I clicked the link after reading just the first 4 words of the title. I didn't see the year it was written until I had closed the link - perhaps it was added after the initial submission.
After reading the article through I was struck by the tone. It was a breath of fresh air - so optimistic and enthusiastic and not in the least bit self-important or unduly serious. It made me excited to read more!
When I saw the '(2009)' flag I suddenly felt a pang of grief. Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?
> Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?
I assume it didn’t make money. I have fond memories of reading PC magazines front to back in the 90s but they’re all gone now. The audience has gone online, to a hundred different blogs or YouTube channels or whatever.
I recently re-started a subscription to paper copies of wired mag. Apparently they just had a chief editor change. It was absurdly cheap, like $5 for a year. I think Conde Nast are just trying to keep some paper subscribers.
Wired has always been cheap. They'll give it away for free with the tiniest bit of effort.
Wired delivers ads to a market segment with a lot of disposable income. They've got the ability and inclination to buy a lot of luxury goods and services. Wired charges at all only so that you believe that getting it into your house was your idea rather than theirs.
Five bucks is less than they spend on printing and delivering, never mind actual writing. A lot of the writing is pretty poor, though they also have a long history of discovering and promoting some real writing talent.
So it's a pretty good bargain. It just helps to be aware that you're the product more than you are the client.
> Wired charges at all only so that you believe that getting it into your house was your idea rather than theirs.
No, they charge at all because people who pay for print ads pay more based on paid circulation (you get people who pay for ads in free publications, but they pay less), probably on the basis that paid subscribers are likely to actually read the publication it and not just pick it up to use as dropcloths for painting or kindling for fires.
Every once in a while the magazines just start appearing at my house without me subscribing. My best guess for that is they want more readers in my zip code to sell ads against.
Same deal. We stopped subscribing to Bon Appetit, moved to a new house, and a year and a half later they started showing up again. Now I just have something new to throw into recycling as soon as it arrives and I can’t get them to stop because I’m not actually a subscriber.
Me too. I was using public transport a lot and at one of the train stations there was a bookstore which had lots of different magazines. I bought and read a lot of them. Those where good times. I anticipated the next issues of the magazines and if it was e.g. a computer games magazine I was often hyped for the upcoming games and the demos that where sometimes included.
Now I sometimes still go to such bookstores but those magazines have lost their appeal since I can get all of the information from the internet, sometimes even on the website of the magazine. It's unfortunately also quite overwhelming.
I still have a physical subscription and I will say they do a good job offering content that you can read and it doesn't already feel terribly dated. Yes, often the topics are stuff you'll have browsed over in the last 30 days but the articles are still well written and worth a read (provided you haven't spent too much time on wired.com (I don't)). But the magazine feels so lite now, almost like a special physical edition of their website. The photo of Grimes on the cover recently was nice, maybe they could lean in a bit more on pictorial and photographic content, if it's days aren't already numbered.
Wired was started in the 1990s, a time that was optimistic even by the standards of your generic "the past was always better" heuristic. It was so optimistic that they actually debated the merits of paying off the US national debt.
In the 1990s, Wired was not merely "infectious and enthusiastic". It was gullibly gung-ho, and ugly as hell. I used a heuristic: if something appeared on the cover of Wired, it was either a fait accompli, or going to fail within a year.
So yeah, 1990s Wired was genuinely different. But often not in a good way.
Really miss stuff like this from back in the early computing days. One time we used MS Backup to copy Warcraft 1 from my friends computer to my own. Took like 80 floppy disks!
> It would have probably been faster to put your friends hard disk into your computer for a few minutes and copy directly from disk to disk?
Did ever your hard drive died because you shut down your computer cleanly, discharged static electricity, removed the disk without jolting it, and installed to another computer with the same care?
I was probably too young to remember these days, however probably a couple of my disks didn't have the feature. The disks I lost were 6GiB and 30GiB models, both were autoparking.
I never had enough jumpers at the time(early in my computer explorations), and hoarded them like gold up until around 2007 or 2008 when I finally had plenty from old spare parts.
Meh. We had a PC in the electronics lab circa 1990 that ran perfectly happily with no case on either the PC or the hard-drive - spinning platters exposed.
haven't thought of that program in decades, thank you. First time I learned about a null modem cable and just scraping the surface of RS-232. I also remember using crossover cables so I could network 2 computers on a high-schooler's budget.
Sorry for a second response to the same comment. While on the topic of entertainment, consider the opposite of putting erasure codes on many weird devices!
Years ago, some colleagues and I did the napkin math over lunch to estimate what a single hard drive would look like that could store all of Google's data. This was for a humorous internal talk. The linear speeds of the outer sectors were enough to leave the solar system (not just higher than Earth's escape velocity). Good laughs were had, I think.
Here's the original blog post on those shuffles[1]. Funny enough, I remember reading about this exact post in 2005, that photo of the four shuffles plugged into the USB hub hits my nostalgia buttons.
"With Seagate Direct Tape Access, users see the tape device as a logical drive letter from within Windows 95 Explorer, Windows 3.x File Manager, or any other Windows application, similar to a hard drive or CD-ROM. Files and directories can be moved to and from the tape device with drag-and-drop operations."
Not that weird, but I've thought about RAIDing some USB thumb drives together. Might actually be a good way to get practice with your choice of RAID software for cheap, come to think of it.
> but I've thought about RAIDing some USB thumb drives together
I had a netbook with an irritatingly slow (and a bit small) eMMC drive for its main storage. I had a pair of microSD cards lying around that were faster for many IO patterns, so I bought a third and strung the three together in mini-USB readers (like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001JPPQS6/) and run Linux off that using its 3-drive RAID10 support. Leaving a bit of space on each for a smaller RAID1 array for /boot (booting direct form RAID10 didn't work), IIRC the 3x8Gb SD cards give a small touch under 12GiB, larger than the built-in 8Gb, and it was significantly faster (more so than I expected). The slow eMMC got used as backup storage, syncing copies of bits from /home and config from elsewhere, so I could rebuild easily should two cards die at the same time.
The main problem with this arrangement was that is consumed all three of the USB ports, if I wanted to access another drive locally rather than over wireless I'd have to shut down and reboot with at least one of the drives hung off a small USB hub. For some reason it didn't work with one of the drives in the built-in SD reader (the arrays would always start in a degraded state on boot) which I never got around to looking into working around (perhaps a kernel module was missing from initrd that was needed to be able to access the hardware?).
I experimented with RAID5 and RAID0 also. 5 gave a bit more space but was a lot slower for write operations, at least in artificial benchmarks, I assume due to read-before-write issues and the machine having little RAM spare for cache that might mitigate this. 0 did not give notable read performance benefits (though measurably faster writes, and obviously gave much more space), perhaps all the ports running of a single internal USB2 hub was a limiting factor.
On Linux, you can expose raw image files as storage devices using "loop devices" - the "losetup" command will turn any flat file into an attached storage device as /dev/loop*, you can then run your RAID of choice on that.
By the way, if you want to play with ZFS, it supports using flat files as backing "devices" naturally, so you don't even need to fake a drive using loop devices.
When I first learned about USB "On The Go", and discovered a friend's Android phone had the feature, I connected a USB floppy drive to the phone. I used a micro USB to type A hub that I had around for my Pi Zero.
Totally worked. Android called it an SD card in its UI but I was able to read/write files to it.
Beware that bad sectors probably exist on those, and modern filesystems (which falsely assume the hardware will do automagical remapping) make it hard to run `badblocks`.
From the fsck man pages, only ext2, ext3, ext4, and reiserfs support it. I hope that `btrfs-convert` deals with it correctly, but you must not ever run `btrfs balance` or delete the backup (it won't waste space if it was a fresh FS). And if further bad blocks develop you'll have to redo this all from scratch.
btrfs doesn't support bad blocks. It's written in the documentation.
From experience I can tell you that most usb sticks fail while reading back data by returning bad data, not an error or timeout, and the defective sectors aren't always the same (internal remap to wear leveling might be the cause of that).
Advice:
Do md-raid0 on half of them, md-raid0 on the other half, and btrfs raid1 on the two md devices.
If you want to exceed 25MB/s, use different USB controllers, not different ports on the same hub.
Btrfs doesn't directly support bad blocks. But since the conversion is supposed to use only "free space" that's presumably excluding bad blocks (which are presumably counted as allocated).
Bad blocks don't count as allocated unless they are newly discovered - data should be moved asap if it's still recoverable. An allocated block with nothing in it is an error.
I wanted to boot my home truenas box off usb flash, but I also know how flakey usb flash can be, so I use a pair of drives in a zfs mirror.
I would not recommend this setup, Any real drive would be better. I just hated wasting drive bays for the non-critical boot/system partition. In my defense despite burning through many cheap usb drives I have not lost the boot yet, however I do keep a new spare drive taped to the unit.
I had grand plans to make a giant USB ZFS volume from tradeshow thumb drives in bulk.
It lasted a couple evenings while I bumped into apparently every Linux USB driver/chipset issue possible trying to drive a couple hundred drives via cheapo AliExpress USB hubs.
It was fun times, but even more useless than I originally thought it would be. It was amusing to get >1GBps for a minute or two across 256 crappy thumb drives though!
From 2009, what I think was a famous video on which some kids in the UK put together a 6-gigabyte RAID with 24 256-gigabyte Samsung drives: https://youtu.be/26enkCzkJHQ
Can confirm, it is fun, also fun was raid5 using iscsi drives, which surprisingly almost worked. Almost in that while I could assemble and access the raid unit, it behaved very poorly(hard hangs) on drive failure. But it was fun, sort of like a super redneck network distributed filesystem.
Fun fact: There's also 2X speed floppy drives, and maybe even higher. So this can be improved further with the right drives.
I believe they were mainly used in things like photo cameras, during the short period of time when photo cameras used floppies to store stuff, and the slow write speed was a bottleneck.
After reading the article through I was struck by the tone. It was a breath of fresh air - so optimistic and enthusiastic and not in the least bit self-important or unduly serious. It made me excited to read more!
When I saw the '(2009)' flag I suddenly felt a pang of grief. Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?