IBM Deathstar Drive
My roommate Rojean lost her hard drive yesterday. Every time I oull a dead hard drive out of a system it's usually an IBM. The call it a "Deskstar" but I call the "Deathstar". I had about 6 of them fail at EFF and I get replacements and they fail too.
I have some laying around but why bother sending them back? IBM will just send me another defective drive. Last time I called them and asked if they would swap it for another model that works and they refused.
The bottom line is - IBM doesn't give a fuck about my data or if I ever get a good drive. They are more than willing to deny they have a design problem and to conceal their flaws - they are willing to put my data at risk. Not to mention the time it takes to replace the drive and restore the data.
So - you won't see me buying another IBM driive again!
Letter to the Editor
I'm not sure which is more disturbing - the fact that Saudi Arabia bankrolled the 9-11 attack - or that the Bush administration wants to conceal that Saudi Arabia was behind the attack by blacking out pages in the 9-11 report. 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, None were from Iraq. Did we go to war with the wrong country?
I was just thinking today about how cheap hard drive space is compared to what it used to be. In 1981 a 5 megabyte Pertec drive cost about $9500 or almost $2000 per megabyte. I just bought a 200 gigabye (200,000 megabytes) yesterday for $129 (after rebate) at Fry's. That's .0645 cents per meg. A little over 6/100 of a cent!
Now - a good piece of HP Bright white inkjet paper costs 2 cents a sheet which is the same cost as 31 megabytes of data. Who would have ever thought that a sheet of paper was worth as much as the storage of six of those old 5 meg drives.
I started this blog after I started hosting Larry Lessig's Web Site. Larry has a blog and it finally occurred to me that I need to blog myself. I've been rather slow about writing new content. Most of the new stuff I'm working on is on my Church of Reality web site. I'm hoping that with this blog I can document what I'm up to and get more stuff up on my site.
On thing I plan to do is get my letter to the Editor up here so that people can read them and comment on them.