okadaka

So Google said: "...although... the storage systems are designed with battery backup, some recently written data was located on storage systems which were more susceptible to power failure from extended or repeated battery drain. In almost all cases the data was successfully committed to stable storage, although manual intervention was required in order to restore the systems to their normal serving state. However, in a very few cases, recent writes were unrecoverable, leading to permanent data loss on the Persistent Disk."

I thought battery is supposed to cover writing the entire write buffer cache to disk in case of power loss. Sounds like they had some badly designed gear which did no account for partial battery charge which should downsize the cache to battery's capacity.

I think you generalized some odd cases. I know a few CS and physics professors as friends. Every reasonable professor knows that there are way fewer academic jobs than PhD graduates. To expect all your students to go to academia is silly & is not the norm among professors.

Surely, a professor should strive to have his/her students graduate with sufficient publication record to be suitable for an academic job. Not everyone will have it upon graduation. And it is not the sole point that you must go to academia!

In some fields, there are research jobs outside of academia (eg in CS, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intel). And in most fields, if you go to industry you make way more money. You just don't get tenure, sabbatical and as much freedom, but it is hardly a failure.

SMTP (mail protocol) between providers is unencrypted anyway. So, if I send email from gmail to ycombinator, it goes to ycombinator SMTP server unencrypted and can be tapped by anyone with access to the wire. Still, clear traffic between Google's own data centers is inexcusable. They are exposing my data to more risk.