This is an experimental post, testing out a control to present my 360 degree panoramic photos. If this works right, below you should see three 360 degree panoramas. One of a Victorian like bedroom in the Biltmore Estate. Click and drag inside the image to look around. Another of a room by the grand staircase. And a third at the Stable Cafe.
It’s a custom and closed source web browser that has a built in BitCoin miner. That means it’ll run high intensity calculations on your CPU, burning electricity with the intent of creating new BitCoin. By closed source, that means they’re not open source. They do NOT make their source code available for inspection.
What it CLAIMS
It claims to make you money by mining BitCoin on your computer while you browse. But this is misleading.
What it ACTUALLY does
In reality, when you create your account, likely from having clicked someone’s referral link, you’re software is now a slave to the person who owns the referral link. While your computer burns through electricity that YOU are paying for, it’s giving a large portion of the tiny amount of BitCoin that your computer generates to the other person, not producing any profit for you at all. Even if you got to keep all of the BitCoin that you mined, you’d STILL be losing way more money than you make.
It’s IMPOSSIBLE to be profitable mining BitCoin on a PC or a mobile device
A very, very long time ago, the complexity of BitCoin became too powerful for PCs to mine it and be profitable. For years, the only way to make a profit mining BitCoin is to buy specialized hardware that can’t do anything other than mine BitCoin. Those hardware devices cast at least $1,300 (USD) on the low end, run very loudly and hot. And you’ll have to run one for about 6 months before you generate enough BitCoin to break even on the cost of the hardware. There is NO PATH to mining profitably on a PC (unless you get your electricity for free!)
If you mine on ANYTHING else, you’re GOING TO LOSE MONEY! Why? Because the amount of electricity you burn will cost you MORE than ANY infinitesimal amount of bitcoin you mine. Even if your electricity were free, the amount you can mine on a PC is virtually nothing. It also slows down your PC for everything else.
But wait! There’s MORE! To make matters even WORSE, when you start mining with this browser, you don’t even get to keep all of the minimal amount of coin you mine. Even if you did, you’d already be at a loss, but it’s worse. Whoever’s link you clicked on to get the browser gets a portion of YOUR earnings! Earnings that are ALREADY in LOSS territory.
A Classic Ponzi Scheme
The ONLY way to “make money” with this is NOT by mining BitCoin, but by having LOTS of people sign up through your referral link. THEY LOSE money by mining and lose even MORE by giving you the minuscule BitCoin THEY mine.
The Decentralized Web 3.0 will bring you the following benefits:
The end of ISPs and governments spying on your online activities.
The end of big tech collecting all your private data.
The end of email providers being able to see your personal email.
Encryption of EVERYTHING.
The end of social media censoring you.
The end of demonetization.
The end of spam.
The beginning of making money by receiving marketing email (if you choose to).
The end of censored banking.
The end of domain name confiscation.
The end of web hosters shutting you down.
The end of registrars shutting you out.
The end of app stores removing your apps.
The beginning you YOU being in FULL CONTROL of your personal data.
Here’s how, but first a short history…
Internet 1.0
introduced the world to the idea of everyone being a publisher. Unfortunately, there was no security designed into the architecture and it was mostly static and difficult to have interaction.
Internet 2.0
was a more structured way of creating websites, with more user friendly user interfaces and lots of interactive content, in addition to improved security models.
But something went wrong.
Something went HORRIBLY wrong! As individuals started becoming effective communicators across geographical and political boundaries, they started being silenced for multiple reasons… sometimes by anti-competitive companies with deep pockets, but usually political reasons by tyrannical regimes in back-assword countries, then in first world countries, by corporations (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Instagram, etc…) and so-called “educational” institutions, and in some cases, even first world governments, themselves.
Anti free speech campaigns began successfully shutting out an entire class of voices via social media outrage mobs demanding voices they didn’t like be silenced and for some reason, the big social media companies complied and shut them down by shadow banning, removing them from search, suspending their accounts, or deleting their accounts altogether, frequently with no warning and no explanation.
Then they went after their income.
YouTube began demonetizing video creators. PayPal began killing users’ PayPal accounts. It even spread out to the real world. Credit card companies began shutting down people’s accounts and even BANKS started deleting their OWN CUSTOMERS! All for political ideological reasons!
They rewound the freedom clock back to the early 90s, and in some cases, back 100 years or more.
Enter Decentralization…
Decentralized services were already being created before “the purge” started, but decentralization started to accelerate because of this. The FIRST popular decentralized service to hit the scene was #BitCoin, which is a fully decentralized, global currency. What makes it so powerful is that there’s no central point of failure, and more importantly… no central point of attack. It’s a BRILLIANT system that prevents double-spending, prevents counterfeiting, and gives control of assets back to the people. Governments CANNOT control it! It first rolled out in 2008 and has grown exponentially since then. It’s been so successful, than many millionaires have been made because of it and thousands of other cryptocurrencies have been created.
The technology behind it can be used for so much more than JUST money. In fact, all the strangle-points (or censor-points) of the current (or “legacy”) internet can be censorship resistant using the same or similar decentralized technology that BitCoin uses:
DNS
File Storage
EMail
DNS
is the Domain Name System that allows you to type in human readable names into your browser like https://BitCoin.org or other sites you’re familiar with. The reason this works is because your browser takes the name you enter into your browser’s address bar and looks it up in a publicly distributed database to find the actual IP address of the computer you’re really wanting to connect to. Even though the database is decentralized, there’s a centralized authority that authorizes the names AND they are beholden to governments, so when a government demands control of your domain name, then you lose your domain name and all your visitors and paying customers, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Domain name registrars can also take your domain names away, and this has been happening due to political reasons.
There are now several decentralized DNS replacements. One of which is https://NameCoin.org This is an open source project designed to have NO central authority. It’s controlled by a blockchain (the technology that drives BitCoin). In fact, it’s copied directly from Bitcoin, using BitCoin’s source code. When you register a domain name on THIS system, you do it with a cryptocurrency called NameCoin. Once registered, you own the domain name like you own your cryptocurrency. It CANNOT be taken from you. For now, there’s a problem in that current (legacy) browsers are unaware of this technology and so those names can’t be used with regular browsers unless you install plugins for them.
File Storage
Another weak point for censorship on the legacy 2.0 web is web hosting. The way it works is you rent space and CPU capacity on someone else’s servers to host your websites. If the hoster doesn’t like your politics, you’re GONE! This has been happening at an accelerating pace.
The solution is decentralized file storage. One of the most popular at the moment is https://IPFS.io which is a fully decentralized file distribtution system. IPFS stands for InterPlanetary File System. The genius behind this is that you don’t request content via a URL with a domain name and a path and file name. Instead, you request it from the decentralized IPFS network via the HASH of the file you want. (A “hash” is a mathematically generated number based on the CONTENTS of a file. IPFS hashes are unique for every file). If you’re a web publisher, you publish your files to the IPFS network. Users can request your files (like website HTML pages) via the unique HASH of your file. The IPFS network goes into action, looking for any node that has that file, and if found ANYWHERE on the network, delivers it to the user. As a file is requested more often, it starts to spread across the globe, becoming more and more decentralized and faster to load.
Decentralized DNS systems, like NameCoin can be configured to return an IPFS file.
EMail
Your EMail will radically change too. From your usage point of view, it will still look and feel similar to what you’re using now, but it’ll have the following, drastically different and improved features:
Censorship-resistant, meaning no one can shut down your e-mail account.
Decentralized. There will be no central server that you connect to.
Encrypted. By default, ALL of your email will be heavily encrypted, without any effort on your part.
Spam-Free: NO ONE will be able to send you email unless you authorize them to. You’ll also be able to set prices that spammers must PAY YOU in order to send you spam, should you elect to even receive spam. The global system will prevent any email going to you unless you’ve authorized it AND that it includes the proper amount of cryptocurrency you’ve specified.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, the dark forces trying to silence you or block you from seeing speech that THEY do not approve of are coming to an end. No websites will be blocked by other people deciding what you can see. Your sites will not be blocked. Your web hosting cannot be blocked. Your social media will not be blocked. Your videos will not be blocked. Your content will not be demonetized. Your banking will not be stopped. Your web browsing cannot be spied upon. Your email cannot be read by third parties. Spam will be a thing of the past. Censorship will be much more difficult for the censors. And everything will be encrypted all of the time. AND you’ll even MAKE MONEY by receiving marketing email and ONLY if you choose to do so.
All of your data will be 100% in YOUR control.
Your data will be stored, fully encrypted on your end, across multiple, replicated hosts (or locally only on your hardware), readable ONLY by YOU!
Decentralized Resources in the making (or already made):
If you’re getting the “Couldn’t install app” error when trying to install the Samsung Blockchain Keystore app in your device’s Secure Folder, then read on. Skip the background if you’re familiar with it and go straight to the Solution section.
Background
In mid-2019, Samsung came out with the Samsung Galaxy S10 phone. At the same time, they introduced their first cryptocurrency wallet, the “Samsung Blockchain Wallet”. At first, it only supported Ethereum. But as of late 2019, it supports a few more cryptocurrencies, most notably, it now supports the most important one, Bitcoin!
But, to use the wallet app, it requires another app; the “Samsung Blockchain Keystore”. I’m not sure why they separated that out into two apps, but my semi-educated guess is that you can create your keys and manage them in one app and use them in other apps, not JUST the wallet app.
Now, as anyone with any knowledge of cryptocurrencies knows, you have to be EXTRA careful with your keys for cryptocurrency. YOU are 100% in control of your cryptocurrency. If you’re careless, and it gets stolen, you have NO RECOURSE! Unlike a traditional bank with FDIC insurance of up to $100,000 protection per account, there’s NOTHING for cryptocurrency. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature! With freedom, comes responsibility. But that’s a speech for another day. The point is, that if you’re going to do this on mobile, you want it to be a secure as possible, and on a Samsung phone, that means putting it in the ultra secure section called “Secure Folder”. Now, let’s get back to the “Couldn’t install app” error.
Solution
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there is no solution at the time of this writing (2020-01-04). I spent an hour on chat support with Samsung, who then sent me to a phone tech support that’s a specialist on the Secure folder. Both the chat tech and the Secure Folder tech were unaware of the problem and both confirmed that it is, indeed, a problem that they’re going to have to fix.
Here are the problems you’ll experience:
When trying to install the Samsung Blockchain Keystore into the Samsung Secure Folder:
It will not find it in the installed apps from the apps installed outside of the Secure Folder.
It will not find it in the Play Store (to their surprise, it’s not in the Play Store at all. You can search for it with a desktop browser. It’s just not there).
It WILL not find it in the Samsung Galaxy Store… at least, not directly. First, you have to search for the Samsung Blockchain Wallet app, select it, scroll down for similar apps, and you’ll find the Samsung Blockchain Keystore down there. Try to install it, and you’ll get the error:
Installing the KeyStore app OUTSIDE of Secure Folder will NOT make it available to the wallet app INSIDE the secure folder.
Even when installed outside of secure folder, it does not show up in the app drawer. You cannot add its icon to the home screen.
The ONLY way to launch it is to find it in the Galaxy Store and tap the “Open” button there.
So, the conclusion is that it’s not possible to use the Samsung Wallet app in the Secure Folder area. And if you can’t use it in there, it’s not worth using. You NEED the extra protection of the Secure Folder for your cryptocurrency. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE IT OUTSIDE OF SECURE FOLDER!!!
Speaking of Decentralized Monetization,
If you like my work, you can contribute directly to me with the following cryptocurrencies (but, apparently, not with the Samsung Blockchain Wallet app in Secure Folder yet!)
Whether you’re a developer or a user, these are the requirements for a truly decentralized app. If it lacks any of these, your app can (and should be assumed that it WILL) be censored:
No reliance on legacy DNS.
While you CAN make use of DNS as an additional measure, your app should still fully function even if the entire DNS system is compromised and/or your domain name confiscated. You should think of the DNS as only a gateway for legacy users to find your services.
No reliance on a centralized account creation system.
User accounts should be created client side ONLY, like a cryptocurrency wallet. The app’s concern with the user account should ONLY be that the user cryptographicly signs their communication with you, using their private key and you use their public key to transmit private data from you to them.
Deployment of the app should NOT depend on a centralized app publisher.
The app should be obtainable if you or your company or your organization cease to exist. This does not mean that you can’t ALSO deploy to centralized app stores, but those should be SECONDARY. You should also dissuade your users away from centralized app stores.
User’s personal data should ONLY be stored on their own device
OR encrypted with their public key before being stored remotely to their choice of external storage.
Remote storage
All remote storage should be stored on a decentralized storage platform (The user’s SiaCoin or FileCoin accounts, for example. For published data, IPFS and/or a blockchain). This doesn’t mean you can’t also make use of centralized platforms. In fact, make use of popular centralized cloud storage like Amazon S3, DropBox, Google Drive, etc, but encourage the user to add 3 of those to their storage preferences and you encrypt their data locally, with their public key, then replicate it, like RAID 3, across at least 3 or more centralized storage platforms.
Monetization
Creator monetization should NOT be controlled by the app creator. The app creator should only facilitate code in their app to allow independent users to pay, directly, to each other, using a system outside the control of the app creator (such as cryptocurrencies).
Speaking of Decentralized Monetization,
If you like my work, you can contribute directly to me with the following cryptocurrencies:
First, a definition: What IS a decentralized app or service?
A decentralized app or service, its data, and the user accounts are available from multiple locations. If any one of them go offline, the app or service continues to be functional and distribution of the app or service does not cease, the data does not go away, the user accounts do not die, and no functionality ceases to function.
Let’s review how legacy (centralized) apps and services currently work…
Ordinary, legacy services that you’re probably used to are things like Google Maps, Google GMail, Google Search, Google Drive, Google Docs (seeing a pattern here?), Google’s YouTube. Aside from the obvious fact that all of these are from A SINGLE COMPANY! they’re also centralized. In spite of the fact that Google has a planetary wide system where they distribute their services and storage, they have the following centralized points of failure:
They’re all owned by one company.
Google could, in theory, go out of business. Wait! Stop laughing. Where are you going? Obviously, that’s not likely to happen any time soon, but it’s always a possibility, especially with the possibility that they may be broken up into multiple smaller companies, due to their gigantic control of virtually the entire internet.
They can (and DO) censor. THOUSANDS of YouTubers have had the following problems, increasing and accelerating in occurrences, frequently for political, not safety reasons:
Demonetization.
Shadow banning.
Removing their videos or channels from “suggested videos”.
Hiding their videos or channels from search results.
Marking them as “age restricted”, which hides them from search results where “child safe” restrictions are enabled, such as public libraries and schools.
Videos deleted.
Channels deleted.
Falsification of viewer counts.
Blocking of voting.
Blocking of comments.
Simply not paying the creators what they’re owed.
They’re all reliant on the centrally controlled DNS system.
Though the DNS is a decentralized service, the CONTROL of it is NOT. The CONTROL of the DNS is controlled by an organization called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). They’re the ones that can take your domain name away from you. They used to be a U.S. based organization, but in 2016, the U.S. government, in a highly controversial move, transferred control to an international body that is not adherent to your first amendment rights. At the time of this writing (2020/1/4), there are fears that tyrannical governments like Russia or China may start to get partial control of this too. Both of them are already creating their own DNS and many countries block domains from their entire citizenry.
Any data you enter into their apps or websites is viewable by them and stored on their servers. YOUR data is controlled by other people.
Your user account is proprietary for THEIR services
You’ll have to create separate accounts for apps and services on OTHER centralized apps and services not owned by Google.
Your user account and password are known and stored on these organizations servers. They have access to EVERYTHING you do with their apps, and so do their employees and contractors!
Decentralization solves ALL of the above problems! Here’s how:
No centralized DNS.
Decentralized apps do not rely on the centrally controlled DNS (Dynamic Name System). Once you install and run the app on your local device, most of the functionality happens on your own device. In cases where data needs to be shared, it’s either done so directly from your device to your friend’s device, if you’re having a private conversation, or it’s distributed to a decentralized, public data system like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System).
Decentralized account management:
Instead of creating a user account on a centralized web site for each and every website you visit, you create ONE account. And you do this on your own device. And you do not publish it (unless you want to). This is how cryptocurrencies work. You create your “wallet” using software running on your own computer. It’s essentially a very large and random number, run through a cryptographic algorithm that generates TWO keys: One private (that you hide from everyone) and on public (that you can share with the world). These keys work in unison. If you want to prove to anyone that you created content, you encrypt it with your private key. Anyone with your public key can decrypt it. Technically, that’s not what we call “encryption”. It’s “digitally signing”. If something can be decrypted using your public key, it’s proof that it was encrypted (or signed) with your private key, meaning only YOU. If someone wants to send you something private, they’ll encrypt it with your public key. It can ONLY be decrypted with YOUR private key. This key combination is your “account” and you can use that on any decentralized app that uses that particular technology. You can also create multiple accounts, if you like.
You create your accounts on your own device.
You use the same account everywhere (if you want).
You can create as many accounts as you like.
No one, but YOU has control over your accounts. No one can delete them.
Decentralized app deployment:
Apps are made accessible on a network of nodes, rather than a centralized app store. Some examples of decentralized networks are BitTorrent & IPFS. This prevents a single entity (Like the Apple App Store or Google’s Play Store) from deleting them. It also prevents a centralized authority, like ICANN from taking away the public’s access to your content via the DNS.
Personal Data & Remote Storage
While personal data does NOT need to be decentralized, decentralized apps SHOULD handle personal data ONLY locally, on the user’s device, OR, per the user’s intention, encrypt, then store on the user’s choice of cloud storage, preferably a decentralized cloud storage, like SiaCoin or FileCoin, or replicated (after encrypted) across multiple accounts on separate centralized cloud storage services like Amazon S3, Google Drive, DropBox, etc…
Monetization
Content creators should receive payments DIRECTLY from the consumers of their content, usually in the form of cryptocurrency. The app providers need only provide the means for the content creator to accept cryptocurrencies. This is usually done by the content creator registering their cryptocurrency wallet addresses with their content and users being able to tap or click it and then transfer crypto directly to the creator. There should be no middleman involved.
Elimination of DDOS
Distributed Denial Of Services is an attack against a CENTRALIZED web site. For example: Multiple machines send thousands or millions of requests to a website, overwhelming the CENTRALIZED servers, causing them to be unable to respond to legitimate requests, because they can’t tell the difference. If your services or content are decentralized, there’s no central server to attack.
Faster Downloads
When you download content from a decentralized network, you’re not relying on the limited server resources of a single organization or single server anymore. The system finds the closest or fastest nodes to you that have the content and deliver it to you.
Global bandwidth
Decentralized distribution means closer physical transfers. In other words, as a downloaded item gets distributed via the act of downloading, it spreads organically across the internet. Each download is done via the closest neighbor, preventing clogging up the longer path connections, making the rest of the internet faster for everything else too.
Decentralization provides massive benefits for BOTH publishers AND consumers.
For Consumers:
As a consumer, the content you love cannot be taken away from you just because of the politics of the day or the preferences of the owner of an organization.
For Publishers/Creators:
You can’t be censored.
Twitter, Facebook, & YouTube have gone on a massive censorship craze and in spite of being hauled in front of Congress multiple times and facing backlash from the public, they’re only accelerating their censorship. Decentralization puts an end to that.
You can’t be demonetized.
A sinister part of censorship is demonetization. In addition to silencing dissident voices, they’re also cutting off their funding and propping up the distribution of funding of only the voice they approve of. Decentralization puts an end to that.
Speaking of Decentralized Monetization,
If you like my work, you can contribute directly to me with the following cryptocurrencies:
OK, let’s debunk yet another #flerfer meme. This one is an anti-science rant, and it’s wrong on OH! Soooo many levels.
Ridiculous flerfer rant, wrong on multiple levels, against science.
Let’s discuss each part of the text, one by one:
“After a bunch of stuff happened, NONE of which we have math for yet”.
Do these guys EVER do a simple search? OF COURSE we have math for it. We have math coming out of our ears. In fact, they’ve used that math to create remarkably accurate computer simulations of the evolution of the universe.
Here’s an article that goes with that: https://www.seeker.com/mind-blowing-computer-simulation-recreates-our-universe-1768543905.html
“then our lucky planet formed in the perfect goldilocks position”
They seem to think the Goldilocks zone of our sun is tiny. It’s not. Both Venus and Mars in inside the Goldilocks zone of this solar system. And common sense says that if we’re going to exist on a planet, it’s going to be one that exists in such a zone, of course. That’s not “luck”. It’s common sense. We’re not going to exist on a fire world like Venus or Mercury, nor an ice world like Pluto, nor a gas giant like Jupiter. There are trillions of planets in this galaxy and a sizable chunk of them are in their star’s Goldilocks zones.
“while furiously spinning”
Uh, no. It’s not “furious”. It’s a calm, consistent, relatively slow rotation. it takes a full 24 hours to complete 1 rotation. Yes, that’s about 1,000mph at the equator. For comparison, Jupiter makes a complete rotation every 10 hours. Given its enormous size, that’s over 28,000 mph.
[the sun] “flying at 67,000 mph through our galaxy”
Not “through” the galaxy, but with the galaxy. The Galaxy is a rotating disc and we’re rotating along with it. And it’s rotating at 492,125 mph at our position in the disc. But all the other solar systems in our general galactic vicinity are moving along with us relative to the center of the galaxy. Relative to each other, we’re barely moving at all. Speed is relative, of course.
“our galaxy that’s going 500 MILLION mph into NOTHINGNESS.”
Wrong on both counts. At galactic scales, direction or speed no longer make much sense to talk about unless you are referring to another object to compare to. For example, how fast are we moving towards or away from the Andromeda galaxy? How about the pinwheel galaxy? We can talk about that. But as far as moving through the universe? Not really. But, we COULD use the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) radiation as a reference frame. If we consider that as “stationary”, we can look at the Doppler frequency differences in the CMB in different directions of the sky. Doing that, we find that we’re moving roughly 2.2 million mph, relative to the CMB, NOT “500 MILLION mph”.
“into NOTHINGNESS”.
The universe isn’t nothingness and our galaxy isn’t moving “into” anything. It’s simply moving relative to other galaxies and relative to the CMB. There’s no “universal” speed for our galaxy. You just have to pick another object and then ask, “how fast are we moving relative to THAT?”
[referring to the abiogenesis of life] “suddenly, out of nowhere”
It wasn’t out of nowhere. It’s simply chemistry of the right atoms in the right configurations.
“with math we don’t have yet”
Well first of all, yes, we do. Second, it’s more chemistry than “math”.
“reorganized, and self replicated, becoming complex multicellular life that then morphed slowly into fish”
Yeah. The flerfer actually got something right, in spite of their uneducated mocking tone of those smarter than them. Obviously this happened with errors in the genetic copies over time. Most of them ended up dying. A small handful were neutral. And a smaller handful provided some kind of an advantage to survival. Rinse and repeat, and you eventually get more and more complex organisms.
“while our nuclear furnace sun stays perfectly stable”
Nope. It’s not been perfectly stable. It has CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections)… “solar flares”. Some are huge and dangerous. It also fluctuates in brightness over tens of thousands of years and over longer periods of time is getting hotter and bigger. Life can only survive about another billion years on this planet.
“heating us just right”
Nope. This planet has gone through hot, dry epochs as well as ice ages.
“All by accident”
Pretty much. Given the vastness of the universe, the trillions upon trillions of planets in the universe, odds are excruciatingly high that many planets are going to be in good conditions for life.
“on a random spinning rock moving is[sic] multiple directions at once”
No. We’re not going in multiple directions at once. Speed and direction are relative. Given any reference frame, we’re moving in only ONE direction. Basic logic and physics here.
“at incredible speeds”
Again, speed is relative. We’re moving at “normal” speeds as would be expected. And we’re not passing through any kind of a cosmic atmosphere, so the “speed” has no meaningful effect. Again, speed is RELATIVE. This is important. Go get Einstein’s book, “Relativity, the Special and the General Theory”. Pay special attention to the special theory of relativity. It explains this simple concept in easy to understand, laymen terms… so simple that even a flat earther could understand. And I’m not being snarky with that suggestion either. It’s really important that you read it. It’s public domain now, so it’s free. Here it is:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5001
This is required reading before you’re allowed to talk about speed and distances anymore.
“All this we believe as we sit here, perfectly still.”
We’re not perfectly still. Well, we are, in a Special Relativity perspective. The flerfer actually listed multiple ways we’re moving as measured by rotation of the planet, orbit around the sun, the sun with the milky-way’s rotation and with the Milky-way relative to other galaxies and relative to the CMB, all of which can be and has been measured. So, why they say we’re “perfectly still” is puzzling.
“That’s science!”
Not quite. With my added corrections, it’s the result of science. Science though, is actually the study of a body of knowledge. It’s a way of objectively finding truth.
“But asking ‘where’s the rest of Antarctica?’ is ridiculous?”
Well, that’s the first time I’ve heard of that question. Do they mean “the rest” other than this?
The reason I’m writing this article today, is because this past week was the first time one of my drives in the ARRAY failed. To be clear, this is not a complaint. ALL drives fail. That’s WHY I bought a RAID tower, so that when one eventually DOES fail, I have the redundancy in place to keep going while I get a replacement drive, with zero down time and zero data loss.
When I bought the tower almost 4 years ago (this model is not available for sale anymore), I also bought 4 of these drives. Click the image to see it on Amazon.
Seagate 4TB NAS HDD SATA 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST4000VN000)
for $149.99 each in December 2014. They were the cheapest 4TB drives I could find at that time.
All 4 have been running 24/7 until 2018-10-29, when one of them finally failed. To be honest, I expected the first failure to be years ago, considering my track record of at least 1 failed drive a year. I bought the cheapest drives I could find too, so I expected more frequent failures. The front panel of the RAID tower indicated that my drive #3 had died.
The computer was completely unaware of the failure. This is a good thing. That means the RAID tower’s seamless drive failure was working. I immediately ordered a new, replacement drive. I ordered the cheapest, 4TB drive I could find. Why? Because reliability of individual drives is not all that important when you have them in a RAID tower. The redundancy of the whole system dramatically improves overall reliability, even when using low reliability drives. I should also point out that just because a drive is inexpensive, doesn’t mean it’s also low reliability.
Here’s the drive I bought in late October 2018 for $79.99… nearly half the cost from 4 years earlier. Click the image to see it on Amazon.
WL 4TB 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ Hard Drive (For RAID, NAS, DVR, Desktop PC) w/1 Year Warranty
What did I do?
When it arrived 3 days later, without shutting anything down, I opened the front panel of my RAID tower, pulled out the bad drive (with the whole system still on and running), unscrewed the 2 screws holding the handle onto the bad drive, screwed them and the handle onto the new drive, and plugged it into the RAID tower.
What did the RAID tower do?
The RAID tower immediately recognized the new drive and started replicating data to it.
What did the PC do?
My PC never knew anything ever happened. As far as it was concerned, there was a working 12TB drive that it continued to actively use throughout the whole process. There was never any downtime.
How long did it take?
Swapping the drive took about 5 minutes or less. The replication, however, began on the night of Tuesday, October 30th. It was still replicating when I left the PC on Saturday night, November 3rd. However, Sunday morning, when I got back to it, it had finally finished. So, it took it about FOUR DAYS to complete the replication. Much longer than I thought. I figured it would take between a couple hours up to maybe 1 day.
What does this mean?
It means that my data was vulnerable to disaster via a SECOND drive failure from the moment the drive went bad on Saturday, October 27th, through when the data was finally, fully replicated onto the new drive somewhere between the night of Saturday 11/3 and the morning of Sunday, 11/4… a total of a few hours more than 1 solid week.
If any other drive had died during that time, my 10TB of data would have been hosed.
The good news is that if I were NOT using a RAID tower, I’d be in that same risk ALL THE TIME! I was only at risk for 7 days. The BAD news (for YOU) if you’re not using RAID, you’re at that risk 100% of the time.
Conclusion:
This RAID tower performed as designed and is still performing. The vulnerable replication period is much longer than I expected. But, in the end, it all worked. This is the first drive failure I’ve had where I didn’t lose a single bit of data.
My recommendations:
Whether you need speed or reliability, you SHOULD be using a RAID array. I highly recommend buying a RAID tower and let it handle the complexities of configuring the system. Software RAID solutions are available, but they are much less reliable and consume resources on your computer, slowing you down. With an external hardware solution, it’s literally just plug and play, like any normal, single external drive. But with the capacity, speed, and reliability of a RAID solution. RAID towers can be found for under $100 and there’s no upper limit to how much you can spend on one.
There are a lot of decentralized, peer-to-peer, cloud backup services coming online like:
Sia
FileCoin
StorJ
and others. None of them are great solutions as of this writing YET! But that’s changing. Keep an eye on them and read EDUCATED reviews of them. That includes keeping an eye on my blog because I’m watching them with intense interest, in addition to testing them myself. I’ll ring the alarm bell when it’s time to jump on. They WILL BE the ultimate backup solution.
RAID is an acronym that stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”. In short, it’s a system that allows you to make multiple hard drives look like a single drive to a computer that’s using them. The benefits you get depend on the RAID configuration you choose and the hardware and/or software you use to implement RAID. Your RAID configuration options are:
RAID Towers
RAID 0: Striping. This treats all the platters in all your drives in the RAID 0 configuration as one drive with multiple platters. On a regular, single drive system, a hard drive usually has multiple, physical disks inside of it. Data is written on the disks on tracks, similar to a record player, but unlike a record player that has ONE groove that spirals all the way from the outer edge to the center, computer disks have individual rings, called “tracks”. A hard drive has multiple disks (called “platters”), each with tracks. A file is written across the multiple platters on the same track until that track, on all the platters, is full, then another empty space is found to continue the writing. With RAID 0, you can add more drives to extend the depth of those tracks. One file is now written across all platters on all drives on the same track until they’re filled. There’s no limit to how many drives you can have in a RAID 0 configuration (except limits imposed on your RAID hardware and/or software).
Benefits of RAID 0:
Speed
Larger volume size.
Disadvantages of RAID 0:
Decreased reliability. If any one drive fails, the whole thing goes down. The more drives you have in a RAID 0 configuration, the sooner the whole thing will die or the LESS fault tolerant it is. RAID 0 is pretty dangerous and should not be used unless speed is more important than reliability.
RAID 1: Mirroring. Given X amount of drives in ANY RAID configuration, you can have a duplicate copy of them, which requires twice as many drives. All drives have to be the same capacity. Neither set is the “original”. All data written to one set is duplicated on the other. Both sets are live. For example: The simplest RAID 0 configuration is a 2 drive system, both drives of equal size each. Your total storage capacity across the system is exactly the capacity of ONE of those drives. Everything written to one drive is duplicated on the other. A more complex RAID 0 configuration will more more than 2 drives, but ALWAYS an even number of drives. The 1st half of drives can be any other RAID configuration you like. The 2nd half of drives will be a duplicate of the same thing.
Benefits of RAID 1:
100% redundancy. Acts as a full, live backup. Any part of either side can fail and the array continues to function, seamlessly.
Speed. Mirroring doesn’t require extra processing. It’s no slower than a single drive with no RAID.
Disadvantages of RAID 1
Capacity is reduced to 1/2 the total capacity of the whole, physical system.
RAID 3: RAID 3 is made of exactly 3 drives. 2 drives for data, one for parity. Any 1 drive can fail and the system can continue to function until you replace the bad drive, in which case, the new drive is restored from the remaining 2 drives.
Benefits of RAID 3:
Redundancy
Capacity. Maximum capacity usage for data across your array of disks.
Disadvantages of RAID 3:
Speed. RAID 3 requires extra processing and thus, results in somewhat slower performance.
RAID Towers
RAID 5: RAID 5 is nearly identical to RAID 3, with the added benefit that you can use any number of drives you like. You’re not limited to 3. Instead of dedicating drives to data or parity, every drive in a RAID 5 configuration contains BOTH data AND parity. 2/3 of every drive contains data and 2/3 of every drive contains parity.
Benefits of RAID 5:
Same as RAID 3 plus…
Not limited to 3 drives. Can have 2 or more, with no practical limitation.
Combining RAID configurations: It should be noted that you can combine RAID 1 with any of the other configurations. A popular configuration is stripping (RAID 0) plus mirroring (RAID 1), known as any of the following labels:
RAID 0+1
RAID 1+0
RAID 10
Benefits of combining stripping and mirroring:
Maximum Speed
Maximum Redundancy & reliability
Disadvantages:
The same disadvantage of mirroring: Your total capacity of all your drives is cut in half.
What is a RAID Tower, then?
A RAID tower is a piece of hardware with multiple drive bays. You can plug in your own hard drives in the tower. The tower usually has the hardware and software built in to handle the RAID configurations for you. You plug the tower into a computer and it appears simply as a single, external disk drive with the full capacity of whatever RAID configuration you assigned the drive array.
RAID is a concept. A RAID tower is a functioning product implementing that concept.
A special note about RAID and SSDs (Solid State Drives)
SSDs, as you probably know, are the modern replacements for the decades old, spinning disks we call “hard drives”. SSDs have no moving parts and are 100% solid state electronics. They’re essentially memory chips that don’t lose their data when you turn them off, making them ideal for a modern replacement for hard drives. Because they have no moving parts, they’re significantly faster and more reliable. They’re also a lot more expensive (for now) per gigabyte of storage.
Can RAID work with SSDs?
Yes! In fact, my personal desktop PC is using two 256GB SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration. Why RAID 0, when it’s known to be less reliable? for several reasons:
Speed. Yes, even though SSDs are significantly faster than spinning platters with moving read/write robotic arms, they can be even faster in a RAID 0 configuration.
Reliability: No, I’m not using RAID 0 to make them more reliable. They are, in fact, LESS reliable in a RAID 0 configuration, but since they’re SSDs, even with two of them in a RAID 0 configuration, they’re still more reliable than a single, spinning disk drive.
I need speed more than reliability on my boot drive. Why? All my important data is stored on my RAID tower. Everything on my boot drive can be restored by simply re-installing all of my software. The only thing I’ll lose is my time.
Actually, the primary reason is I’d purchased a 256GB SSD for another computer and didn’t need it in that one anymore and I wanted 512GB SSD for my desktop, so I just bought a second 256GB drive and put them both in, configured as a RAID 0 system. I’m perfectly fine with it for the reasons listed above.
But, enough about me. Yes, SSDs can be used in any RAID configuration that spinning platter disk drives can be with the same pros and cons. It’s just that every configuration on an SSD is faster than the same configuration on spinny disks (as I like to call them). Also, every option is more expensive with SSD.
If you’re trying to get started with Machine Learning using Tensorflow, you’ll likely experience frustration trying to find the right version of Tensorflow, Python, & NVidia CUDA drivers that all work together.
Having just gone through that frustration myself, I present to you a WORKING set of instructions.
NVidia CUDA
This part is NOT REQUIRED, unless you want to use your GPU for MUCH faster Tensorflow program execution. You DOwant to use your GPU, BTW!
As of this writing, CUDA 9.2 is the latest version, however,Tensorflow will not work with anything later than 9.0, so go here to download CUDA 9.0:
If you don’t have an NVidia GPU, click here to get one…
NVidia GPUs on Amazon.com
What is CUDA?
CUDA is software to allow you (or other programs written by other people) to write software to utilize your video card’s GPU (Graphic Processing Unit). A GPU is hardware designed specifically for video operations that are many times faster than a CPU can do it. Turns out, you can use your GPU for some specific types of calculations that have nothing to do with graphics and speed up those operations… like… a Neural Network like TensorFlow. They’re also good for cryptomining, but we won’t get into that in THIS article.
Tensorflow
Once you have CUDA installed (assuming you have an NVidia GPU and want to take advantage of the massive speeds it’ll give you compared to just running Tensorflow on your CPU), it’s time to install Tensorflow.
