M looks grim, in his wood-panelled London office.<\/p>\n
“Bond, this is serious. SPECTRE have one of our key scientists kidnapped. They want ten of our secret programs mailed to them from around the world. For each program that fails to arrive, they will chop off one of his fingers, before he is released. He needs those fingers, dammit.<\/p>\n
“Your job will be to send one of those files; nine other agents will also be doing the same task. There is no time to lose; you will only have one opportunity to save those files to media, and post them to the address given. There is no time to try again on a different computer; it has to work first time.<\/p>\n
“You’d better speak to Q.”<\/p>\n
Q looks grim, as lab technicians explode costumed dummies with tricked-out staplers.<\/p>\n
“Bond. We are a little short on budget for this project. All I can give you is a modern home computer, and a single unit of removable media. If you can’t get it to work first time, well I am afraid our scientist will never be able to play the scales on the flute again.”<\/p>\n
So, my question is: how many fingers should the scientist expect to keep?<\/p>\n
In other words, what percentage of the time does a simple experiment of writing some simple data to removable media, mailing it across the world, and reading it successfully on another machine, first time with no fuss<\/em> succeed?<\/p>\n I think the answer to the question depends on what year the scenario occurs.<\/p>\n What’s wrong with this picture?<\/p>\n How did the industry forget that the big advance with 3.5″ disks wasn’t the capacity but the reliability<\/em>. (Unless, based on my experience, an old Macintosh was involved.)<\/p>\n Why do I throw away more DVDs than I successfully burn? Why do I have to trade tips on where to buy DVDs that work? Why do I have to learn (and explain) the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R?<\/p>\n M looks grim, in his wood-panelled London office. “Bond, this is serious. SPECTRE have one of our key scientists kidnapped. They want ten of our secret programs mailed to them from around the world. For each program that fails to arrive, they will chop off one of his fingers, before he is released. He needs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25,21,27],"tags":[292,293],"class_list":["post-571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology","category-observation","category-thoughts-from-the-shower","tag-hardware","tag-reliability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n Year<\/th>\n Media<\/th>\n Expected Fingers Remaining<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n \n 1983<\/th>\n Cassette Tape<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 1988<\/th>\n 5.25″ Floppy<\/td>\n 6<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 1993<\/th>\n 3.5″ Floppy<\/td>\n 9<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 1998<\/th>\n CD<\/td>\n 9.8<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 2008<\/th>\n DVD<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n