uses are we ok eliminating so the wealthier population has a more consistent/resilient supply?
