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POPSRandom Thoughts One good turn gets most of the blankets. There are two kinds of pedestrians -- the quick and the dead. If quitters never win, and winners never cheat, then who is the fool who said "Quit while you're ahead"? Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not sure. What happens if you get scared half to death twice? Multitasking: Screwing up several things at once. Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
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POPSGoogle reports on harddisk failures http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf A few conclusions: * higher temperatures do not mean more failures. * if you're hard drive didn't fail in the first year, it'll quite possible survive for the next few years. In the end, Google's research does not solve the problem of predicting when hard drives are likely to fail. However, it shows that temperature and high usage alone are not responsible for failures by default. Also, the researcher pointed towards a trend they call "infant mortality phase" - a time frame early in a hard drive's life that shows increased probabilities of failure under certain circumstances. The report lacks a clear cut conclusion, but the authors indicate that there is no promising approach at this time than can predict failures of hard drives: "Powerful predictive models need to make use of signals beyond those provided by SMART."