For the ones out there that don't know it, in order to read Quora articles without registering you can add to the url: ?share=1

In this case you could have sent this link instead: http://www.quora.com/Google/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts...

Many hard drive failures are caused by its PCB and can be easily solved just by replacing it with a new one. Finding a Matching Hard Drive PCB: http://www.hddzone.com/conditions.html

For physical problems: http://www.wikihow.com/Fix-a-Physically-Broken-Hard-Drive

I assume you already knew this, as you keep them on your freezer... and that this may not be applicable to your case, but this could be useful for other people anyway.

I'll give it a shot. In this series Seagate changed the platter coating. So after around 3 years the coating starts to flake off and get jammed between the head and surface.

It is pointless to swap a PCB on Seagate drives these days. Most likely it will not help. The odds are 1:50 that a compatible PCB will be a good match. There is a procedure that is a procedure to perform the proper swap and that requires tools, recovery equipment and knowledge of PCB architecture. On certain drives (some Seagate models ver IV or V) you should never swap a PCB. If you do, the drive will be toast. Same applies to some Hitachi / IBM drives. If data is critical - do not experiment.

This. (@yardie: I tried to get in touch with you)

Do not replace the controller on a Seagate. You may have better luck with other manufacturers.

If there is valuable data on there, and it sounds like there is, pay the price to have it professionally recovered.

They have insurance.

...and before you pick a company, do your homework. There is a number of fly-by-nighters who have no clue what data recovery is. Cute and fancy website is an easy catch these days. Don't fall for its appeal, talk to the techs, see how well the conversation goes. Don't settle for the cheapest quote. A good engineer pays higher bills for his "better" equipment, so if data is important, make sure it's done right by the reputable data recovery engineer. Remember, sometimes there is only one attempt and it has to be done right. Best of luck!

Oh, they are.

It has the iPhoto library from the months before and a few years after my son was born. All I have from that period is whatever I emailed to friends, family, and Facebook. Music was restored from my iPod, movies were on DVD/Bluray, so only the leaving 60GB of photos.

can anyone confirm that in order to avoid MPEG LA license fees for encoding (20$ per unit sold I think) I can not distribute Cisco's compiled encoder library with my software (even if I use the binary from Cisco's repository -when they make it available- instead of compiling it myself) and the only option would be to download it from my software at runtime as a plugin? are there any other options (the systems on which my software is going to be installed do not have internet access)?

That's right. This is a workaround for the MPEG LA license, and having the user download the binary right from Cisco is the only way to have Cisco pay for the license fees. Anything else and you've got to become a licensee.

I don't think that's entirely true.

There's plenty of other H.264 products that you can get without directly downloading them. Flash is a close analogy, they pay the flat fee and nearly every desktop in the world uses it. And while some people download Flash direct from Adobe's servers, other's get it indirectly, e.g. pre-installed on computers they buy, or by downloading an installer. And people build apps (including desktop apps) around that functionality.

Cisco is mostly doing this to support WebRTC interoperability with their deployed hardware (which generally means internet access) so they may just be going for the simplest thing for them to do.

Not $20 but $0.20. (after the first free 100,000 and until it drops to $0.10 after 5 million) although you may have to sign a license with MPEG-LA to take advantage of the free 100,000 and potentially submit to audits so there are risks/costs.

I don't know how direct the distribution from Cisco to the end user has to be to be legal although I can imagine a range of possibilities for this I don't know if they would be practical in your situation. I imagine that you could ship a tool that creates an install package to be used on the non-connected devices and downloads the binary from Cisco and adds it to your install bundle but that is still an annoying extra step.

Practically I don't see anyone coming after you (and certainly not getting real damages) if you did include Cisco's binary with your product - it would be hard to see the real harm or damage caused.

the funny thing with Candy Crush is that it looks like a free app. If you want to keep advancing levels you will eventually need to pay as the difficulty will make it near impossible to win without paying...

I'm up to level 197, haven't paid a dime.