Just finished installing a new computer. The one I'm still typing this with, served three years pretty ok. There was only one wipeout hard disk failure.
It is a well-unknown fact that there's a secret program hidden in every computer. Its purpose is to make the computer slower and slower so that in three years it becomes practically useless. That program is called Angry Dave.
Mis-cited Moore's law states that computing power doubles every 18 months. Angry Dave counteracts that by halving the computing power every three years. It's been put in place by a luddite conspiracy to hinder us reaching technological singularity.
Comments (2)
Tuomo on 24 Mar 2008 | PermalinkOnly one hd failure within three years is one too many. I guess I need to start backing up my PhD work now, as my illusions of Macs having no problems at all is now shattered.
My longest lasting pc hardware have been a Maxtor hd (1996, boots approximately every third time) and a HP CD-RW drive (1996 as well). I guess 12 years is pretty good for computer hardware, but then again, my grandma tells me her fridge and freezers are well over 30 years old.
Agree 100% that a Mac is no silver bullet solution. Luckily I only lost the the work at hand and a few months' worth of junk photos and such at that HD crash. Decent ones were on Flickr anyway.
Some backup scheme needs to be in place. An external hard drive at least. Soon I'll give Time Machine a try. As for emails, if you don't mind possible data mining, Gmail is fantastic. The day Google crashes we'll have bigger problems than personal email archives I guess...
Then you can always burn some data DVDs and distribute the risk among friends. How intimate!
A Maxtor from 1996 with 33% availability sounds almost like an achievement. Funnily enough, the longevity of hardware was discussed on one Jaiku thread recently. I suppose environmental sealing, solid state storage and touch based interfaces could improve this a lot. The question remains whether that is in anyone's commercial interest at the moment.
I'm curious if my Discman from 1997 still plays CDs – at least commercially pressed media. Trying to get it back from the village now.
