What is it about Ubuntu Linux that makes otherwise competent technical writers switch to Moron Mode? Everywhere I turn, I see articles on how to do obvious things in Ubuntu. Books on Ubuntu concentrate on listing every insignificant detail of every obvious procedure; things that are inherently self-explanatory are explained in depth. Subjects that have any inkling of technical complexity are skipped because, “Whoa — those are way too hard for you stupid Ubuntu users to grasp, so let’s just skip them and pretend everything’s peachy.” The best I can guess is that article writers and book authors assume that if you were capable of something more technical, you would be using Slackware or Debian, not Ubuntu.
I don’t know what specifically pushed me over the edge about Ubuntu articles. Maybe it was the daily “How to do something obvious in Ubuntu” blog post on the front page of Digg; maybe it was the umpteenth “Ubuntu for complete and utter noobs” book that I’ve been offered for review; maybe it was the fact that I was writing a Linux migration book for moderately technical people until the publisher decided that it, too, needed to be the umpteenth-and-first “Ubuntu for complete and utter noobs” iteration; maybe it’s all of the above.
Back in the dark days before Windows was more than just a memory-hogging graphical toy, I had a similar opinion of Apple users. Every time I met one, he’d go on and on about how easy it was to do something, as though I should be struggling with my PC that had an interface that I found to be both creative and intuitive — the DOS command line. I began to think of Apple users as drooling idiots who were not mentally capable of navigating the CLI, and therefore needed a low-IQ-friendly, one-button toy to play with while the rest of us were using good old blue-screened WordPerfect and playing online multiplayer games on The Sierra Network (which required manual dialup configuration!). My, how times have changed — now Apple computers are arguably more difficult to use than their competitors, so the drooling idiots have moved to the unlikeliest of places — Linux, ala Ubuntu. Or at least, that’s what so many tech writers seem to believe.
The subject matter of the majority of Linux articles and books does make a difference; it affects how people think about Linux. On the one hand, the over-simplistic how-to guides provide the impression that Ubuntu is easy to use, or at very least that appropriate documentation is available. On the other hand, the articles in question are published in places where only technical people are likely to see them, and therefore present a more negative impression — that Ubuntu is for noobs and morons. If you are a technically-minded Windows user who wants to switch to Linux, Ubuntu could very well seem like an option to avoid because of this stigma-by-association.
Ruby is a hot topic among software developers — and rightly so. It’s an exciting language to learn for “old school” programmers because it allows many luxuries and conveniences that you used to have to code around at length. Ruby is equally as attractive to new developers because it is easy to learn and can be implemented on almost any platform. A good book that introduces this interesting language by designing scripts for software development and testing would certainly be welcome; unfortunately, Everyday Scripting With Ruby isn’t it.
Writing analysis
What a terribly written book this is. The language is so poorly crafted that whatever information the author is trying to convey is at best muddled, and at worst totally lost. The author speaks over-colloquially, as though a shift in style will somehow make the book’s content easier to understand. Writing simply does not convey complex concepts more simply; all it does it make the material more difficult to understand.
The author irritatingly worships feminist propaganda by using female pronouns exclusively, which is such a distraction in itself that it is difficult to focus on the technical content. If you want to protest a male-dominated culture, go march in parades and hold signs at protests — don’t cheat your readers out of a good, non-political, technology-centric text that teaches them how to solve important problems with an interesting programming language.
Putting the book to the test
I did not get very far into Everyday Scripting With Ruby before I was so thoroughly disgusted with it that I could no longer continue. There are a shocking number of technical errors, inaccurate oversimplifications, and errors of fact in the first 50 pages. Particularly frightening is the author’s misunderstanding of operating systems. He claims that Linux, the BSDs, and OS X are based on AT&T Unix (does Brian Marick work for The SCO Group?), and that OS X is “Unix with a pretty face.” All of this nonsense, in addition to the fact that all of the book’s screen shots are of Mac OS X, suggests that this book is yet another misinformed fruithead’s musings on technology he doesn’t understand. To clarify, there is no evidence to suggest that there is Unix code in Linux; BSD was originally a rewrite of AT&T Unix, but no longer exists in that form; and OS X has absolutely no basis in AT&T Unix (or any other trademarked UNIX or SVR4 code). I did not feel that I could trust the author to teach me how to write scripts with Ruby after reading these blunders.
Flipping through the rest of the book I see lots of unnecessary first-person narrative, and colloquial speech that hinders the uptake of useful technical information. There are better languages to use for the kind of software development-centric scripting that the author tries to focus on in Everyday Scripting With Ruby, but he never explains why he feels that Ruby is a superior choice.
Conclusions
Avoid Everyday Scripting With Ruby at all costs. You’re likely to find it confusing, non-specific, inaccurate, and inappropriate as a Ruby resource. Considering the large number of Ruby books out there, nearly all of which are guaranteed to be better at helping you how to learn Ruby, it’s not worth wasting your time and money on this one.
Yesterday the OpenBSD Foundation announced its inception as a legal entity in charge of donations of money and equipment for the OpenBSD operating system and its associated projects. Today we have an interview with Ken Westerback, one of the foundation’s founding members.
Whose idea was it to establish the OpenBSD Foundation? I know that people have been talking about this idea for a long time, but I thought Theo de Raadt wasn’t agreeable to it.
Ken Westerback: The idea for The OpenBSD Foundation came from Bob Beck after several experiences with companies expressing a reluctance to donate money or equipment to OpenBSD without getting a receipt that would satisfy their accounting department. Theo has not, to my knowledge, been opposed to the creation of such an organization but has always firmly declined to put in the work to organize, complete the paperwork and run one himself. He was quite supportive of this effort but clearly reiterated his non-involvement in the running of the organization. Theo is always happy to get no strings attached support for OpenBSD.
One problem that potential donors have spoken up about in the past is that US residents can subtract donations to the FreeBSD Foundation from their taxes, but donations to OpenBSD via Theo de Raadt did not qualify. Is making a donation to the OpenBSD Foundation tax deductible in the US? (And Canada? I don’t know if such tax provisions are available in other countries.)
KW: The OpenBSD Foundation is not a registered charity, and cannot issue tax receipts. We did consider incorporating as a charity and thus gaining that capability for Canada, but the extra paperwork and organization demands deterred us. In addition, being a registered charity involves significant extra running costs and legal obligations. If The OpenBSD Foundation attracts enough donations that the extra costs could be assumed without taking a significant portion of any donations away from OpenBSD support we will strongly consider moving to a charitable status. Going further and organizing as a US registered charity presents even more hurdles and obligations and is thus that much further over the horizon. Even more so organizing in any of the other 200 or so countries in the world today.
How will the OpenBSD Foundation benefit OpenBSD and its associated projects (OpenSSH, OpenCVS, etc.)? What problems do the foundation solve?
KW: The OpenBSD Foundation hopes to benefit OpenBSD and related projects by attracting and disbursing funding and other material support from larger organizations, in particular public corporations, that need to have a paper trail with an appropriate legal entity. All funds and equipment will be distributed to the OpenBSD developers needing it. Current projected overhead is minimal. Specific plans on assuming recurring costs such as providing financial and organizational assistance to hackathons or commissioning specific larger scale projects will be developed as the level of funding available becomes clear. As mentioned above, the main problem we see being solved is providing that legal entity whose lack was often blamed for the inability to support OpenBSD in a material way.
Who are the members of the OpenBSD Foundation, and how do they relate to the OpenBSD project?
KW: The current membership consists of the founding directors – Bob Beck, Kjell Wooding, and Ken Westerback. All of us are long term OpenBSD developers of varying degrees of current activity.
Can people “buy” new features and functionality in OpenBSD through donations, such as is implemented in the concept of software bounties? There was a recent discussion on Undeadly.org about this, specifically pertaining to implementing the WPA wireless security protocol. Many OpenBSD users said (there and elsewhere) that they would be willing to donate money if it would go toward WPA implementation in OpenBSD. Are there any plans to offer software bounties or otherwise have money buy influence in OpenBSD development?
KW: This is an idea we have discussed, but we are not currently considering becoming a gathering point for smaller donations towards a specific goal. A single large donation towards a specific goal is something we would consider on a case by case basis.
What’s the question I forgot to ask? What else should people know about the OpenBSD Foundation?
KW: We currently accept cheques only. The more zeros on the end, the faster OpenBSD will progress. .
Today the OpenBSD Foundation announced that it has been fully formed as a legal entity in Canada, with the stated purpose of acting as the legal entity for handling donations and other legal and financial matters for the OpenBSD operating system and its associated projects. Full text of the press release is below; we’ll print more on this subject later this week.
The OpenBSD Foundation is pleased to announce today it has completed its organization as a Canadian federal non-profit corporation and is ready for public interaction.
In particular it will act as a single point of contact for persons and organizations requiring a legal entity to deal with when they wish to
support OpenBSD in any way.
The OpenBSD Foundation will initially concentrate on facilitating larger donations of equipment, funds, documentation and
resources. Small scale donations should continue to be submitted through the existing mechanisms.
Over the years I’ve dealt with a number of people in the public relations field. Some work directly for a particular company, others work for PR or marketing firms that a company outsources its PR work to. Some of the people in the tech PR world are very good at what they do and understand their role in the the process. There are a few rogue PR people out there, however, that make it their mission to stymie article and news story efforts, redirect information requests to the circular file, and in some cases, even try to take revenge on journalists for writing things that interfere with PR’s message. Here’s a quick story about some of the more ridiculous PR moments in my career as a journalist.
I’ll start with the most recent one. Today I received a phone call from a man who works for Mayo Communications, specifically on the SafeMedia Corp account. If you’re a regular reader, you probably recognize that name from a recent editorial and a product review that focused on SafeMedia. “My client is not happy,” was the first thing of substance the Mayo man said to me after confirming that I am who I said I was when I answered the phone (I was), and asking me if I was familiar with an email he sent to me last week (I wasn’t). He then proceeded to tell me that my article (which one, I don’t know) was inaccurate, and then said something that seemed to imply that I wasn’t supposed to write a review of the product that the SafeMedia CEO sent me to review. The Mayo representative then quickly charged forward on a tangent, but I stopped him. “Wait, are you saying that this product was not sent to me to write about for review? What do you think I do here?” The PR guy did some backpedaling and spinning and took an angry tone with me, at which point I told him that the conversation was over. Had he been in contact with his clients, he would have known that I’d already had a lengthy conversation with SafeMedia representatives earlier in the day, and we resolved to work out the problems that I found when testing their Clouseau device. The lesson: Calm down before you pick up the phone, and don’t argue with journalists. Even if you win, you lose. PR is there to help, and you making angry phone calls filled with accusations doesn’t help anyone, especially when the issue you’re so upset about has already been worked out with your client.
I’ve requested hundreds of products to review in my career. Usually the requests are denied because there aren’t any review units available when I ask. Timing is really everything in this regard; if I time my request right, I usually get what I want to write about. Every once in a while, though, I get some unusual responses from PR. Two cases come to mind in particular: Apple and The SCO Group. Apple PR representatives first ignored several email requests for information about current (not future!) products and a request to review a newly released desktop system. After I left a phone message or two and repeatedly called the PR number, I got in touch with someone. Until that time, I’d thought condescension was a lost art — a skill abandoned by professionals and left only to rank amateurs. That notion was rudely shattered by the Apple PR woman I talked to, who acknowledged reading and ignoring my email and phone messages, then graciously responded to every one of my inquiries with a perfectly dismissive yet pleasantly bemused air of detached indifference that left me convinced that Apple was not a company I would ever want to write about, buy from, or do business with. The lesson: If you don’t think a journalist is important enough to deal with, don’t make it obvious. You don’t know what publication he will be working for in the future — if it’s one your company depends on for press coverage, you’ll regret acting like a snob on the phone. It’s hard enough to remain objective about the companies a writer covers without you making it harder by acting like a jerk.
The SCO Group was even worse than Apple. The Apple PR lady could conceivably have been a short-timer who misrepresented his company, but SCO made it abundantly clear that they had a terrible PR attitude. The company representative at the time, Blake Stowell, forwarded my request for a review copy of a newly released version of SCO UnixWare to the Schwartz PR firm, which apparently handled some of SCO’s PR work. Someone claiming to be a vice president at Schwartz sent me an email that linked to an article I wrote about SCO CEO Darl McBride’s ridiculous comments about copyrighted Unix code in the Linux kernel, and told me that I was obviously out to harm the company with my writing, and that he would not send me SCO UnixWare because he was certain that whatever I wrote about it would be negative. The lesson: The lesson here is pretty self-evident. Not only did this Schwartz VP guarantee that I would never review SCO products (and since there are few other writers who can or will write reviews of proprietary Unix-based operating systems, this is a big problem for his client), but that I would also never deal with his PR firm again. If he’s one of the company’s managers, then I can reasonably expect the other people at Schwartz to act like him.
These are only three of the worst PR incidents I’ve gone through. There have been other bloopers that might warrant a mention in a longer, less subjective article on the subject. The majority of the people who work in this field are professional, pleasant to deal with, and make life easier for me while getting press coverage for their clients. I would never want to work in PR, though; I half-admire, half-pity anyone who can stomach this kind of work on a daily basis.
In the majority of the software world, companies and open source projects alike compete with one another in terms of quality, cost, documentation, ease of use, and necessary program features. A small, unethical portion of the market sees things a different way; companies in this minority category want to find a way to force people to buy their products. Today I present you with two examples of such underhanded business tactics: Microsoft and SafeMedia Corp, both of which are petitioning governmental entities to legislate them into hyper-profitability at everyone else’s expense.
In Microsoft’s case, it’s pushing to have its proprietary MS Office file format become the standard for government documents and communications both in states in the US and entire countries in other parts of the world. Obviously if Office’s file format is made the standard, that will impel governments to buy large numbers of Microsoft Office licenses, and Microsoft will make a lot of money. One could argue that if Microsoft made a superior office suite with competitive features at a reasonable price, such dirty tricks would not be necessary.
The other company is one you likely have not heard of — SafeMedia Corp. It’s a small, Florida-based corporation that produces a P2P network traffic block technology. Though it is implemented in a dedicated appliance (the Clouseau), SafeMedia’s long-term goal is to get its filters into cable modems. The filtering technology does not just involve ports — it seems to actually filter out certain kinds of protocols that indicate BitTorrent and other distributed file sharing technologies ala programs like FrostWire and KaZaa. Unfortunately, according to my testing, it also weeds out a large number of false positives in the form of legitimate BitTorrent traffic. Integrating SafeMedia’s technology into cable modems would be a disaster for ISPs, broadband Internet customers, BitTorrent Inc., and anyone who uses distributed filesharing technologies to distribute their products or services. But SafeMedia would make a lot of money, and that is why its CEO, Safwat Fahmy, provided written testimony to both the US House of Representatives and the Senate that shamelessly plugged his products as the perfect solution to unwanted filesharing. Quoted in part from an email press release sent to me this morning by SafeMedia’s PR firm:
SafeMedia Corporation CEO and Founder, Safwat Fahmy outlined the dangers and risks of contaminated P2P networks today (Tuesday, July 24, 2007) in his written testimony before the U.S. House Of Representatives Committee On Oversight and Government Reform, at the “Inadvertent Filesharing Over Peer-To-Peer Networks” hearing. The SafeMedia Chairman focused how P2P networks operate, the features and characteristics of “contaminated” P2P networks. Fahmy also explained in his written testimony how SafeMedia’s technology was developed to address illegal sharing of copyrighted materials on contaminated P2P networks and how it will help to protect consumers, students ,businesses and our national security from the serious privacy, identity theft and security risks.
And:
Historically, Fahmy told the Senate hearing, “P2P networks were developed to overcome limitations on bandwidth and processing/storage so arguably there were some benefits to using P2P networking as opposed to the client-server model. But frankly, the historic reasons for developing P2P networks do not exist in today’s world: limitations on bandwidth and processing/storage are easily remedied by clustering many low cost servers and the deployment of wideband fiber to deliver even more powerful performance than P2P networks.”
So BitTorrent is made obsolete by clusters and fiberoptic Internet services? I can’t trust Mr. Fahmy’s expertise when he makes statements like that; clearly he does not understand the fact that BitTorrent is used by companies who cannot afford hugely expensive hardware and bandwidth resources. It is not a luxury — it’s a necessity to many software and media businesses. But how can I trust him anyway? Fahmy is directly involved with a business that sells products that would benefit from this testimony’s acceptance, so in effect the testimony is one big sales pitch. His words are biased in favor of profits, and tainted with misinformation that unnecessarily polarizes the issue, and therefore meaningless before the congressional committees — or at least we must all hope that our elected representatives are smart enough to understand this. Presumably they have been in politics long enough to know when they’re being wooed by greedy CEOs or their lobbyists.
Just as disturbing are Microsoft’s dirty tricks in getting its OOXML file format adopted as a standard in the state of Massachusetts and the country of Portugal (among several others in Europe and South America). But Microsoft is under greater scrutiny and faces opposition from both the open source software community and corporate competitors Sun Microsystems and IBM, both of which have an interest in seeing the competing OpenDocument format gain wider adoption. In contrast to Microsoft’s proprietary OOXML, OpenDocument is an open standard that is free to implement in any software, so it is not platform-dependent like OOXML, which is currently only implemented in Microsft Office 2007. Consumers will not suffer any consequences of OpenDocument becoming a state or national standard because they can download and use the open source OpenOffice.org suite to view and edit them. If Microsoft wins the format battle, you may be forced to buy (or “pirate”) MS Office 2007.
What concerns me more than Microsoft and its Office format is SafeMedia’s congressional manipulation. The issue has made it into an amended Senate bill which will control education funding. If the corporations that will benefit from this — SafeMedia, the MPAA and the RIAA — succeed, they will make money and we regular citizens will suffer by losing federal funding for 25 colleges and universities as they struggle to prevent P2P file transfers. Such prevention is an exercise in futility; even the SafeMedia technology does not filter out direct file transfers via email, FTP, HTTP, or SSH. To filter out all “bad” traffic, you also have to filter out some or all of the legitimate traffic as well, crippling the network’s usefulness and limiting the ability of those 25 institutions to teach and conduct research.
If only Microsoft and SafeMedia made products that sold themselves without legislative help. If only their sales pitches focused on competitive quality, features, and pricing, there would be no need to try to force people to become their customers. Perhaps the awful truth is that people do not want to spend a lot of money on Microsoft Office 2007 (and by extension, Windows Vista), or they make good use of P2P filesharing and don’t want it filtered out. This practice of lobbying our governments to force us to use substandard or unwanted products is nothing short of predatory capitalism, and I think it stinks.
Last week the Talent First Network announced the launch of a new monthly publication geared toward greater understanding and dialogue between businesses and open source software projects. The free monthly’s title is Open Source Business Resource, and it’s geared toward the local business, open source, and academic communities in Ontario, Canada, though if it does well, there are plans to expand it beyond the region.
The OSBR’s goal is to be a resource for students and professionals who want to work with open source software in a business atmosphere. Because there are so many sources of misinformation on this subject, such a publication is a necessary resource for professionals. This month’s issue (PDF) deals with a variety of interesting business-oriented open source topics, such as using open source software as a competitive advantage, an overview of why and how the Eclipse project has been successful, a piece that explains all of the properties of an open source software license that businesses should consider, an introduction to Talent First and the Open Source Business Resource, and a listing of lead projects in Ontario.
In charge of the OSBR editorially is Dru Lavigne, who has also been one of the driving forces behind the BSD Certification Group, a speaker at many open source software conventions, and the author of O’Reilly’s BSD Hacks, among other things.
Overall, the OSBR is a decently organized newsletter with useful information written by actual industry professionals that is easy to read and understand. I think it’s an excellent implementation of an open source software resource for local Ontario businesses, college students, and professional programmers. Sometimes great works don’t succeed, though, so time will tell if this format and content will find all of its readers and grow beyond Ontario to reach a larger audience. Being that the alternatives, in the form of blogs and news articles, are wildly inconsistent and frequently misleading or factually incorrect, I certainly hope that the OSBR succeeds.
A long time ago, when I first started doing motherboard reviews, I vowed to disclose if I was using pre-release engineering sample hardware in my reviews so that readers would know that the results and findings could be different from the finished product. I also said that I would try not to use engineering samples whenever possible, because there is a dangerous potential for the manufacturer to enhance and buff up a sample that a reviewer will work with. I don’t do as many hardware reviews anymore, and I rarely get any engineering samples, so it’s not as much of an issue. More of a problem these days is the publication of pre-release copies of software, which flood the Web with useless drivel to the point that when a real release review comes out, its importance and impact is diluted.
There is little point in publishing much of a review of an alpha or beta copy of an operating system or program. The alpha stage means that a product is in active development and can have many bugs, some known, some not. Many features aren’t yet implemented, some don’t work at all, and some could harm your hardware or data if they malfunction. Any critical analysis of this situation is totally useless to everyone — users and developers alike. So why bother publishing such tripe? My guess is, it’s an effort to be first to print. If you did not already know that the first review of a popular product tends to get the most traffic, you know now. Publishing alpha and beta reviews is the best way to get the first review. By the time the release comes out, you can have written several reviews of pre-release alpha and beta test copies, thereby robbing the real review of the majority of the traffic.
The best example of this pre-release review craze is Windows Vista. Actual Vista reviews are difficult to find because they’re buried in a sea of beta reviews from the two years leading up to the release, most of which are completely worthless. I can understand a quick story (or a series of quick stories) on how a particular project is progressing throughout its development cycle, but as a reader I’d rather see only full reviews of actual releases. The only way to solve the problem is to stop reading pre-release reviews — if they don’t get any page views, there will be less of an incentive to publish them.
The quality of online journalism is, and has always been, mostly controlled by readers, not writers or publishers. Vote with your mouse.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are not difficult to learn how to create and implement, but going beyond the basics take a lot of thought, creativity, and knowledge. The thought and creativity part are up to you, but the knowledge portion has to come from a competent source that can show you some real technical wizardry. O’Reilly’s CSS Cookbook, 2nd Edition is the perfect book for anyone interested in advancing from a beginner’s CSS level to an expert’s.
Writing analysis
CSS Cookbook, 2nd Edition is laid out in typical O’Reilly “cookbook” format. A problem is presented, the best solution is provided, and then it is explained in detail, including alternative solutions. A complete listing of the necessary code and screen shot of its implementation in a Web browser are also part of each “recipe.” A large appendix offers extremely useful lists and tables of CSS elements for HTML tags and which Web browsers they will work with.
There is some value in reading a book like this from cover to cover, but it would probably be more appropriate to consult it whenever you come across a technical challenge in building a Web site.
Though the book starts out with some CSS basics, it would be most helpful to readers to have a firm grasp of CSS basics before reading. I suggest the W3Schools free online CSS tutorial as a prerequisite to CSS Cookbook, 2nd Edition.
Putting the book to the test
There is so much great CSS information in this book that it’s hard to talk about specifics. No single chapter or recipe stands out above the others — they’re all useful to working Web designers and developers, and appropriate for modern design practices and standards. The first thing I did when reading it was open up to a random place, a little more than halfway through the book, and read the first recipe I saw. It happened to be a series of solutions for creating a variety of multi-column layouts using <div> tags, and addressed problems that I have struggled to solve on my own several times. I wanted to go back and read that section later, so I put a piece of the press release in that spot and flipped back to some earlier sections. Everything I saw was not only useful to any professional designer or developer, but it was brilliant in its analysis of relevant problems and solutions. This book was definitely written by someone who knows the challenges we face as Web site creators and editors.
The only negative point about the book — and this is totally a matter of personal preference — is that all of the screen shots show the OS X operating system. I can’t stand Apple or OS X, so seeing screen shots of its nonsensical, toy-like interface is a distraction and an annoyance.
Conclusions
Every Web designer and developer who has to deal with XHMTL or CSS — even if only infrequently — should have this book on his desk. It deals with the difficult challenges that Web designers deal with every day and on every project. Even if you think you’re a CSS guru, CSS Cookbook, 2nd Edition is still likely to teach you something new.
I’d also strongly recommend this book for hobbyist Web designers who want to get into hand-coded XHTML and CSS, or who want to graduate from WYSIWYG Web editors to the real thing.
A recent scientific study at the University of California has discovered the process by which a hard drive magnetically fails. The solution is, somewhat obviously, to use better magnetic materials in drive platters. While this discovery could lead to better quality hard drives in the future, it won’t solve other drive failure types. Maybe we won’t even have to worry about this for very much longer if light replaces magnetism as a data storage and retrieval mechanism.
Ultimately, the goal in all electronics development is to replace the slow — magnetism, physical switching, mechanical connections, and electrical signals — with the fast, which generally involves switching to some sort of light-based solution. Fiber optics and light signals, for instance, will need to replace metal wire and electrical signals if we hope to improve signal bandwidth, speed of operation, reliability of connection, and greater power efficiency. So in essence, this discovery about hard drive failures comes too late in the magnetic hard drive life cycle to make a big difference. Magnetic storage is dying a slow but certainly deserving death.
Platter polarization is not the only way for a drive to fail, though. In fact I’d say in world of hard drives, it’s probably the least likely to be at the heart of a catastrophic hard drive failure. Most common are the usual suspects — electrical and mechanical failures. One of the realities of electro-mechanical devices is that even if the electrical components magically last forever, a lack of adequate lubrication and normal wear and tear will eventually cause an unrecoverable mechanical failure. Anyone who has owned more than one motor vehicle knows this reality all too well.
Beyond their initial “expect to fail” period of 30-90 days of regular use, electrical components rarely fail under normal conditions. It takes some kind of abuse, contamination, or corrosion from environmental factors to cause late-life electrical components to die. With hard drives, the extreme heat generated inside of your computer (much of it by the drive’s own mechanics) and the thermal stress of turning it on and off on a daily basis is enough to cause both electrical and mechanical failures. Fortunately, an electrical failure is usually very easy to fix on a hard drive — you just buy an identical drive and swap out the control boards.
Mechanical failures are by far the most common in my experience as a technician. Lack of lubrication can cause “hard drive sticktion,” which causes initial failures at boot time, but can go away after the drive motor has had the chance to spin up a little. The only “voodoo” way of fixing this was to shake the drive vigorously. Sometimes the heads just don’t seek anymore, and like a record with a dull stylus, the drive is unable to locate and read the requested sectors. Under these conditions, repair is not usually possible. There are so many problems with electro-mechanical magnetic storage; I can hardly wait for my first light-storage drive.
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