//beconfused

Saw this at the Media Temple blog:

Update: April 8, 2008

We would like to extend our thanks for the continued understanding and patience of all of our customers affected by this incident. In an effort to bring you up to date we would like to share where we stand at this time.

Through internal testing and the continuing evaluation of our systems, (mt) Media Temple has concluded that the recent availability and latency problems of the (gs) Grid-Service product are related to segments of our current storage architecture.

Some time ago, we brought online additional storage resources to alleviate anticipated pressure points. Although we did see some very positive short-term improvements, things did not scale as far as our original projections showed. In order to meet these demands we are currently preparing additional hardware resources, to be completed and in place later today. Over the next few days and weeks, we will be rebalancing the storage load onto these new resources.

We would like all of our customers impacted by this to understand that we’re doing our best to provide a service that in no way exhibits the behavior you are currently seeing. This is our top priority and we are acting accordingly. Whenever possible, we’ve been able to minimize the length of time your service has been affected. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the small service interruptions that you have likely experienced during the course of this incident.

This System Status posting will continue to provide timely updates that have meaningful, useful information. Until such time we respectfully ask that any support requests that you have attached to this incident stay open. We promise to provide updates to this System Status blog, and notify any users that have submitted a support request related to these events. These two channels are currently the most effective way we can communicate vital information to our clients.

So no refund? Hahaa…

Media Temple has been hit by numerous issues recently. Things are responding slow. A couple of times I just lose my patience and went to bed. I hope things will be okay soon.

[By the way, I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5. It perks me up looking at the new interface, it's beautiful. I saw many comments complaining about the colors, the interface and the bugs. Perhaps I'm a little more forgiving here. I really love the colors and the interface! Not really loving the bugs though. Still a splendid job by the WordPress dev team. It's a work of art.]

SanDisk rolls out pretty purple flash drives. Very nice. I actually like to have one of those. May I also highlight that this is in support for the Take Action Against Alzheimer’s campaign. The ironical thing is that memory products are supporting Alzheimer cause.

(The SanDisk Cruzer Micro flash drive and the SanDisk Ultra II SD Card are both purple now.)

While it’s great that SanDisk is doing her part for charity, donate just US$1 for each flash drive or SD card sold is just too little! Consider donating US$5 or something. I mean, this is for a good cause after all right?

I have a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Titanium flash drive, I don’t think mine looks as good as the purple one. I kinda like mine is just something different. I was helping a client buy her red flash drive the other day and that was when I realize that there is only 1 company with red flash drive in Singapore. That really disappointed me.

I’m hoping to see more colorful flash drives in Singapore. The white, the grey, the black, they’re boring already. They’re not even technically considered a color…

[via Engadget]

Well, this is something that is known and acknowledged in the whole industry.

I quote from Wikipedia:

As of 2007, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most manufacturers of hard disks and Flash disks define 1 gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes, the computer operating systems used by most users usually calculate a gigabyte by dividing the bytes (whether it is disk capacity, file size, or system RAM) by 1,073,741,824. This distinction is a cause of confusion, especially for people from a non-technical background, as a hard disk with a manufacturer rated capacity of 40 gigabytes may have its capacity reported by the operating system as only 37.2 GB, depending on the type of report.

The difference between SI and binary prefixes is logarithmic â?? in other words, an SI kilobyte is nearly 98% as much as a kibibyte, but a megabyte is under 96% as much as a mebibyte, and a gigabyte is just over 93% as much as a gibibyte. This means that a 500 GB hard disk drive would appear as “465 GB”. As storage sizes get larger and higher units are used, this difference will become more pronounced.

Note that computer memory is addressed in base 2, due to its design, so memory size is always a power of two (or some closely related quantity, for instance 384 MiB = 3Ã?227 bytes). It is thus convenient to work in binary units for RAM. Other computer measurements, like storage hardware size, data transfer rates, clock speeds, operations per second, etc., do not have an inherent base, and are usually presented in decimal units.

As an example, take a hard drive that can store exactly 140Ã?109 or 140 billion bytes after formatting. Generally, operating systems calculate disk and file sizes using binary numbers, so this 140 GB drive would be reported as “130.38 GB”. The result is that there is a significant discrepancy between what the consumer purchased and what their operating system says they have.

Some consumers feel short-changed when they discover the difference, and claim that manufacturers of drives and data transfer devices are using the decimal measurements in an intentionally misleading way to inflate their numbers, though these measurements are the norm in all fields other than computer memory. Several legal disputes have been waged over the confusion. See Binary prefix â?? Legal disputes.

The basis of the problem is of course that the official definition of the SI units is not well known, and some legal settlements include directions for manufacturers to use clearer info, e.g. by stating a hard disk’s size in both GB and GiB.

Thus:

When you purchase 160GB, which is 160,000,000,000 bytes.

You take 160,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 to be roughly equals to 149.0116119384765625 GB. This amount is reported by the operating system.

And look how much you seemed to be shortchanged:

160 GB - 149.0116119384765625 GB ~= 11 GB

It would be worse for the 320 GB hard disk I intend to purchase, I get 298.023223876953125 GB reported in the Operating System, which is roughly shortchanged of about 22 GB.

This problem has always been there but Western Digital sums it up best by lamenting - Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a “dozen,” because some bakers would view a “dozen” as including 13 items.

Wow, quote of the Day!

[I was talking about this to some friends and thought I share with you guys.]

Microsoft and SanDisk would be working together it seems.

Microsoft and SanDisk Join Forces to Create New Experience for USB Flash Drives and Flash Memory Cards, Expanding on and Replacing U3 Smart Technology

REDMOND, Wash. & MILPITAS, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Microsoft and SanDisk® Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) today announced they have signed an agreement to deliver a next-generation software and hardware solution to place application programs and personal customization on USB flash drives and flash memory cards, expanding on and replacing SanDisk’s existing U3 Smart Technology.

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will develop a new software experience and SanDisk will develop new hardware capabilities, including the addition of TrustedFlash security technology. SanDisk will incorporate the combined software and hardware solution on removable flash memory cards and Cruzer® USB flash drives. The new offering is expected to be commercially available starting in the second half of 2008.

Effective immediately, Microsoft will engage in discussions with third-party hardware vendors interested in licensing the new software offering. A new entity will be created to license compatible hardware designs, TrustedFlash and other intellectual property from both Microsoft and SanDisk, with revenues to be shared by the two companies.

Source: Business Wire

I don’t know if you guys heard of U3. It’s a SanDisk technology and I have a SanDisk USB device and it’s always good to hear about improvements. I use quite a lot of portable applications so it’s easy to just plug into any computer and be able to do my work.

I have a web server in my flash drive and I use it to run PHP applications such as WordPress. I also have GIMP image editing program although I would much prefer Photoshop. There are a lot of tiny little entertainment tools that I bring along. I bring along the codecs and some anime to watch when I’m free. I never regret buying a flash drive with lots of space, it’s so convenient.

Now that Microsoft and SanDisk wants to join forces to improve U3, I hope they would be able to provide better support for portable applications.

[via Engadget]

During the IT Show on March, I actually acquired this little device for myself - a SanDisk Cruzer Titanium USB Flash Drive. (Most of the Singaporeans refer to a flash drive as “thumb drive”.) It’s 4GB and it transfer things at quite a good speed. I especially love the way it looks.

I have yet to start using it but I am starting to populate it with those portable applications. The SanDisk Cruzer Titanium also supports U3. Very nice.

There’s an IT Show today (from Thursday to Sunday actually) so it might just be a good time to buy that external harddisk that you wished Santa fall last Christmas.

I might be getting a couple of gadgets this IT Show:

• Flash drives - I’m getting one from SanDisk. I’ll snap a picture if I manage to buy one.
• External harddisk - My brother wants one of these. If it’s affordable, I buy one of these too.
• Laser Printer - I felt like having a laser printer. I don’t really like to read from the monitor all the time you know.
• Earphones - Shure is there I heard. I’ll check out their canal phones, if they’re affordable, I may just buy it. But it’s Shure, so… probably not.

I’ll be going with my camp mates. I felt like I ORD already actually. Days left says 93. That’s about 3 months more and time will fly real quick on the month of March.