Which, while not directly dated in the content of the document, references a "screaming Pentium II 333 MHz", which would theoretically put it ~1998. Is the claim that operating at a "low level" on hard drives in 1998 is the same as in 2024?
the simplest explanation for what spinrite does that I have heard is that on spinning rust drives, it simply tries to access the same bad data over and over until it finally (sometimes) gets a result. which makes sense that it would work (sometimes) because hard drives that are going bad tend to do so intermittently.
This is more or less also what (GNU) ddrescue does[0]. It first tries to do a linear copy of the full disk, skipping any errors, then goes back and tries to re-read the error sectors until you either cancel or it succeeds. It also keeps track of everything it's doing so you can stop and start the process without it redoing work.
This article didn't read like character assassination to me, personally - most of the time spent on GRC/SpinRite (after the overall topic of disk recovery is introduced) seems to be either observations about Gibson's style with which I think many would agree - e.g.
"It doesn't help that Steve Gibson's writing is pervaded by a certain sort of... hucksterism. A sort of ceaseless self-promotion that internet users associate mostly with travel influencers selling courses about how to make money as a travel influencer."
Or substantive critical points about the software, e.g.:
"This gives the flavor of the central problem with SpinRite: it claims to perform sophisticated analysis at a very low level of the drive's operation, but it claims to do that with hard drives that intentionally abstract away all of their low level details."
And I think it's fair to ask someone who is selling a piece of software for $89 to provide some backing for their claims beyond ones that would only pertain to largely-obsolete hardware.
I think you are dead on. I recall -- perhaps incorrectly -- that Gibson has been just silly amounts of incorrect on some things, but SpinRite itself, I've never heard anything but "... and then everything worked like a minor miracle." And you're correct, Gibson has a certain, uh, Wolfram-y habit of selling himself whenever possible, which doesn't help matters, but I hope people can manage to separate the personality from the product.
Observations of Gibson's style are all negative, except at the very end, praising the user interface. But that last element read more like a quick self-cleaning ritual for the author of the piece, rather than effort to provide a balanced description.
Gibson's style may very well be overly self-congratulary and deserving criticism, and many could agree on that. But this piece still reads like inordinate amount of effort just to show somebody and their work in negative light, without actually checking their product and evaluating it rationally and equitably. Even if there are bad things to say about Mr. Gibson's style or his software, the software may still be working and useful, and no attempt at serious evaluation was made.
> And I think it's fair to ask someone who is selling a piece of software for $89 to provide some backing for their claims beyond ones that would only pertain to largely-obsolete hardware.
I agree it is fair to ask, and Mr. Gibson seems like a reasonable ,easy to talk person. Did you try? He has a podcast, Twitter and a newsgroup discussion forum.
IMO "made easy" would involve connecting everything single concept in calculus immediately to the whole reason it exists - physics.
I made the mistake of taking algebra-based physics, then calculus, and only after the calculus course did I realize how much harder I made my life by not starting with calculus (and learning it as the mathematical language of physics).
I understand the argument for national security. Having said that...where's the accountability if what they build is terrible? Where's the return to the investor (the public) if they succeed?
I'm not saying the government should just take over businesses...but if the government is going to essentially be an investor in a business, it should be at least as rigorous as a private investor would be.
Sometime I don’t understand HN. Such an informative article gets no traffic, yet people jump to a sensational article to discuss the very topic covered in details over there.
Presumably because it's cheaper to pay intel to set up a foundry in the US and allow them to keep all the money that results from it, than it is to pay them to set up a foundry and demand a % of the revenue.
Agreed, the only time I ever saw OKRs work in my professional life was a (sadly) brief ~6 month period during which cascading OKRs were strictly enforced from CEO down.
I suspect folks don't like that because it forces middle management to actually decide, for real, who is doing what, rather than allowing multiple different teams to fragment off chunks of what should be a whole (which then lets them both claim personal victory and deflect blame for the whole actually failing)
I could see desktop Linux being higher than ChromeOS if what's being tracked is activity at websites that ChromeOS' target audience wouldn't often visit - which to your point, leads to the question of what the denominator is (all "desktop computing" form factor devices, all devices that browse the internet, are devices restricted to an intranet included, etc.)
The savegame situation was part of what made me less interested in my Switch over time - I just didn't want to invest much time in any long-term games where I couldn't actually back up the savegames in any direct way. Now it gets pulled out every now and then when the kids want to play Club House Games or Mario Party.
That's fair, although IMO it's additionally fair to be skeptical of making a long-term commitment to products/services that aren't funded in ways that permit long-term product planning and reasonably-paced development based on that plan.
I guess we all make our own risk calculations, but if it is truly long term, 5+ years then a SaaS is a risk regardless of funding.
Especially for my personal life where long term really means long term, self-hosted is the only safe option.
As an employee it's a toss up on whether your employer or your SaaS dependency changes course first. So a shorter term engagement is basically guaranteed and it doesn't matter that much.
https://www.grc.com/files/technote.pdf
Which, while not directly dated in the content of the document, references a "screaming Pentium II 333 MHz", which would theoretically put it ~1998. Is the claim that operating at a "low level" on hard drives in 1998 is the same as in 2024?
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