Category Archives: Sufficiently Advanced Technology

Over the weekend, someone called my office voice mail and left a 228 second message that sounds like a muffled pro tennis match play-by-play.

For a minute there, I thought I had a new social trend spotted in the wild: voice mail spam.

So I called the number from the caller ID.

It's not a social trend. It seems a former student took his young daughter to the tennis match this weekend, and during the match he gave her the cell phone to play with. She happily pushed buttons, it called my office, and I got a recording of a bit of the match.

But I had a nice chat with the dad, who's now a partner in a big local firm and seems to be doing very well.

This very funny ad skewering the Macbook Air actually made me want to buy the Lenovo product — until I saw the price tag.

(via Ed Bott)

Looks like I'll be waiting for that Atom-powered Asus eee after all.

Is this the future of car doors? Looks good to me:

It seems that ordinary Western Digital (WD) hard drives have an “advanced” feature that makes them unsuitable for either hardware or software RAID. Since I like to mirror the family's hard drives for security in the event of hard drive failure — we had one fail on my wife's machine last week so this is hardly paranoia — this is something I am glad I found before placing an order.

Answer

Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically in either a desktop computer environment or on RAID controller.

If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly unless jointly qualified by an enterprise OEM. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.

When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).

I think the box should have a warning sticker about this…

Meanwhile, back to the hunt for reliable, very quiet, low-heat-producing, mass storage.

Norbert Wiener Award winner Bruce Schneier points us to a new 117-page paper by Ronald C. Arkin on Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture.

Looks like a must read – after I get caught up…

Here's a new twist on an old method of stealing data.

Taipei Times: Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.

Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said.

The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner's knowledge …

The bureau said that the method of attack was unusual, adding that it suspected Chinese authorities were involved.

Of course, in the USA, we use more subtle means to get your data.