Google searches for "talking desktop clock"  found this: http://www.cinnamonsoftware.com/desktop_clock.htm Is that the one?

The app. Is talking desk top clok.

Just like the subject line.
I hope I didn’t break any of Gene’s rules.

I thought I   thought I gave enough information.

Sorry

From: main@TechTalk.groups.io <main@TechTalk.groups.io> On Behalf Of Steve Matzura
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2018 1:02 AM
To: main@TechTalk.groups.io
Subject: Re: [TechTalk] talking desk top clock

Tell us the name of the application, and someone will surely download and  install it to help you figure out how to change the voice back.

On 9/22/2018 11:55 PM, Karim Lakhani wrote:

Hi,

I installed this cool clock, and I had a lady voice announcing the time, but I went into speech and changed to another voice and now, Can't figure out how to get her back.

I've gone to options and checked every where with no luck.

sometimes when things are going good, one should not experiment, unless you love that kind of thing.

>grin>

Hi all,
I am on a desktop, Windows10, Jaws2018 latest version, using IE to
open https://m.facebook.com/ I google leave a group on Facebook To
leave a group, go to the group, click Joined at the top and then
select Leave Group. When you leave a group: Members won't be notified. You're removed from the member list and the group will be removed from your list of groups I cannot find leave button.
Thanks,
Ann

Three to one? How ever did you get that out of what I said? LOL. Eight
three-terabyte drives. Six hold data, two are for RAID redundancy. Six
times three equals eighteen. All eight drives are in one RAID set, or
volume. Other computers see it as one big disk. The NAS box combines the
storage and presents it to the network as one eighteen-terabyte volume.


On 9/23/2018 1:36 PM, Kay Malmquist wrote:

Hi Steve,
Most of what you said makes perfect sense, but one thing confuses me.
You wrote:
To use my NAS as an example, I have a RAID  6 array of eight physical
3TB drives, but I only get the storage aggregated from six of those
drives, which of course is eighteen terabytes. I did this because
virtually all of those eighteen terabytes of data I have are
irreplaceable.
Why is it 3 to 1?  Wouldn't it be for every disk you would have to use
another one to copy data?  I think you said you are using Raid 6 and
that is not mirroring but gathering statistical info from the disk to
allow you to put the info back together.  Also, how did you tell it to
split in a 3 to one configuration?
Kay Malmquist
kay.malmquist@... <mailto:kay.malmquist@...>
Your reputation is in the hands of others. That's what a
reputation is. You can't control that. The only thing you
can control is your character.
- Wayne Walter Dyer (1940-2015)

----- Original Message -----
*From:* Steve Matzura <mailto:number6@...>
*To:* main@TechTalk.groups.io <mailto:main@TechTalk.groups.io>
*Sent:* Sunday, September 23, 2018 1:58 AM
*Subject:* Re: [TechTalk] RAID 0 or RAID 1, which is advisable

Walter, et al.:

Your understanding is correct. Following your line of thinking
about NAS, I would suggest going that route. Let me explain a
little about why one would want this solution for those who may be
contemplating expanding their disk storage due to increased
capacity needs.


The following is long but thorough. The videos at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE7Bfw9lFfs and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P8ZecG9iOI explains the RAID
concepts. Read the following or watch the vids; the choice is yours.


First of all, as you probably know or have figured out, the more
capacity a disk has, the closer together all that data must be.
The form factor of a disk drive has  not changed one iota since
IDE days, when disk capacity was measured in megabytes, not
terabytes. So if the box is the same size, the box has got to be
able to hold more information, and the only way to implement that
is to squish that data physically closer and closer together.
While you may not think of data as physical, in a sense it really
is. It's a small magnetized area on a magnetically permeable
substrate, and  those magnetized regions have to be made smaller
and smaller as data capacity goes up and up.

So now we have a box which is the same size today as it was thirty
years ago that can store literally one million times as much data
in the same physical space.


Every time manufacturers of disk drives have to shrink things down
to fit more data in the same amount of space introduces mechanical
challenges. The heads built into the drive must be able to move in
smaller and smaller increments to find the aforementioned tracks
and cylinders which are now closer together than ever thought
possible. The tolerances between the physical platters inside a
disk drive are so small now, the least vibration from external
forces can and sometimes does throw off the calibration of the
internal mechanisms of disk drives, the head touches the platter
as it's never supposed to, there's friction, disks become
scratched, heads become damaged, data becomes lost. In other
words, the more you cram into the same physical space, the
tighter the physical tolerances get. I have a friend  that had a
6TB mechanical external drive that accidentally got tipped over.
There was a little clicking noise from the drive when it fell
over, and that was the end of it. The shock from the box with the
drive in it having fallen over was enough to make a head come in
contact with a fast-spinning platter, there was friction, there
was heat, there was surface damage to the platter and head, and
that took out the whole drive.

The next jump in hardware technology  between drives of three
terabytes and anything larger put data at even higher risk because
the newer  denser technology crammed more platters and closer
tracks and cylinders into the same box that  one-, two-, and
three-terabyte drives use. See where I'm going with this? In my
considered opinion, I would hesitate before buying drives of
higher capacity than 3TB. If I really had to, I'd go to the next
level of compacted storage, the 4-6TB drive. Maybe up to 8TB, I
don't know for sure where the next jump in compaction happens.

Is there a solution to this problem? Yes. And here's where the
expense part comes in.

In your situation, which is quite similar to mine and maybe even
more so, I would install a disk server, or network-attached
storage unit (NAS for short). A NAS can hold two, four, eight
disks and build an storage array out of these disks. This type of
storage model is called RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive
Disks). RAID comes in five types--RAID level 0, or
striped/striping, RAID 1, or mirrored/mirroring, and the two more
advanced RAID types,  5 and 6. There's also a RAID 10, which is
not really ten, but one plus 0 (sometimes written as RAID 1 +0).
Mirrored means exactly what it sounds like--everything written to
the first disk is duplicated exactly, sector for sector, on the
second disk. One disk goes bad, no worries, the other one contains
a perfect 100% duplicate of the first disk. Tell the RAID  server
to drop the bad one, replace it, tell the RAID server it has a new
mirror, and things carry on without you and your data missing a
beat. Striping means every other write operation changes physical
media. In practice, this means your data is split across multiple
physical disks. This is  quite a dangerous thing to do because if
one drive goes bad, that's one nth part of your data lost that
absolutely positively cannot be reclaimed, reconstructed or
reconstituted by simply replacing the bad device. It's really
efficient, though, because even slower-speed drives can be put
into a striped RAID set and help improve performance because while
one drive is servicing a read or write request, another part of
the stripe set might have the next part of the read request
already in its cache, so it can offer it up to the program
requesting it faster. But remember, lose one disk and you lose the
world.

Raid 1+0 (or RAID 10) is a good pairing of striping and mirroring.
Unfortunately, it's only fifty percent capacity-efficient because
four drives comprise two stripe sets and those two stripe sets are
mirrored. So theoretically any two of those four disks can go bad
at the same time with no data loss. The volume itself may go
offline if the RAID software or server isn't as fault-tolerant as
it probably should be, but at least your data is secure from loss
due to mechanical failure.

But there's another more efficient solution--RAID 5 to the rescue!
RAID 5 is an advanced RAID 0. That is, it's a striped kind of
storage, but additional disks are part of the RAID set that don't
actually store your data on them, but rather, store information
about how to reconstruct your data based on certain mathematical
algorithms sometimes called checksums or parity values. There are
scholarly papers, even books, detailing how RAID  5 works, and
work it does. Its drawback is that you need at least one more disk
than would be required for a RAID 0 (striped) array to complete a
RAID 5 set.

RAID 6 is RAID  5 on steroids. It uses two checksum or parity
disks, increasing reliability and of course cost because, like
RAID 5, the extra drives don't hold any real data and are used
only to replicate or reconstitute data that might be lost if one
of the physical disks in the rest of the array goes bad. To use my
NAS as an example, I have a RAID  6 array of eight physical 3TB
drives, but I only get the storage aggregated from six of those
drives, which of course is eighteen terabytes. I did this because
virtually all of those eighteen terabytes of data I have are
irreplaceable.  Back when the Internet was a lot less controlled
than it is now, I collected a lot of media, and I mean a *LOT* of
it, that nowadays it is only possible to purchase or rent the
right to perform, not physically own, so I am extremely (and, if I
may say so, rightfully) protective of my data. I have also
converted my entire compact disc library--over fifteen hundred
discs collected since the format was invented--to a lossless
digital storage format called FLAC, enabling me to use a media
player to search my library and play anything I want on demand
without having to physically locate a CD, put it in a player, and
press a lot of buttons just to hear a couple favorite tracks.
Anybody wanna buy a bunch of CD's? LOL.

Building a network-attached storage solution can get expensive.
Western Digital sells two- and four-bay devices for under three
hundred dollars (not including the cost of the disks). I needed
something bigger, so I bought the Synology DS1815+. The "plus" is
the ability to connect two of these devices together to double the
capacity available via one network address. The cost of one of
these babies is just stupid for home use--just under a thousand
dollars--and is not generally recommended for the average home
user, whereas the WD devices are perfectly suitable for at least
ninety percent of home applications. In fact, I had two other
four-bay Synology NAS boxes that I got in 2009 and 2010 that were
restricted not just by the number of drives but also by drive
size--max  2TB each drive. That changed a lot by the time I bought
the DS1815+ in 2016.

If one is intrepid and on the geeky side, one can build one's own
NAS with a cheap computer and a bunch of RAID cards from companies
like Intel, StarTech or Vantec, and software called QNAP that runs
under just about any flavor of Linux there is.

So there's the whole story, complete with lots of choices. It's
your data. Never lose control of it.

Now, about that bottle of wine ... pass that bottle to me! I'm
thirsty after all that typing! :-)

On 9/22/2018 4:58 PM, Walter Ramage via Groups.Io wrote:

Hi All.  A week or so back I asked a question on the use of
Dropbox for large data storage.

After considering the responses from this list and that of other
lists on which I asked the same question, I’ve decided I should
stick to storing my media files on external hard drives.

Now here’s my problem; ignorance!  I am clearly going to have to
obtain high capacity hard drives.  The largest single hard drive
unit I can get is a Seagate 10tb but I’ll very soon grow out of
that so will have to go for something quite larger such as 16tb
or 24tb and I have no knowledge of how these large arrays work.

I have found on Amazon a16tb western digital drive, which is a
two bay 2x8tb drive.  This item can be configured for Raid 0 or
Raid 1.  I looked on line to find out what that meant and as I
understand it; RAID 0 means the two drives act as one drive
whereas RAID 1 means the data is duplicated, a copy on each drive
but to my mind that wouldn’t give me enough space and I’d be just
as well sticking to my individual 8tb drives.  Now do I have that
understanding correct or have I misunderstood something?  From my
understanding RAID 0 is best for my needs but the negative is, if
any one of the 2 internal drives fails then all my material goes
down the pan.

Now the second part of my lack of knowledge is what is better; a
two bay array (2x8tb) or a four bay array (4x4tb) or even more
weird a 24tb array with 6 bays (6x4tb).  This is all very
confusing to me and I don’t know what is the best combination.
And finally, are these drives plug and play or is any software to
be installed or configuration required prior to use?

Phew!!! I hope that all made sense, and I’ve not even mentioned
any NAS options yet but one step at a time... Now, where’s that
bottle of wine! LOL. Walter.

Hi.  To show just how naive I am, My Problem with the Array thing is; I order the item, it arrives, I remove it from the packaging, I connect the USB cable and attach the unit to the mains outlet and from that point I'm stuck.  I don't know what to expect nor what next to do.  I might well need some extra help at some point.  Walter.

Hi Steve,

Most of what you said makes perfect sense, but one thing confuses me.  You wrote:

To use my NAS as an example, I have a RAID  6 array of eight physical 3TB drives, but I only get the storage aggregated from six of those drives, which of course is eighteen terabytes. I did this because virtually all of those eighteen terabytes of data I have are irreplaceable. 

 

Why is it 3 to 1?  Wouldn't it be for every disk you would have to use another one to copy data?  I think you said you are using Raid 6 and that is not mirroring but gathering statistical info from the disk to allow you to put the info back together.  Also, how did you tell it to split in a 3 to one configuration?

 

Kay Malmquist
kay.malmquist@...

 

Your reputation is in the hands of others. That's what a
reputation is. You can't control that. The only thing you
can control is your character.
- Wayne Walter Dyer (1940-2015)
 

----- Original Message -----

From: Steve Matzura

To: main@TechTalk.groups.io

Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2018 1:58 AM

Subject: Re: [TechTalk] RAID 0 or RAID 1, which is advisable

Walter, et al.:

Your understanding is correct. Following your line of thinking about NAS, I would suggest going that route. Let me explain a little about why one would want this solution for those who may be contemplating expanding their disk storage due to increased  capacity needs.

The following is long but thorough. The videos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE7Bfw9lFfs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P8ZecG9iOI explains the RAID concepts. Read the following or watch the vids; the choice is yours.

First of all, as you probably know or have figured out, the more capacity a disk has, the closer together all that data must be. The form factor of a disk drive has  not changed one iota since IDE days, when disk capacity was measured in megabytes, not terabytes. So if the box is the same size, the box has got to be able to hold more information, and the only way to implement that is to squish that data physically closer and closer together. While you may not think of data as physical, in a sense it really is. It's a small magnetized area on a magnetically permeable substrate, and  those magnetized regions have to be made smaller and smaller as data capacity goes up and up.

So now we have a box which is the same size today as it was thirty years ago that can store literally one million times as much data in the same physical space.

Every time manufacturers of disk drives have to shrink things down to fit more data in the same amount of space introduces mechanical challenges. The heads built into the drive must be able to move in smaller and smaller increments to find the aforementioned tracks and cylinders which are now closer together than ever thought possible. The tolerances between the physical platters inside a disk drive are so small now, the least vibration from external forces can and sometimes does throw off the calibration of the internal mechanisms of disk drives, the head touches the platter as it's never supposed to, there's friction, disks become scratched, heads become damaged, data becomes lost. In other words, the more you cram into the same physical space, the  tighter the physical tolerances get. I have a friend  that had a 6TB mechanical external drive that accidentally got tipped over. There was a little clicking noise from the drive when it fell over, and that was the end of it. The shock from the box with the drive in it having fallen over was enough to make a head come in contact with a fast-spinning platter, there was friction, there was heat, there was surface damage to the platter and head, and that took out the whole drive.

The next jump in hardware technology  between drives of three terabytes and anything larger put data at even higher risk because the newer  denser technology crammed more platters and closer tracks and cylinders into the same box that  one-, two-, and three-terabyte drives use. See where I'm going with this? In my considered opinion, I would hesitate before buying drives of higher capacity than 3TB. If I really had to, I'd go to the next level of compacted storage, the 4-6TB drive. Maybe up to 8TB, I don't know for sure where the next jump in compaction happens.

Is there a solution to this problem? Yes. And here's where the expense part comes in.

In your situation, which is quite similar to mine and maybe even more so, I would install a disk server, or network-attached storage unit (NAS for short). A NAS can hold two, four, eight disks and build an storage array out of these disks. This type of storage model is called RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). RAID comes in five types--RAID level 0, or striped/striping, RAID 1, or mirrored/mirroring, and the two more advanced RAID types,  5 and 6. There's also a RAID 10, which is not really ten, but one plus 0 (sometimes written as RAID 1 +0). Mirrored means exactly what it sounds like--everything written to the first disk is duplicated exactly, sector for sector, on the second disk. One disk goes bad, no worries, the other one contains a perfect 100% duplicate of the first disk. Tell the RAID  server to drop the bad one, replace it, tell the RAID server it has a new mirror, and things carry on without you and your data missing a beat. Striping means every other write operation changes physical media. In practice, this means your data is split across multiple physical disks. This is  quite a dangerous thing to do because if one drive goes bad, that's one nth part of your data lost that absolutely positively cannot be reclaimed, reconstructed or reconstituted by simply replacing the bad device. It's really efficient, though, because even slower-speed drives can be put into a striped RAID set and help improve performance because while one drive is servicing a read or write request, another part of the stripe set might have the next part of the read request already in its cache, so it can offer it up to the program requesting it faster. But remember, lose one disk and you lose the world.

Raid 1+0 (or RAID 10) is a good pairing of striping and mirroring. Unfortunately, it's only fifty percent capacity-efficient because four drives comprise two stripe sets and those two stripe sets are mirrored. So theoretically any two of those four disks can go bad at the same time with no data loss. The volume itself may go offline if the RAID software or server isn't as fault-tolerant as it probably should be, but at least your data is secure from loss due to mechanical failure.

But there's another more efficient solution--RAID 5 to the rescue! RAID 5 is an advanced RAID 0. That is, it's a striped kind of storage, but additional disks are part of the RAID set that don't actually store your data on them, but rather, store information about how to reconstruct your data based on certain mathematical algorithms sometimes called checksums or parity values. There are  scholarly papers, even books, detailing how RAID  5 works, and work it does. Its drawback is that you need at least one more disk than would be required for a RAID 0 (striped) array to complete a RAID 5 set.

RAID 6 is RAID  5 on steroids. It uses two checksum or parity disks, increasing reliability and of course cost because, like RAID 5, the extra drives don't hold any real data and are used only to replicate or reconstitute data that might be lost if one of the physical disks in the rest of the array goes bad. To use my NAS as an example, I have a RAID  6 array of eight physical 3TB drives, but I only get the storage aggregated from six of those drives, which of course is eighteen terabytes. I did this because virtually all of those eighteen terabytes of data I have are irreplaceable.  Back when the Internet was a lot less controlled than it is now, I collected a lot of media, and I mean a *LOT* of it, that nowadays it is only possible to purchase or rent the right to perform, not physically own, so I am extremely (and, if I may say so, rightfully) protective of my data. I have also converted my entire compact disc library--over fifteen hundred discs collected since the format was invented--to a lossless digital storage format called FLAC, enabling me to use a media player to search my library and play anything I want on demand without having to physically locate a CD, put it in a player, and press a lot of buttons just to hear a couple favorite tracks. Anybody wanna buy a bunch of CD's? LOL.

Building a network-attached storage solution can get expensive. Western Digital sells two- and four-bay devices for under three hundred dollars (not including the cost of the disks). I needed something bigger, so I bought the Synology DS1815+. The "plus" is the ability to connect two of these devices together to double the capacity available via one network address. The cost of one of these babies is just stupid for home use--just under a thousand dollars--and is not generally recommended for the average home user, whereas the WD devices are perfectly suitable for at least ninety percent of home applications. In fact, I had two other four-bay Synology NAS boxes that I got in 2009 and 2010 that were restricted not just by the number of drives but also by drive size--max  2TB each drive. That changed a lot by the time I bought the DS1815+ in 2016.

If one is intrepid and on the geeky side, one can build one's own NAS with a cheap computer and a bunch of RAID cards from companies like Intel, StarTech or Vantec, and software called QNAP that runs under just about any flavor of Linux there is.

So there's the whole story, complete with lots of choices. It's your data. Never lose control of it.

Now, about that bottle of wine ... pass that bottle to me! I'm thirsty after all that typing! :-)

On 9/22/2018 4:58 PM, Walter Ramage via Groups.Io wrote:

Hi All.  A week or so back I asked a question on the use of Dropbox for large data storage.

After considering the responses from this list and that of other lists on which I asked the same question, I’ve decided I should stick to storing my media files on external hard drives.

Now here’s my problem; ignorance!  I am clearly going to have to obtain high capacity hard drives.  The largest single hard drive unit I can get is a Seagate 10tb but I’ll very soon grow out of that so will have to go for something quite larger such as 16tb or 24tb and I have no knowledge of how these large arrays work.

I have found on Amazon a16tb western digital drive, which is a two bay 2x8tb drive.  This item can be configured for Raid 0 or Raid 1.  I looked on line to find out what that meant and as I understand it; RAID 0 means the two drives act as one drive whereas RAID 1 means the data is duplicated, a copy on each drive but to my mind that wouldn’t give me enough space and I’d be just as well sticking to my individual 8tb drives.  Now do I have that understanding correct or have I misunderstood something?  From my understanding RAID 0 is best for my needs but the negative is, if any one of the 2 internal drives fails then all my material goes down the pan.

Now the second part of my lack of knowledge is what is better; a two bay array (2x8tb) or a four bay array (4x4tb) or even more weird a 24tb array with 6 bays (6x4tb).  This is all very confusing to me and I don’t know what is the best combination.  And finally, are these drives plug and play or is any software to be installed or configuration required prior to use?

Phew!!! I hope that all made sense, and I’ve not even mentioned any NAS options yet but one step at a time... Now, where’s that bottle of wine! LOL.  Walter.

The app. Is talking desk top clok.

Just like the subject line.
I hope I didn’t break any of Gene’s rules.

I thought I   thought I gave enough information.

Sorry

 

From: main@TechTalk.groups.io <main@TechTalk.groups.io> On Behalf Of Steve Matzura
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2018 1:02 AM
To: main@TechTalk.groups.io
Subject: Re: [TechTalk] talking desk top clock

 

Tell us the name of the application, and someone will surely download and  install it to help you figure out how to change the voice back.

On 9/22/2018 11:55 PM, Karim Lakhani wrote:

Hi,

I installed this cool clock, and I had a lady voice announcing the time, but I went into speech and changed to another voice and now, Can't figure out how to get her back.

I've gone to options and checked every where with no luck.

sometimes when things are going good, one should not experiment, unless you love that kind of thing.

>grin>

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found and find Windows 10 Mail a steaming pile of inaccessibility. Sometimes accessibility is more than just what controls we can find and manipulate with our bolted-on technologies; sometimes it's about how things are arranged, how many times we have to press a key to get to controls which logically should be adjacent, not at opposite ends of a TAB order. This is Windows 10 Mail's main problem. Everything's there, but not in any seemingly logical order. Apparently it looks all very nice visually, but it acts like somebody took the list of controls and scrambled them slightly. In my unhumble opinion, I'd use another client were I in your situation. In fact, wait a minute, I *was* in your situation. I tried Windows 10 Mail and got so frustrated, I immediately downloaded, installed, and learned Thunderbird and never looked back. I used to use the email portion of a program called Forte Agent News Reader, but I had to leave it behind because it does not support iMap, which I need because I use email across a few devices now, which I didn't in the past.

Hello Listers,

 

How easy is it to use the mail ap in windows 10 with jaws?  I am having no luck in setting up my friend's @msn email address in windows live mail.  There for I want to go the mail ap route.  I my self have never used  the mail ap.  How easy is it to teach some one that doesn't know much about technology?  Is it easy to set up an acount?

 

Thanks

 

Michael

I found and find Windows 10 Mail a steaming pile of inaccessibility. Sometimes accessibility is more than just what controls we can find and manipulate with our bolted-on technologies; sometimes it's about how things are arranged, how many times we have to press a key to get to controls which logically should be adjacent, not at opposite ends of a TAB order. This is Windows 10 Mail's main problem. Everything's there, but not in any seemingly logical order. Apparently it looks all very nice visually, but it acts like somebody took the list of controls and scrambled them slightly. In my unhumble opinion, I'd use another client were I in your situation. In fact, wait a minute, I *was* in your situation. I tried Windows 10 Mail and got so frustrated, I immediately downloaded, installed, and learned Thunderbird and never looked back. I used to use the email portion of a program called Forte Agent News Reader, but I had to leave it behind because it does not support iMap, which I need because I use email across a few devices now, which I didn't in the past.

Hello Listers,

 

How easy is it to use the mail ap in windows 10 with jaws?  I am having no luck in setting up my friend's @msn email address in windows live mail.  There for I want to go the mail ap route.  I my self have never used  the mail ap.  How easy is it to teach some one that doesn't know much about technology?  Is it easy to set up an acount?

 

Thanks

 

Michael

----- Original Message -----

From: Steve Matzura

To: main@TechTalk.groups.io

Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2018 1:58 AM

Subject: Re: [TechTalk] RAID 0 or RAID 1, which is advisable

Walter, et al.:

Your understanding is correct. Following your line of thinking about NAS, I would suggest going that route. Let me explain a little about why one would want this solution for those who may be contemplating expanding their disk storage due to increased  capacity needs.

The following is long but thorough. The videos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE7Bfw9lFfs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P8ZecG9iOI explains the RAID concepts. Read the following or watch the vids; the choice is yours.

First of all, as you probably know or have figured out, the more capacity a disk has, the closer together all that data must be. The form factor of a disk drive has  not changed one iota since IDE days, when disk capacity was measured in megabytes, not terabytes. So if the box is the same size, the box has got to be able to hold more information, and the only way to implement that is to squish that data physically closer and closer together. While you may not think of data as physical, in a sense it really is. It's a small magnetized area on a magnetically permeable substrate, and  those magnetized regions have to be made smaller and smaller as data capacity goes up and up.

So now we have a box which is the same size today as it was thirty years ago that can store literally one million times as much data in the same physical space.

Every time manufacturers of disk drives have to shrink things down to fit more data in the same amount of space introduces mechanical challenges. The heads built into the drive must be able to move in smaller and smaller increments to find the aforementioned tracks and cylinders which are now closer together than ever thought possible. The tolerances between the physical platters inside a disk drive are so small now, the least vibration from external forces can and sometimes does throw off the calibration of the internal mechanisms of disk drives, the head touches the platter as it's never supposed to, there's friction, disks become scratched, heads become damaged, data becomes lost. In other words, the more you cram into the same physical space, the  tighter the physical tolerances get. I have a friend  that had a 6TB mechanical external drive that accidentally got tipped over. There was a little clicking noise from the drive when it fell over, and that was the end of it. The shock from the box with the drive in it having fallen over was enough to make a head come in contact with a fast-spinning platter, there was friction, there was heat, there was surface damage to the platter and head, and that took out the whole drive.

The next jump in hardware technology  between drives of three terabytes and anything larger put data at even higher risk because the newer  denser technology crammed more platters and closer tracks and cylinders into the same box that  one-, two-, and three-terabyte drives use. See where I'm going with this? In my considered opinion, I would hesitate before buying drives of higher capacity than 3TB. If I really had to, I'd go to the next level of compacted storage, the 4-6TB drive. Maybe up to 8TB, I don't know for sure where the next jump in compaction happens.

Is there a solution to this problem? Yes. And here's where the expense part comes in.

In your situation, which is quite similar to mine and maybe even more so, I would install a disk server, or network-attached storage unit (NAS for short). A NAS can hold two, four, eight disks and build an storage array out of these disks. This type of storage model is called RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). RAID comes in five types--RAID level 0, or striped/striping, RAID 1, or mirrored/mirroring, and the two more advanced RAID types,  5 and 6. There's also a RAID 10, which is not really ten, but one plus 0 (sometimes written as RAID 1 +0). Mirrored means exactly what it sounds like--everything written to the first disk is duplicated exactly, sector for sector, on the second disk. One disk goes bad, no worries, the other one contains a perfect 100% duplicate of the first disk. Tell the RAID  server to drop the bad one, replace it, tell the RAID server it has a new mirror, and things carry on without you and your data missing a beat. Striping means every other write operation changes physical media. In practice, this means your data is split across multiple physical disks. This is  quite a dangerous thing to do because if one drive goes bad, that's one nth part of your data lost that absolutely positively cannot be reclaimed, reconstructed or reconstituted by simply replacing the bad device. It's really efficient, though, because even slower-speed drives can be put into a striped RAID set and help improve performance because while one drive is servicing a read or write request, another part of the stripe set might have the next part of the read request already in its cache, so it can offer it up to the program requesting it faster. But remember, lose one disk and you lose the world.

Raid 1+0 (or RAID 10) is a good pairing of striping and mirroring. Unfortunately, it's only fifty percent capacity-efficient because four drives comprise two stripe sets and those two stripe sets are mirrored. So theoretically any two of those four disks can go bad at the same time with no data loss. The volume itself may go offline if the RAID software or server isn't as fault-tolerant as it probably should be, but at least your data is secure from loss due to mechanical failure.

But there's another more efficient solution--RAID 5 to the rescue! RAID 5 is an advanced RAID 0. That is, it's a striped kind of storage, but additional disks are part of the RAID set that don't actually store your data on them, but rather, store information about how to reconstruct your data based on certain mathematical algorithms sometimes called checksums or parity values. There are  scholarly papers, even books, detailing how RAID  5 works, and work it does. Its drawback is that you need at least one more disk than would be required for a RAID 0 (striped) array to complete a RAID 5 set.

RAID 6 is RAID  5 on steroids. It uses two checksum or parity disks, increasing reliability and of course cost because, like RAID 5, the extra drives don't hold any real data and are used only to replicate or reconstitute data that might be lost if one of the physical disks in the rest of the array goes bad. To use my NAS as an example, I have a RAID  6 array of eight physical 3TB drives, but I only get the storage aggregated from six of those drives, which of course is eighteen terabytes. I did this because virtually all of those eighteen terabytes of data I have are irreplaceable.  Back when the Internet was a lot less controlled than it is now, I collected a lot of media, and I mean a *LOT* of it, that nowadays it is only possible to purchase or rent the right to perform, not physically own, so I am extremely (and, if I may say so, rightfully) protective of my data. I have also converted my entire compact disc library--over fifteen hundred discs collected since the format was invented--to a lossless digital storage format called FLAC, enabling me to use a media player to search my library and play anything I want on demand without having to physically locate a CD, put it in a player, and press a lot of buttons just to hear a couple favorite tracks. Anybody wanna buy a bunch of CD's? LOL.

Building a network-attached storage solution can get expensive. Western Digital sells two- and four-bay devices for under three hundred dollars (not including the cost of the disks). I needed something bigger, so I bought the Synology DS1815+. The "plus" is the ability to connect two of these devices together to double the capacity available via one network address. The cost of one of these babies is just stupid for home use--just under a thousand dollars--and is not generally recommended for the average home user, whereas the WD devices are perfectly suitable for at least ninety percent of home applications. In fact, I had two other four-bay Synology NAS boxes that I got in 2009 and 2010 that were restricted not just by the number of drives but also by drive size--max  2TB each drive. That changed a lot by the time I bought the DS1815+ in 2016.

If one is intrepid and on the geeky side, one can build one's own NAS with a cheap computer and a bunch of RAID cards from companies like Intel, StarTech or Vantec, and software called QNAP that runs under just about any flavor of Linux there is.

So there's the whole story, complete with lots of choices. It's your data. Never lose control of it.

Now, about that bottle of wine ... pass that bottle to me! I'm thirsty after all that typing! :-)

On 9/22/2018 4:58 PM, Walter Ramage via Groups.Io wrote:

Hi All.  A week or so back I asked a question on the use of Dropbox for large data storage.

After considering the responses from this list and that of other lists on which I asked the same question, I’ve decided I should stick to storing my media files on external hard drives.

Now here’s my problem; ignorance!  I am clearly going to have to obtain high capacity hard drives.  The largest single hard drive unit I can get is a Seagate 10tb but I’ll very soon grow out of that so will have to go for something quite larger such as 16tb or 24tb and I have no knowledge of how these large arrays work.

I have found on Amazon a16tb western digital drive, which is a two bay 2x8tb drive.  This item can be configured for Raid 0 or Raid 1.  I looked on line to find out what that meant and as I understand it; RAID 0 means the two drives act as one drive whereas RAID 1 means the data is duplicated, a copy on each drive but to my mind that wouldn’t give me enough space and I’d be just as well sticking to my individual 8tb drives.  Now do I have that understanding correct or have I misunderstood something?  From my understanding RAID 0 is best for my needs but the negative is, if any one of the 2 internal drives fails then all my material goes down the pan.

Now the second part of my lack of knowledge is what is better; a two bay array (2x8tb) or a four bay array (4x4tb) or even more weird a 24tb array with 6 bays (6x4tb).  This is all very confusing to me and I don’t know what is the best combination.  And finally, are these drives plug and play or is any software to be installed or configuration required prior to use?

Phew!!! I hope that all made sense, and I’ve not even mentioned any NAS options yet but one step at a time... Now, where’s that bottle of wine! LOL.  Walter.

I found and find Windows 10 Mail a steaming pile of inaccessibility. Sometimes accessibility is more than just what controls we can find and manipulate with our bolted-on technologies; sometimes it's about how things are arranged, how many times we have to press a key to get to controls which logically should be adjacent, not at opposite ends of a TAB order. This is Windows 10 Mail's main problem. Everything's there, but not in any seemingly logical order. Apparently it looks all very nice visually, but it acts like somebody took the list of controls and scrambled them slightly. In my unhumble opinion, I'd use another client were I in your situation. In fact, wait a minute, I *was* in your situation. I tried Windows 10 Mail and got so frustrated, I immediately downloaded, installed, and learned Thunderbird and never looked back. I used to use the email portion of a program called Forte Agent News Reader, but I had to leave it behind because it does not support iMap, which I need because I use email across a few devices now, which I didn't in the past.

Hello Listers,

 

How easy is it to use the mail ap in windows 10 with jaws?  I am having no luck in setting up my friend's @msn email address in windows live mail.  There for I want to go the mail ap route.  I my self have never used  the mail ap.  How easy is it to teach some one that doesn't know much about technology?  Is it easy to set up an acount?

 

Thanks

 

Michael

I found and find Windows 10 Mail a steaming pile of inaccessibility. Sometimes accessibility is more than just what controls we can find and manipulate with our bolted-on technologies; sometimes it's about how things are arranged, how many times we have to press a key to get to controls which logically should be adjacent, not at opposite ends of a TAB order. This is Windows 10 Mail's main problem. Everything's there, but not in any seemingly logical order. Apparently it looks all very nice visually, but it acts like somebody took the list of controls and scrambled them slightly. In my unhumble opinion, I'd use another client were I in your situation. In fact, wait a minute, I *was* in your situation. I tried Windows 10 Mail and got so frustrated, I immediately downloaded, installed, and learned Thunderbird and never looked back. I used to use the email portion of a program called Forte Agent News Reader, but I had to leave it behind because it does not support iMap, which I need because I use email across a few devices now, which I didn't in the past.

Hello Listers,

 

How easy is it to use the mail ap in windows 10 with jaws?  I am having no luck in setting up my friend's @msn email address in windows live mail.  There for I want to go the mail ap route.  I my self have never used  the mail ap.  How easy is it to teach some one that doesn't know much about technology?  Is it easy to set up an acount?

 

Thanks

 

Michael

Hi Teri,

I use jaws and n v d a as well, both  on their latest versions.

I haven’t e-mail   to n v d a developers, probably I’ll ask on the international mailing list.

Sounds really interesting what you were ssayiing about modify jaws so it can say the names of the phonetic symbols.  I’ll google it to see what can I find.

However, for now my main obstacle is that I can’t find any accessible info related to this.

For instance, I would like to find a web site describing the name of the phonetic symbol, followed by how to write it with a keyboard and if possible even an audio example.

As I said in my first message, all I had found is how to write those symbols using ascii  decimal and hex.

I  don’t know how to do that because I’m confused.

Once  I figure out that, I would try to add new each symbol as an entry to the default dictionary.

I can’t tell it will work but so far I can’t come up with a better idea.

Leo Bado

Hello Leo

I would be interested to know if anyone else on list has answers to your questions, especially about writing phonetic or phonemic symbols. If you are a Jaws user, there is a way to modify Jaws so that it says the names of the phonetic symbols, but it won't pronounce words written with those symbols.

Which screen reader do you use? If you use NVDA have you emailed the developers to see if NVDA can be modified to pronounce the symbols? I found information on how to do this with Jaws by googling so there could be something similar for NVDA.
If you have difficulty understanding ESpeak, can you use another synthesizer?

Teri
On 23-Sep-18 4:02 AM, Leo Bado wrote:

Hello fellow listers,

I stop by to ask a question about learning phonetic sounds for English language and any accessible tech-tool related.

I’ve been looking for an accessible way to read phonetic symbols specificly with a synthetizer or may be a software.For my surprise espeak reads some of the phonetic sounds properly but it seems not to be able to read all of them, besides I have a hard time trying to grasp what espaek is trying to say due to its robotic sound.So, if anyone can give me a tip ere I would appreciate it.

I also want to know if someone knows how to write phonetic sounds, let’s say at least using ascii code.I foundcodes for ascii decimal and hexadecimal or something like that but I don’t know how to use those codes to write the symbol.

Lastly but no least, does anyone have international phonetic alphabet (I P A) on audio that be willing to share?

I take hints and remarks about how to face this situation, specially because I can’t find reliable technological resources in oreder to properly learn the international phonetic alphabet.

Thank you for any help or suggestion.

-- 
Leo Bado

Hi all,
I am on a desktop, Windows10, Jaws2018 latest version, using IE to
open https://m.facebook.com/ I google leave a group on Facebook To
leave a group, go to the group, click Joined at the top and then
select Leave Group. When you leave a group: Members won't be notified. You're removed from the member list and the group will be removed from your list of groups I cannot find leave button.
Thanks,
Ann

Tell us the name of the application, and someone will surely download and  install it to help you figure out how to change the voice back.

Hi,

I installed this cool clock, and I had a lady voice announcing the time, but I went into speech and changed to another voice and now, Can't figure out how to get her back.

I've gone to options and checked every where with no luck.

sometimes when things are going good, one should not experiment, unless you love that kind of thing.

>grin>