Posts by HobartTas 47 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2013
How many people are here that can instantly recognize that £65535 is £ (2^16)-1 or basically the highest unsigned 16 bit integer number that you can have, unsigned is 0..65535, signed is -32768 to 32767, and anytime this pops up then it's probably not a random or chance amount and more likely a programming error of some kind.
If it's a really old NAS then wouldn't it be a simple solution to fire up and configure the native FTP server that's probably already installed there but never been used before because it was disabled by default? You just then install an FTP client on your Windows 11 machine and you're off and running again. Or have I missed something with this presumably easy fix?
As I understand it with regards to tape migration what happens is in a large tape library holding many LTO-X drives and LTO-X tapes is that they just rip out the LTO-X drives and put in new LTO-(X+2) drives and a bunch of LTO-(X+2) tapes (which should hold about four times as much data per cartridge) and simply start reading data from the LTO-X tapes which those drives can still read and then write that data to the new LTO-(X+2) tapes and then they eventually remove the old tapes. I believe that much of this process is automated anyway so shouldn't be that much of a drama as far as human involvement goes. So rinse and repeat again every half dozen years time or so. One advantage of doing this is that you never have to test the tapes reputed longevity of several decades as you've probably only got them on hand for perhaps a decade at most. Disadvantage is the cost in doing this migration but again it would cost even more if you go outside the (X+2) window. This is probably the only real method of digital preservation for very large amounts of data. Interesting read here if anyone is interested. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-lost-picture-show-hollywood-archivists-cant-outpace-obsolescence
Then why haven't they already? Clearly they aren't exactly geniuses in this regard and you only have to look at this situation where they thought they were using uncrackable encryption and it was anything but that with the police monitoring every single communication sent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
Does any organization ever have any rules in place for differentiating between two people who share the same first, middle and last name as well as date of birth? Or do they just hope for the best and assume cases like this will never happen? Perhaps if they do occur we should encourage the affected individuals to add additional middle names and always quote them in their entirety e.g. King Charles is Charles Phillip Arthur George and is not likely to ever be confused with anyone else on the planet.
When I worked for Centrelink Australia we had a case where someone applied for either an Invalid or Age Pension and the first thing we did is check if there is an old previous record for the person and reuse that rather than create a new record so we don't have duplicates floating around confusing people, anyway we noticed that there was an old cancelled record in another state and promptly reused that record but this confused the new person as they got a letter to say their details had been transferred but then they contacted us to say that they never had any previous dealings with us whatsoever and then when we started looking into it further things like their income tax file numbers were different and it slowly became clear that these were two different people and we had to reverse what we did and I'm not sure how it was eventually all sorted out, or how it was setup so that this didn't occur again other than perhaps having a message on each persons record that flashes up when you access it to say that there are two identical people with the same details and to exercise extreme care when accessing their records.
Had the old cancelled record been active and current we would have contacted the applicant to ask what was going on with their fresh application as you can't have two income support payments at the same time but being cancelled and in the past then that didn't really raise any red flags at the time.
Even simple stuff like getting employers to fill out forms in respect of people was a hassle especially if you had say George Bush Snr and George Bush Jnr and you'd quote the Snr or Jnr and the date of birth as well on the questionnaire but the employer would only be familiar with the name they had as the employee and would just ignore the Snr/Jnr and DOB and happily quote the details which being for the other person would screw us up when we got the form back with the obviously wrong details on them.
Interesting that you mentioned this because on a typical window there are three icons in the upper right hand corner and they are minimize, resize, and close the window. For a fully square and full screen window like on my Win7 machine then when using the first two I position the mouse over it and press click because I have no other choice. For the last one however, I never do this as I just over generously and quickly and lazily move the mouse in a 45 degree angle upwards and to the right to a point way somewhere past the notional height and right width of the screen by about 20% and since the mouse can't actually be any further than this, then it therefore has to sit on the upper right hand pixel so when I then click the mouse button it does close the window.
I cannot comprehend actually having to position the arrow right on the "X" and then clicking the mouse unless of course the window is not full screen and then obviously you do have to do this to close it.
Problems started for me with the introduction of Vista because the windows were very slightly rounded and doing that same trick I always used to do on a full screen Vista window meant that the upper right corner pixel wasn't part of the slightly rounded window and hence not part of the "X" either and therefore all that happened was that when I clicked as usual then I just successfully de-selected the window as if I was actually clicking on the background which I found a real nuisance.
This must have eventually gotten noticed by Microsoft one way or another because a service pack (probably the first one) notionally included the missing area as if the window was still square and included it as part of the window itself such that my old method of closing the window worked again.
Two things I don't understand and the first is does no one else on the planet close full screen windows like I do? And, secondly, how did Vista go into production without anyone whatsoever at Microsoft not noticing this either?
The density of LH2 is 70.85 g/L or alternatively 70.85 Kg/kL so that unfortunately would mean a complete redesign of all airplanes and we saw what happened when Boeing tried to avoid doing that with the 737 Max because it would take too long and also be very expensive meaning they would lose a significant number of sales to Airbus during that period of time they would have to do all of that.
Otherwise you could possibly consider LH2 as a fuel but pressurized cryogenic tanks would probably be too heavy, if you go the unpressurized or lightly pressurized route you would have to contend with constant boil off and with an airplane that probably wouldn't be too bad because as soon as you start filling up the tanks you'd have to fire up the plane's APU for power and then start up the engines which would also cope with any boil off as well as consuming LH2 itself.
It would also mean that you'd have to keep the engines or APU running when you land and start disgorging passengers and continue doing so until you could reverse the fueling process and drain the tanks leaving behind some residual H2 gas. Also are these tanks when left empty going to warm up to normal atmospheric temperatures and how will constant cycling down to cryogenic temperatures and back up to normal atmospheric temperatures going to affect their lifespan?
Then there's the issue with cryogenic fuel tanks inside a wing or the airplane body even if surrounded by insulation causing problems with atmospheric moisture condensing and freezing inside the airplane itself so how would you cope with that exactly? How much ice would a trans Atlantic flight accumulate? Would it be just hundreds of Kg or Tonnes? There wouldn't be much accumulation at an altitude of 34,000 feet as it's cold up there and not much moisture in the air but transiting from sea level up to there and especially descending would be interesting to say the least given you wouldn't know the exact weight of the plane when it lands.
H2 could be converted to a more conventional fuel and both Methanol and Ammonia have been mentioned but Ammonia has been pretty much ruled out for both domestic and military uses because of its toxicity and because you need people to actually handle it which probably won't turn out all that well if there's any accidents occurring. The trouble with Methanol is that you need to get Carbon from somewhere as part of that molecule and the most likely source would be CO2 and since Carbon gives off a lot of energy when oxidized into CO2 then the reverse happens when you try to reduce CO2 to get back to Carbon and typically efficiencies of conversion of H2 to Methanol of only 50% are usually quoted for this reason.
Whatever is decided will in all likelihood mean synthetic fuel prices quoted in integer multiples of current jet and kerosene prices rather than simple percentage increases which will make flying very expensive in the future using any SAF.
I suspect LH2 is more hassle than what it's worth.
The Moxie experiment on the latest Mars rover successfully made Oxygen by converting CO2 into CO but I'm not sure how easy it is with presumably unlimited electricity from solar or nuclear energy on the Moon to go any further. If you could have some sort of a reaction chamber where you could pump in CO or CO2 together with electricity and get Oxygen gas given off and the Carbon then deposits there in solid form which you then dispose of then that would be ideal and it would mean you could simply recycle all the CO2 back into O2 and you wouldn't need the vast quantities of O2 mentioned on a regular basis.
Alternatively, set up the moon base and skip the people and just use robots for probably a tenth of the cost of a manned station.
I agree with you that the power issue is a deal breaker but if that problem is solved then solar panels are probably the best way to make power even though they will generate less than on Earth but they are otherwise reasonably lightweight, don't forget any install will be a reasonably large array compared to what a rover or lander would have so I would expect that they would have to also include small robots that could continuously move along the panel array sweeping them of dust as they go along.
There's plenty of it available because it comprises 95% of Mars atmosphere https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/with-mars-methane-mystery-unsolved-curiosity-serves-scientists-a-new-one-oxygen so all you need to do is have an open pipe to the outside and a pump to compress it because atmospheric density is 1% that of earth (or about the same as that on Earth at 100,000 feet) and then you can have as much of it as you like to extract however much Oxygen you need out of it.
Well naturally it would be a hugely energy intensive process but if you're on Mars you have to do it otherwise your astronauts will run out of breathable air, besides even if it's several multiples of what it would otherwise be to get Oxygen from electrolyzing water it's still only a reasonably small amount given how much energy the ISS uses to maintain three people being there continuously. Don't forget that the ISS needs regular water deliveries whereas you'll never run out of CO2 on Mars and it's right outside your spacecraft or base-station.
"A paper published this week said about 1.5kW out of the 4.6kW energy budget of the Environmental Control and Life Support System on the ISS is used up by the Oxygen Generator Assembly (OGA), which relies on electrolysis." so about 4 or 5 panels worth out of all those panels they have there. I'm not really seeing a problem given Wikipedia states that "Altogether, the eight solar array wings[3] can generate about 240 kilowatts in direct sunlight, or about 84 to 120 kilowatts average power (cycling between sunlight and shade).[4]" so they are not going to suffocate up there due to lack of power to run the electrolyzer.
Oxygen production on Mars isn't a problem either as you can manufacture it by converting CO2 to CO resulting in O2 while venting the CO and apparently the Moxie ISRU experiment on the Perseverance rover was successful https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9432831/ so again I don't see that as an issue as there is plenty of CO2 on Mars, alternatively if you can get ice from below the surface you can melt and purify it probably by way of distillation because it's the easiest method even though it's more energy intensive than reverse osmosis but the advantage is that it's simpler and doesn't require consumables like membrane filters, and then you simply electrolyse the purified water.
Stock market transactions here in Australia can run into the millions of dollars per transaction especially if it's the large financial institutions doing the trading. Tracking all of those trades behind the existing computer transactions would be hordes of accounting folk familiar with the double entry book-keeping method invented by Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli in the 15th century so chasing down any irregularities in transactions or payments is relatively straightforward because until you sort the matter out the books won't balance.
With blockchain which the majority of the population don't really understand including myself then say if one leg of a large $50 million dollar trade disappears into the ether or is maybe perhaps fraudulently diverted with a corrupt blockchain (assuming of course such a thing is possible) then who is going to be able to track down the errant transaction and fix it, and given blockchain is supposed to be immutable and irrevocable how would you even reverse anything.
I can readily understand that pretty much all of the ASX brokers and users weren't all that keen on this idea and I am also left wondering where exactly the reputed hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings in using blockchain was supposedly going to come from.
On the face of it then it sounds like maybe it could be a good idea. The only other issue that perhaps crops up is that vibrations from hard drives are going to efficiently transmit via liquid to other hard drives as shock waves as well as to the rest of the computer hardware also in the liquid, it wouldn't look too good if say for example after a year or two you suddenly got metal fatigue in the wiring on the motherboard leading to micro-fractures, cracks or dry joints immediately filling with the non-conducting liquid causing electrical problems.
This is a issue that hasn't existed before because everything else previously immersed never had any moving parts. You would have to research and test this aspect thoroughly before you give immersed hard drives the green light but I suspect what will happen is that someone will blindly go gangbusters with this idea until major failures occur a few years later and then everyone will be none the wiser as to what caused the problem.
The possibility also exists that this may totally be a non-issue but given that the stuff that's immersed is usually very expensive I wouldn't want to blindly bet on it being the case.
NVIDIA knew when they designed it that it was going to be a tall card and secondly given the size of most computer cases that there would be a much smaller gap between the top of the card and the side panel requiring that the cables somehow be bent out of the way.
You wouldn't need to be an Einstein to figure out that the best solution from the outset would have been something like a right angled connector like we also do have for SATA drives as they also work very well. There's also no room for wires and connectors inside the plug to move past a 90 degree bend either so once it's plugged in you would know each individual connector would make full contact.
I guess they would've had to have two of them for each card such as an upward and downward connector depending on how the power cables are routed in everyone's cases and I presume further that saving a buck of two just providing a single substandard straight connector on cards that sell for thousands anyway somehow made good financial sense.
Modula-2? As a Pascal programmer I looked forward to the commercial and readily available release of this language as an improvement to Pascal back in the 1980's.
Imagine my surprise when I first got it and the FTL Modula-2 compiler started rejecting variable names, procedure and function calls left, right and centre for no apparent reason and upon closer inspection I identified the problem because for example lets say you use the mathematical arctan function, or is it the Arctan or ArcTan function instead?
I don't understand for what unknown or even insane reason Niklaus Wirth decided to introduce case sensitivity where it wasn't there previously in Pascal.
This meant not only did you have to remember the name which is easy enough but also the capitalization of each letter in the name which is next to impossible just to get it to pass through the compiler, and the English language consists of only 26 letters and definitely not 52 of them.
Sadly, for this reason alone I pretty much dropped using it the day after I got it and haven't touched it since.
The wikipedia article on ballistic missiles states that warheads re-enter the atmosphere at about "6-8 km per second" but as I understand it air resistance is proportional to the square of the speed being traveled so I presume when they detonate on the ground or several kilometers above the ground they would be going considerably slower at that stage.
As far as "extreme maneuvers" go you would only do that if you had a range of targets close together so that they couldn't work out what the eventual target is and you couldn't do too many of these maneuvers either because that's an extremely efficient way of bleeding off speed which is something an attacking weapon doesn't exactly want.
Anti missile technology? The last time I read anything about this topic a couple of years ago then I understood that the USA had done up to that point in time something like ten tests where they had fired off a missile to intercept another missile warhead and they were successful in about half of those cases.
As we all know with military weapons they use things like camouflage and radar absorbing paints as well as active countermeasures to stop getting intercepted by the other side so when I read further that some of the target warheads had an "active transponder" then that sure didn't inspire any confidence in me at all.
I'm a bit surprised given that TV detector vans exist in the UK that there won't be an equivalent in China, secondly in Australia here you can get into a lot of trouble if you use cellular jammers or even unlicensed Picostation repeaters to boost mobile signals and the relevant authorities and/or phone companies hunt these down as they usually cause a lot of issues and interference for other legitimate users. Given that Starlink will broadcast on known frequencies there's also the possibility of them being detected by China's own military satellites so if they are banned then presumably you'll receive a knock on your door there within the hour once you start using them.
Reading this "After spending years in college studying to be an electrical engineer, he started his career as a lab tech at Rayovac. From there, he worked his way up through manufacturing companies " as far as I can see it tends to imply that he never actually graduated from university with an Engineering degree so at best I'd say is that he is a highly skilled technician given his resume. We'd never regard someone as a doctor who never graduated from medical school so why should we consider him an engineer no matter how much work experience he has.
BSD? That implies two things (1) availability of ZFS and I assume you can use it on a boot drive as well by now and (2) OS installations are usually fairly small like several tens of GB's or in other words a small portion of the disk its installed on. The combination of both of those things means that if you can somehow specify "copies=2" when you do the OS install using ZFS you can have redundancy and automatic repair of all OS files so a corrupt file should no longer occur.
I would have thought that distillation in a specialized multi-stage flash unit like the Arabs use to make fresh water from sea water would be the best way to go as you can boil off whatever remaining water is left and all you're left with is solid residue which could be a large mix of radioactive elements and then you can just simply bury it somewhere like you do other contaminated nuclear waste. I believe that you only need a high single digit of kWh's to make one kiloliter of fresh water using this method so even a swimming pools worth of contaminated water would need less energy than that required to make one tonne of Aluminum which is about 14,000 kWh's. These robots would probably only be useful for a contaminated pond or lake with a huge amount of water.
Regarding "Neither filesystem takes very kindly to being physically ejected without being unmounted first, I would have thought a fairly basic practical requirement for any portable filesystem."
Perhaps instead we should use some open or pre-29 version of ZFS even though it probably is even worse at "doesn't take very kindly to being physically ejected without being unmounted first" but due to its superior features like check summing and time stamping for each and every block it could easily repair itself quite quickly when it's mounted and brought back online.
Several years ago researchers got to 220TB for BaFe tape https://www.fujifilmusa.com/products/tape_data_storage/innovations/barium_ferrite/index.html and then IBM got to 330TB with sputtered media https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/ibm-and-sony-cram-up-to-330tb-into-tiny-tape-cartridge/ and I've also read of Strontium Ferrite as a future replacement for Barrium Ferrite so who knows where the limit is.
Actually it was the change from GMR heads to TMR heads which only IBM makes as they have had several years experience with TMR technologies http://www.insic.org/news/2012Roadmap/PDF/24_Roadmap%20-%20Heads%20-%20FormattedV5.0.pdf Up to LTO7 drive's heads were GMR and could read either type of tape media whereas LTO8+ are TMR heads and apparently MP tapes trash the TMR heads in short order if used. LTO drives can't tell what type of tape is inserted and since LTO6 can use either the LTO.ORG decided that LTO8 drives won't accept LTO6 tapes as it can't distinguish between LTO6 MP and LTO6 BaFe tapes and therefore the only safe course of action was to deny backwards compatibility and program the LTO8 drives to reject all LTO6 tape cartridges.
If you look at this document here https://www.lto.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/LTO_Media-Shipment-Report__CY17.pdf you'll see on page 4 that tape capacity shipped is going up every year but at the same time on page 6 the number of cartridges sold is slowly declining and I presume that this is because of individual tape capacity doubling every generation and you might be right about the "guy on a skateboard" if they are carrying 1 PB of data sometime in 2026 stored in five 192TB LTO12 cartridges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open
"The report showed a record 108,457 petabytes (PB) of total tape capacity (compressed) shipped in 2017" https://www.lto.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/LTO-Shipment-Report-Release_2017-FINAL.pdf so even for 10TB hard drives you would need 10,845,700 of them plus the servers and data centres to hold them, it does mention "compressed" so roughly halving that number it's still about 5 million drives for that year alone and actual tape sales in total capacity are increasing each and every year. LTO9 with 24TB uncompressed cartridges may come out at the end of this year.
My understanding is that anyone born on US soil automatically becomes a US citizen regardless of their parent(s) status and also if born elsewhere to at least one US citizen parent then all that parent has to do is simply apply for citizenship status for their child by way of supplying documentation of birth and custody and then its just granted.
One thing I hate is to destroy a ZFS snapshot the command is 'zfs destroy tank@snapname" whereas to destroy the pool itself is "zpool destroy tank" so it could be really easy to make a very bad mistake given the pool one is immediate without any warnings issued and I don't know if you included the snapshot name to the zpool command whether or not it would still work but probably not because the syntax wouldn't be correct but you can just imaging some bad cut and paste job could potentially be executed by accident, I have no idea why the original ZFS authors didn't chose a synonym for one of them instead and I probably would have preferred changing the pool one to something like "obliterate" given the level of damage it could do, surely the American ZFS designers have access to the full range of words in the English language much as anyone else does.
Can you quantify that "extra strain" as I can only see two potential problems and that is the head loading/unloading cycles and thermal shock from going from cold to hot and back again. The first is not a problem as even consumer PC's have at least 400K to 600K head unload cycles so daily shutdown will only account for 365 of these a year so no problem there until you get aggressive APM spinning down idle hard drives in some cases in just 8 seconds so some people have racked up hundreds of these cycles in a matter of hours especially in external hard drives, enterprise hard drives usually have more unload cycles available than consumer drives even though they don't need them. Secondly I haven't seen any statistics where tests are done on hard drives which are say fired up and run for maybe half an hour to warm up to their working temperature and then turned off for maybe half an hour to cool off and this cycle repeated over and over until failure occurs so I presume this is a non-issue either unless you can point me to some research somewhere.
I tend to agree back when Seagate announced that they were ceasing production of their 5400 RPM green drives and two reasons I remember they quoted at the time was that the faster drives they had available only used something like 0.5 watts more power which they considered insignificant and also there were too many SKU's, naturally after a month or two's absence perhaps then magically they suddenly had 5400 RPM "NAS" drives available for sale in quantity and of course at a much higher price.
Depends on how they increase the storage size whether by increasing the track density or the DPI and if say you assume the drive will be 4 times bigger by doubling both then it will still only take twice as long to access all of it as you will get double the data in each rotation of the platter so ZFS Raid-Z3 will probably suffice and it doesn't even matter if they are shingled because even Solaris introduced sequential re-silver I think in version 11.2 in 2014. If you don't use the raid array whilst its re-silvering you're hardly working the actuator heads as they will be gently clicking over from one track to the next and the fluid bearings won't wear out and also being enterprise drives they will be adequately cooled so no problems there either. I've sequentially re-silvered an idle ten drive Raid-Z2 array of 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300's in 7 hours with an I7-4820K CPU processing 1 GB's and my other array in another PC with an E5-2670 v1 CPU does 1.3 GB's and in enterprise systems with more grunt they should go even faster, so yes it could take days but so what? with ZFS the procedure should eventually complete successfully no matter how long it actually takes.
Yes, cassette tapes are good for this reason as firstly they are analogue and the special machines they should be using also record alongside the audio track some special tone(s) so that if you cut and paste the tape or edit out sections of it this is detectable, but to answer your question if you use the ZFS filesystem you can snapshot the data on the hard drive so for example ransomware thinks its encrypting your data but all its doing is writing fresh data whereas the source data is in a read-only state and immutable, also if you record to LTO tapes you can also get a special variant WORM (write once read many) cartridge that could conceivable satisfy this requirement.
No, because "uses" as you put it is 200 times to fill up a tape which for LTO-5 according to Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open requires "80 end to end passes to fill up a tape" and so your ACTUAL TOTAL "Expected tape durability, end-to-end passes" is 16000 (80 times 200) and not the 200 you quoted.
However, since the total size is 1.5TB this implies you could read 18.75 GB for one pass (1.5 TB / 80) so say for the entire data access operation you want to read just one (and only one) file (e.g. a movie) even up to this 18.75 GB size it could conceivably be contained on one pass but realistically most likely would be split over two and so you could quite comfortably do this procedure about 8000 times. Anything much smaller would most likely be readable with one pass only and of course I'm presuming the data on the tapes would be contiguous but that would be a reasonable assumption to make as the backup software would most likely be writing the files sequentially. Naturally I'd make a further assumption that each of the 4 bands and the 20 wraps per band get roughly the same amount of access because otherwise yes each individual wrap might only be good for 200 passes before the tape is worn out in that spot and the drive/software offlines the cartridge permanently due to "too many hardware errors" or whatever.
Tape drives themselves have a MTBF of 250K - 1M hours or so and their tape load/unload cycles are also huge so I don't see them failing early for this reason either, but who knows the tape holding the header pin might snap off after say 1000? load/unload cycles but since its reinforced around that area then 8000-16000 cycles of single file accesses <= 18.75GB in size might still be quite reasonable for one tape cartridge.
That's my 2 cents worth but someone more knowledgeable who actually uses LTO extensively may have a different opinion.
Yes, but modern hard drives that use 5-10 watts need around 20-25 watts to spin up for only a short period of time and most of that extra is the 12 volt feed so some reasonably large capacitors on that line could also assist and this only applies to consumer drives and setups whereas server grade gear such as SAS drives and raid cards/HBA's have things like PIUS (power up in standby) where to avoid such power surges the raid card spins up the drives one at a time, also if they do start up a batch of say 10-20 drives in PIUS mode you may only need a couple in that batch to actually start up and work and the others can stay in powered standby and also be mechanically idle until you shut that batch down and so that will save on head loading/unloading cycles for the unused drives.
Perhaps you might want to consider storing your data using LTO drives and accessing the data on the tapes using LTFS which appear to be completely free from the tax you mentioned according to how I read this document http://www.copiefrance.fr/files/Tariffs_ENG_2017.pdf.
I agree and from what I've read it appears datacentres with tape libraries with LTO-X wait until LTO-(X+2) comes out about 4-5 years later and then they spend a couple of months moving thousands of tapes over to the new ones needing on average about a fifth in number as the LTO-(X+2) drives can still read the LTO-X tapes. They can then finally get rid of the old perfectly good drives which are still reasonably good value to other people and the one main advantage of the new hardware is if they do actually need to recover data then they have much faster drive speeds with which to do so. I expect to see a lot of this happen again when LTO-8 comes out presumably somewhere in the expected October-January 2018 timeframe. I'm not sure what they do with the old tapes but either they sell them off or they just keep them as they are because they are a perfectly good backup of the original data for another 4-5 years until LTO-(X+4) comes out and the process repeats again.
I doubt that's the case because if your read their explanation here http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/techandscience/foxtel-reveals-source-and-scale-of-the-glitches-that-crashed-game-of-thrones/ar-BBEEZkR?li=AA4Zor&ocid=iehp where they say 'The company claimed the issue resided in its identity management (IDM) system' and also this here 'Ordinarily, the IDM handles around 5000 requests a day, the company said. But on Monday, it "was hit with 70,000 transactions in just a few hours".' how much bandwidth is used for authenticating credentials? I presume similar to online bank logins (several tens to a couple of hundred kilobytes perhaps) so if you take 'several hours' as say three hours (10800 seconds) then dividing this into 70,000 transactions gives about 6.5 transactions per second so hardly bandwidth intensive. I'd say its probably more of a case of slow implementation of a database server if anything probably running on some Raid 5 array of spinning rust with consequently low IOPS. I presume once people successfully logged on and got authenticated they had no problems with the actual downloads of the video stream which would be several orders higher in magnitude as far as bandwidth goes because there weren't any complaints in that area.
No, not more compressible but don't forget that even though the algorithms are fairly simple like that used for say NTFS compression that was introduced in Windows NT 3.51 it could easily reduce the size by around 50% for easily compressible data (whereas WinZip or WinRAR would shrink it down to say an eighth of the original size) .
Newer tape drives will have better algorithms and even if they don't they will most likely have larger memory buffers and work on larger chunks of data and something like LZW compression even back then would have gotten better results if you used a larger workspace going from a 128 KB buffer to say a 1 MB one and the last time I checked these drives may have like one GB of on-board RAM so its not inconceivable that they can get this sort of compression. Obviously if they get fed like Mpeg-2 data or random numbers then compression will be zero.
I know some professional people that would add in the charge to the customer for the four hours driving on top of the work they do and when their customers complain about that quote they are bluntly told beforehand "take it or leave it" but since they are highly skilled and very good at their job they still invariably get the work order as its still cheaper getting it done right compared to previous contractors that maybe have right royally stuffed things up and then cost them a lot of money to rectify.
"drone operators work 12-hour shifts five or six days a week" As if this isn't bad enough regarding total hours worked (60/72) per week, the article linked to also stated that they were "sapped by alternating day and night shifts " which would really do wonders for your health as you could never establish a consistent sleep cycle. I'm actually more surprised at why people would even undertake such a job under those conditions in the first place.
I agree as interlacing was a brilliant idea as for still images it showed full resolution and for moving images it was updated 50 times a second (analog PAL). I'm not familiar at all with the method of broadcasting for digital TV but if you consider Mpeg-2 P-frames I don't see a problem (as a concept) of replacing each full frame (assuming each frame was already a P-frame) with two half frames (giving 100 Hz of updates) or even 4 quarter frames giving 200 Hz of updates. Alternate options conceptually could be possible as well like say simulcasting on another effectively available channel intervening frames e.g. frames 1,3,5,7... on the main channel and frames 2,4,6,8.... on another one and if your TV is sophisticated enough combine the two together to double the Hz. From a practical perspective nothing like this will probably eventuate however.
As far as I understand it 100Hz and 200Hz TV's simply interpolate between each of the 50p frames and display intermediate results which as far as I can tell works reasonably well so that's another reason nobody will probably be bothering to do anything about this issue. We might have better luck if more films are created with double the normal picture rate (e.g. The Hobbit, Avatar 2+) so when 4K broadcasting takes off they may well consider this and build in this higher refresh capability up front. We can only hope!
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