New efforts!

[blacksly]

I don't think autocorrect is advanced enough yet to fix his errors...

We will know when AI is advanced enough to have true sentience, because it can correct Joshex's posts.
Well, other than by doing a "IF author.username CONTAINS 'Joshex' THEN ReplacePost('Wall of Incoherence 15-foot Radius')".

[blacksly]

This thread is allowed to remain and wander vastly off-topic because it acts as a magnet for meaningless chatter that would otherwise clog up the boards. So much so that the moderators don't even read everything that is posted here, relying on people using the report post feature to bring questionable posts to their attention.

What? They miss most of the fun?!? But how will you go through the day without your daily dose of Joshex? I think his posts provide an important immunization effect against the Internet, and should be read by everyone who posts and reads on the Internet. Everywhere.
Well, his and UniqueDragon's.

[Azrael]

A couple of questions came to mind today.  I think these are things that have been discussed before, but not for a long time as I recall.

1.  Suppose CoH came back and it was possible to give each new account a level 50 character.  Would you want them to do so, and if so what build would you choose?

I think I'd actually prefer this didn't happen as I like the idea of starting over.  But, if it did, I would definitely pick one that I'd levelled to 50 before, that I don't really feel the urge to go through the levelling process again, and one that would help get established.  So, probably an elec/shield scrapper.


2.  Suppose also that they could turn on any events, in particular double XP.  What would you want to happen here?

I always had mixed feelings about double XP weekends.  I tried levelling characters on them once or twice and actually felt that the levels came so fast that I didn't feel a real sense of accomplishment, and had no attachment to the character as a result.  After that I stuck with playing 50s on such weekends.  I realize a lot of people would probably like it to level up old characters again.  As for Summer Blockbuster, Valentine's, invasions and so on, I think it would be nice to see a rotation of them through the first little while.  I'd especially like to see Summer Blockbuster as I never had a chance to do it, and I have a character idea or two that would really benefit from access to the Overwhelming Force -kb IO.

1.  Probably SS/Shield Brute.

But to be honest.  Better to play it from Level 1 upwards.  Like I would with a 'first roll when the game comes back' Elec/Elec Dominator.

2.  XP.

Well, like the AE, hard to get emotionally attached when the levels come too quick.  But the Double XP weekends were a treat.

Azrael.

PS.  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01639694M/ref=psdc_1292116011_t3_B010QD6W9I

This one seems pretty fast...  I hope my next iMac has something like that...  And a GPU that can cope with a 5K screen...

[Codewalker]

What? They miss most of the fun?!? But how will you go through the day without your daily dose of Joshex? I think his posts provide an important immunization effect against the Internet, and should be read by everyone who posts and reads on the Internet. Everywhere.
Well, his and UniqueDragon's.

They do read some of it, I just meant they don't have time to read everything.

[Felderburg]

Regarding data storage... wow, some high capacity stuff is cheap (relatively) these days. Other than the Samsung specific defect, I'm under the impression that SSDs do fail eventually, since flash storage has a limited amount of read / write uses just natural to it. I'm also under the impression that it's a ridiculously high amount that wouldn't really be an issue for an ordinary PC user such as myself.

I think his posts provide an important immunization effect against the Internet, and should be read by everyone who posts and reads on the Internet.

...what if someone is convinced by them? That's not immunity.

Koreans [have] an enhanced genetic predisposition to excelling at Starcraft.

Hmmmm. I'm gonna go with "nurture" rather than "nature" on this one. :p

So if you follow the instructions there and subscribe to the thread you'll even get an email notification.

Hahaha! I rely on the notifications board, since I have set my filter to delete the tons of "your thread has been updated!" emails I get.

[Angel Phoenix77]

Quite frankly, I lost any patience I ever had with Joshex when he posted some blatantly wrong nonsense about print/prose copyright which, if followed, could have gotten someone who did not deserve such grief into serious trouble with a couple of large media organizations.  I happen to know a very great deal about such things, since I am in the business.

question, what is print/prose copyright  I really never heard of it. :(

[Angel Phoenix77]

Joshex, has anyone ever told you the other part of "keep an open mind"?  It's "Don't let your brains fall out".  As I posted some days ago, sometimes you need to cool it man.

We all have our faults around here,  I cannot say I am perfect(and many certainly know my flaws here).  But there is always a time when one needs to look at oneself and ask "maybe I should lay off on that topic".  Hell many people ask if you need actual help and even I agree with them on that.  Just, cool it once in a while.  Relax.

And don't go believing every single little paranoid rumor on the internet.  It's bad for your health, seriously.

I agree with you Alex, that is why I stop posting from time to time. It is also used to give a space to relax and calm down. Sometimes it is better to walk away then it is to continue.

[Arcana]

While I have not actually had data loss- I can only imagine that the poor performance and occasional stalls and blue screens of death are caused due to the already admittedly flawed design of the Samsung SSD's.

Anything is possible.  But blue screens?  Extraordinarily unlikely.  That doesn't even happen when spindles timeout block reads.  The performance glitch on the 840s essentially reduces the peformance of some reads to that comparable to a medium speed spindle in the worst case.  That cannot on its own cause system instability.  In effect, the 840 EVO functions like a hybrid drive, with an enormously huge SSD front end cache.

It sounds like your drive has problems unrelated to the read voltage bug, or your system itself has problems unrelated to the SSD drive.

[Arcana]

Regarding data storage... wow, some high capacity stuff is cheap (relatively) these days. Other than the Samsung specific defect, I'm under the impression that SSDs do fail eventually, since flash storage has a limited amount of read / write uses just natural to it. I'm also under the impression that it's a ridiculously high amount that wouldn't really be an issue for an ordinary PC user such as myself.

Wanna see what happens when a hardware review site tries to wear out an SSD with writes?  You can read all about it here: http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment.  Short version: although different vendors' SSDs have different endurance, all of them seem to exceed their quoted lifetimes by a substantial margin.  In the case of the best of them, like the Kingston HyperX and the Samsung 840 Pro, ludicrously high margins.  I followed this experiment from the day it started back in 2013, and it took almost two years of almost non-stop writing to kill the drives.  Most of them entered the petabyte range.  That's thousands of terabytes, written into nominal 256GB drives, the equivalent of overwriting the drives (ignoring spare sectors) over four thousand times.

[Arcana]

question, what is print/prose copyright  I really never heard of it. :(

I'm assuming VV is referring to the copyright rights associated with the printed or written word.  Other forms of expression are eligible for copyright protection (music, dance, computer software, sculpture, photography, etc), but each type of expression has its own unique issues and specific rights. 

I presume VV is referring to the specific nuances of copyright as it pertains to writers, and many of those nuances may not be the kind of thing you can just look up on wikipedia because they are expressed in case law not in the copyright statute, and thus it is difficult to learn it all without actually having the experience of being a published author with lawyers and editors and other authors educating you on those nuances.

Incidentally, this is true for most technical fields, which is why it is so easy to call out someone whose only knowledge of a subject is cursory internet searching.  And ironically, why it is so difficult to dissuade people from trying to feign expertise through cursory internet searching: nowhere is there a hint of what they don't know, so they assume it doesn't exist, so they cannot understand why people get annoyed when they say obviously dumb things.  It is only obvious to people who aren't limited by cursory internet searching, which means it isn't obvious to them, their immediate circle of friends, or many of the people they test out their limited knowledge upon.  It is only when they run into someone with field knowledge that it all falls apart catastrophically, but they often don't understand precisely how they are so catastrophically wrong when it happens.

[Vee]

The copyright thread VV was referencing

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,11606.msg199908.html#msg199908

[Brigadine]

Wanna see what happens when a hardware review site tries to wear out an SSD with writes?  You can read all about it here: http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment.  Short version: although different vendors' SSDs have different endurance, all of them seem to exceed their quoted lifetimes by a substantial margin.  In the case of the best of them, like the Kingston HyperX and the Samsung 840 Pro, ludicrously high margins.  I followed this experiment from the day it started back in 2013, and it took almost two years of almost non-stop writing to kill the drives.  Most of them entered the petabyte range.  That's thousands of terabytes, written into nominal 256GB drives, the equivalent of overwriting the drives (ignoring spare sectors) over four thousand times.

I love my crucial mx100 500gb. Best part for the price that I have seen.

[MWRuger]

Incidentally, this is true for most technical fields, which is why it is so easy to call out someone whose only knowledge of a subject is cursory internet searching.  And ironically, why it is so difficult to dissuade people from trying to feign expertise through cursory internet searching: nowhere is there a hint of what they don't know, so they assume it doesn't exist, so they cannot understand why people get annoyed when they say obviously dumb things.  It is only obvious to people who aren't limited by cursory internet searching, which means it isn't obvious to them, their immediate circle of friends, or many of the people they test out their limited knowledge upon.  It is only when they run into someone with field knowledge that it all falls apart catastrophically, but they often don't understand precisely how they are so catastrophically wrong when it happens.

This is exactly it. I'm not an expert on physics, more of a generalist with a passion for how things work. But I did read the New York Times article as well as some other pieces. I'll likely read other things about it when they come around. It seemed, from what I read, that this dovetails nicely with other predictions that Einstein made and moreso because of his own doubts that proof would ever be possible because of the limitations of technology. I have explained to many of my non technical friends that even if a new theory comes along that "knocks relativity into a cocked hat" it will still need to explain and take into account everything that Einstein's theory has correctly predicted and all observed phenomena.

The reason that I dismiss (and why I would rather not see any of his posts) anything Joshex says is because I don't need to be an expert to realize when I am being fed a line of BS. Whenever somebody says they have proof of something that is completely opposed to what is generally agreed upon AND refuses to back up the claim, it's bogus. Put up or shut up.

If he actually ever has something real about this subject (or any other), I feel certain I can learn all I need from other sources that I actually trust as acting in good faith to provide me with truth.

[Angel Phoenix77]

The copyright thread VV was referencing

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,11606.msg199908.html#msg199908

Oh, I understand now :), thank you Vee and Arcana for answering my question. :)

[Arcana]

The copyright thread VV was referencing

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,11606.msg199908.html#msg199908

I missed that thread (lucky me).  That topic has come up lots of times, including back on the original forums, several dozen of which I was a party to.  Not to step on VV's toes in any way, but there's two issues in that thread that deserve a small amount of amplification.  First, the Joshex horrible advice one: that would indeed be horrible advice within the context VV implies - prospective writers - but the fundamental copyright issue is the question of derivative works in general.  When you use someone else's copyright protected work within your work, you still own the copyright on that work as an author.  The problem is that you don't automatically have any rights to the components you used.  That places your work in legal limbo.  You own it, so no one else - even the owners of the pieces you used - can use it without permission.  But you yourself cannot exercise practically any of the rights you have because doing so would infringe upon other people's rights.  You can't sell copies, because you'd necessarily have to sell copies of the pieces you used.  You can't exhibit it, or publish it, or read it aloud in a public square.  You can write it, and keep it in your house, and stroke it like a cat from time to time, and that's it.  If you try to pass it off as your own you can and probably will get into a lot of trouble, and so will anyone who believes you.  If you were a prospective writer, time to start looking for another prospective career: you probably incinerated that one.

NCSoft is only allowed to use our characters because we gave them that right: it is a requirement of the EULA that you grant them that right.  This is all pretty much black letter law, and Joshex doesn't do well when it comes to laws, legal or physical.

There was another more interesting question raised, and that was the question about how you could go about using your City of Heroes characters in your own fiction.  Would it be enough to simply change around some details and not use the proper names for things; say invent your own squid-like alien energy beings that just aren't called "Kheldians"?   Would that work?  VV didn't discuss that in great detail, but my interpretation of copyright law in this case is that it would not work, explicitly because you already asked if that would work.  Let me explain.

You can't copyright ideas.  You can only copyright expressions.  "Alien energy being thingy" is an idea, and not eligible for copyright protection.  But the Kheldians are: an explicit instance of that idea, with a specific description, name, origin, and set of abilities.  Here's the catch: if someone somewhere who has never heard of the Kheldians happens to write a story about energy alien refugees that look like glowing lobsters, they haven't automatically violated the copyright of the Kheldians.  However it is *not* legal to *copy* the concept of the Kheldians and then just adjust the details.  The *process* by which you made your own "original" idea is actually a derivative work: you took something and then just changed some details.  You did not transform the original into something materially different by your own admission.  If opposing counsel managed to find the discussion thread where you asked "hey, what if I take the Kheldians and switch some stuff around" you'd probably lose right there.  Therefore, like I said before, the fact that you asked at all means the answer is probably "no."  Even if it was a grey area before you asked, it isn't anymore.

The distinctions can be subtle.  Just looking at the works themselves is often not the sole issue.  How they were created can be legally significant.  And because of that, you shouldn't trust the legal advice of anyone posting on an internet forum.  Non-lawyers can be dangerously ignorant or wrong.  Actual lawyers wouldn't post legal advice on an internet forum: they are professionally barred from doing so in general.

The idea here is the same one I echoed above previously: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  It will get you into trouble, and it can take down a lot of people around you as well.  I don't really care that much if Joshex or anyone else disagrees with me about Special Relativity: you can't hurt anyone through a misunderstanding of Lorentz transformations.  But when it comes to things like the law, or health care, or things that can materially affect people's lives, I believe everyone should recognize the limits of their knowledge and tread carefully.  And if you don't know what the limits of your knowledge are, consider that a priori evidence those limits are severe indeed. 

If you don't know, ask.  Don't pretend to know or assert as true things you don't know to be true assuming someone will correct you if you're wrong.  When it comes to quantum mechanics, that is intellectual dishonesty.  When it comes to things that can materially affect people's lives, that is sociopathy.

[GenericHero05]

I find that the pads of my dogs' paws smell like Fritos.

[Felderburg]

I find that the pads of my dogs' paws smell like Fritos.

...check your closet. Betcha find open Fritos bags all over the floor.

That's thousands of terabytes, written into nominal 256GB drives, the equivalent of overwriting the drives (ignoring spare sectors) over four thousand times.

So, like I said, way more than average PC user like me would need. :p What about for companies that use massive amounts of data?

[Vee]

So, like I said, way more than average PC user like me would need. :p What about for companies that use massive amounts of data?

Think the initial offer expired but for 6 months last year google was offering 100 free petabytes of cloud storage to businesses. But there was a pretty big catch - you had to actually use a petabyte for the entirety of the first year plus I think 3 months. I never actually heard how this turned out but I like to imagine a bunch of small businesses signing up, not even coming close, then having to pay the .01/gb rate on a bunch of stuff they wouldn't have actually saved if they weren't trying to meet a storage minimum.

[Arcana]

So, like I said, way more than average PC user like me would need. :p What about for companies that use massive amounts of data?

Kind of an interesting topic (storage in general is an interesting topic and more complex than most people think).  There's no issue with *storing* lots of data on SSDs, the issue is deleting and overwriting data.  An individual bit in an SSD "wears out" with each reset - from 1 to 0 and from 0 back to 1.  It is analogous to batteries that slowly degrade as you charge and discharge them.  Eventually they won't hold enough charge.  SSD technology is like that.  So you have to be careful how you use the drive.  If you read and wrote to the same spot over and over, you could very quickly burn that sector of storage out.  So SSDs don't do that.  SSDs are actually small computers unto themselves that manage flash storage resources.  When you try to write data, the SSD decides where to put it.  Try to overwrite the same spot over and most SSDs will try to move those writes somewhere else on the drive, in a process called "write leveling."  By remapping where things are the drive tries to average out your writes so that they are spread out over the entire drive.  That reduces the chance of burning out "hotspots."  The process isn't perfect, of course, and some drives do this more or less aggressively, so you see differing results in different drives.

Where you see the biggest problems isn't in flash storage, where you are storing data, but in flash cache: high speed SSDs deployed to cache frequently accessed data in a storage system.  Those things are read and written far more than drives that just store stuff, and they can fail much quicker.  And peculiarly, wear leveling introduces a problem spindles don't have.  Usually, some weak point breaks first in any piece of technology.  But with wear-leveling SSDs, it is possible that the leveling process has "ground down" all the storage cells by roughly the same amount.  Which means the drives can catastrophically fail suddenly, when lots of its cells burn out in rapid succession.  It is important, then, in applications like that to monitor the drives carefully to look for signs you're approaching SSD exhaustion.  Some drives signal this better than others.

In enterprise applications, people tend to recommend enterprise class SSDs that are rated for more write cycles and thus take longer to exhaust their memory cells.  They also tend to have more sophisticated controllers that do a better job of managing cell decay, error correction, and storage remapping.  They also cost a lot more.

But in any case if you're talking about the typical store-my-data application?  It is usually not an in issue on time scales of how often enterprise storage is upgraded or decommissioned - three to seven years.

[worldweary]

Since we are on the subject of hard drives and many of you have a lot of experience with computers I would like to ask about 4,5,6 and 8 TB hard drives.I would like to move my stuff to larger drives but I keep hearing about how the larger the drive the faster it fails.My 2 and 3 TB drives have lasted for years but I could really use the extra space.