The word "gigabyte" has meant 1,073,741,824 bytes in common usage for over thirty years.
Over thirty years ago the word "gigabyte" was mostly just of theoretical interest. Almost nobody (apart from governments and major corporations) could afford even one gigabyte. I'd guess that gigabyte didn't hit common usage (outside of computer data center professionals) until the mid to late nineties.
So the question for the court is really did the marketting types at disk drive manufacturers switch definitions on an unsuspecting public, or have they been using gigabyte = 10^9 bytes for as long as the general public have had any interest in gigabytes?
The track record for marketting in the computer industry isn't good. "19 inch" CRT monitors (with only 17 inches of actual screen). "Full speed USB 2.0 devices" (where "full speed" means just 11 mb/s... not the highest speed that USB 2.0 is capable of). Etc.
I bought a 19" LCD monitor from Best Buy while they were running this scam and they signed me up for msn.com just the way the article says. No disclosure to me beyond telling me that there was a free 6 month subscription CD in the box. I recycled the CD as I had no interest in the MSN subscription. Six months later the first monthly charge appeared on my credit card bill.
I called MSN and asked what was going on. They said that I'd signed up at Best Buy. I said "oh no I didn't". After a couple of iterations of this the guy on the phone agreed to cancel the subscription and refund my money.
Assuming the lawyers take $30M of the $100M judgement, and assuming that there were 100,000 customers (complete random guess... the article only says "thousands of customers"), then my share ought to be $700. That would actually be quite cool. But I bet that I'll just end up with a $10 coupon good for discounts on Microsoft Vista:-(
Does flash technology leave a phantom image after it's erased like magnetic storage does?
Almost certainly yes. Lots of people have been asking about the number of write(erase) cycles that a flash drive can perform, and many others have been answering "wear levelling". This means that when you re-write block 100000, the flash controller will actually write the data to some other physical block and just internally renumber that new block as 100000. This of course means that the data you "overwrote" is still in the original location.
Because you have no control over the wear levelling algorithm, even writing to the whole drive may not remove all traces of old data. The drive may internally have a larger than rated capacity with plenty of spare blocks to use as replacements for ones that reach their wear level limit.
Q: Why would anyone think a power plant could ever have a nuclear explosion occur?
A: The movies.
...
Narrator: In this week's episode of Mythbusters Adam and Jamie build their own nuclear reactor in Jamie's workshop in San Francisco to try and debunk the myth that a nuclear power plant can cause a nuclear explosion. But first they need to find someone who will sell them some enriched uranium...
In the self proclaimed "Capitol of Silicon Valley" my allegedly 3Mbit download DSL link maxes out at 2.4Mbit... so I see little point in paying them more for an alleged 6Mbit connection.
The machines in use at the last election here (San Jose, CA) had a printer with a roll of paper under a glass screen. At the end of the touch screen voting phase the machine printed my selections, and had me confirm them, before it scrolled my selections away.
For this machine, it doesn't matter if someone can hack the machine... the best they can achieve is a denial of service attack by spoiling the election. If the electronically tabulated result doesn't match what is on the roll of paper (combined with the tally of how many people voted that is kept by the humans who handle the sign-in process).
Just in case any TiVO people are reading this thread... here's my wish list of features before I'll upgrade from my old TiVo
1) 2-way cablecards... so I can still access on-demand content from Comcast 2) Standby mode that sucks 2W (current system eats 40W 24x7, yech!) 3) External drive... so I can customize capacity
I just upgraded my pre-historic (well >3 year old) phone for new one. At the Sprint store the clerk asked whether I'd like my old phone book transferred to the new phone. I said yes and she hitched the old phone to a small box (took her a while to find the right cable for my old phone). After a couple of minutes she hooked the new phone to the box... and tada! all contacts transferred without a hitch.
Mr. PC enthousiast who likes to rip DVDs and do other things in the meanwhile can do with 2 cores.
Isn't DVD ripping (video transcoding) just a perfect application for 4 (or more) cores? CPU intensive, trivially parallelizable, takes long enough now that user will notice and appreciate a 4x (or more) speedup.
Not much of that high speed matter will hit us though. If it spreads out evenly in all directions (doesn't quite fit with the article's description of "jets of matter") then the 200*mass-of-the-earth will be spread out across 125,000 square lightyesrs. Which comes to 10e-7 grams per square meter. Now it is moving pretty fast, so maybe it might be a bad idea to get hit by that.
If the distribution is uneven... then we'd be pretty unlucky to have our planet parked directly in the path of one of these jets.
How many likely-to-go-supernova-sometime-soon are there in our near (100LY) neighborhood?
According to this article the cable companies have to make cable cards work, because starting July 1st all new cable boxes they give to customers have to use the same cable cards to decode video that they give out for uses like this.
The real problem is that banks etc. are willing to open new accounts on the flimsiest of evidence of whether the customer really is who they say they, often just because they are able to quote a social security number.
So why not pass a law that says that banks are responsible for all the debt racked up in such accounts. That might focus the banks minds a little on making sure that the customer really is who (s)he says (s)he is.
Then just to make it really clear that the government would like everyone to stop relying on SSN as a valid form or idendification, ssn.gov should post every single SSN ever issued together with name and birthdate.
Here in the S.F. Bay area the summer-time weather is more human-friendly, so air-conditioning needs are lower, and thus daytime summertime power consumption is lower.
I'm generating a small excess of power in the peak charging time (1pm-7pm on the E-6 tariff). Each extra kWh I make in that period gets me a $0.20865 credit with which to buy power at night (at $0.09418). On the standard E-1 tariff my excess daytime power would only reap $0.1143, the same as my cost for buying night time power.
Forcing people onto TOU tariffs will make it hard for small systems to break even, but shouldn't have as much effect on larger systems.
The long term trend is toward TOU systems for everyone (at least if the PUC grants the wishes of the utility companies). So another way to look at the current situation is that people who use large amounts of power during the peak hours are currently getting a free (well cheap) ride from the utility companies, and those days are numbered.
I bought an LCD monitor at Best Buy... at the checkout they said something about a free trial of MSN being included in the price.
Six months later MSN billed my card. I called MSN and asked what was going on, they told me that I'd signed up through Best Buy. I said "Oh no I didn't". They canceled the membership and refunded my money.
Lawsuits going all the way to the supreme court? Sounds like some lawyers getting richer.
Sounds like Ballmer is predicting that iPhone sales will be 2-3 times higher that Steve Jobs is planning. At least my recollection of the MacWorld announcement was of Steve talking about a 1% market share.
Perhaps I'd better get in line outside the Apple store to buy one on the first day it goes on sale so I can turn around and resell it on EBay for some ludicrous sum if Apple really are that far off on their demand predictions.
"Doesn't this mean they'll just change the contract on new DVDs?
Not necessarily. Last week Dan Glickman (CEO of MPAA) was reported to have announced "a plan to let consumers rip DVDs for use on home media servers and iPods".
Lifetime of the panels is 30 years (they have a 25 year warranty).
Lifetime of the inverters is perhaps half that (the financial projections
from the installer include the cost of replacing the inverters once at
about the 15 year point).
Damage due to weather etc.... could be a problem. I really need
to check with my insurance agent on whether my existing policy
covers the panels, and if so for what sort of events, and how much
will they cover.
Solar panel theft may be an new upcoming crime spree. The panels
are expensive. Some crooks with a boom arm lift and a truck could
strip them from a house in a few hours. Some expertise is needed
(during the day there are 600V DC wires involved... very bad for
the health). But I think it would be tough to hit more than two
houses in a city before the local population got wise to the "solar
repair" guys.
People keep dismissing solar because it can't compete
in price against traditional large scale ways of generating
electricity.
But it doesn't matter to me that some hydro-electric plant
far from my house is making power at $0.02 per kWh, what
matters to my economic reality is that my local power
company charges just over $0.08 for the first dozen kWh
delivered each day and then has a sliding scale that goes
up to $0.36 kWh for increased amounts of power.
Before I installed solar panels a high percentage of
my power was costing me that top rate. So the relevent
economic calculation for me is the cost to install my
panels divided by the expected number of kWh that they
will generate across their lifetime. This number comes
out at about $0.16 per kWh. So I'm better than breaking
even now, and assuming that energy prices continue to
rise, I'll do even better in years to come.
The final kicker in the equation is that I've switched to
a time-of-use tariff so across the summer the power company
will credit me with $0.209 for excess power that I generate
in peak hours (between 1pm and 7pm), and $0.112 for partial-peak
(10am-1pm + 7pm-9pm).
If I'd taken the capital that I used to install the panels
and invested it instead, I'd have to maintain a >19% annual
pre-tax rate of return to beat the panels. Possible, but extremely
unlikely (especially with my stock-picking track record!).
So now every time a camera catches a police car or other
emergency vehicle running a red light a notice gets sent,
someone has to correlate that notice to the log of
emergency calls at the specific date&time. Then check
the duty roster to see who was supposed to be driving
that vehicle at that time, probably interview a few
people to find out who was actually driving it.
Unless there is an emergency, then nobody should be
running the redlights... but this "solution" looks
like a nightmare.
How about adding a small RF transmitter to the siren
& lights in emergency vehicles so that when *both* are
on, any redlight cameras in the vicinity add a notation
to photographs they take that there was an emergency
in progress. This would allow the emergency vehicles
through without tickets and without bureaucracy.
PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) whined to the public utilities commission that it would cost them $35M to go out and reprogram all the time-of-use meters. So the PUC let them stick with the first Sunday in April, last Sunday in October rules.
For me this meant that the "part-peak" tariff ran from 6pm to 9pm, instead of from 5pm to 8pm for the past three weeks. This cost me two ways:
1) Electricity generated by my solar PV system between 5pm and 6pm spun the meter backwards counting off-peak kWh instead of part-peak kWh.
2) I use very little power from 5pm to 6pm (I'm generally not home from work), I definitely use more from 8pm to 9pm (I'm home, and it is dark so I have lights on). So moving the part-peak time an hour later meant that I bought more of the higher priced power than the cheaper off-peak power.
Check the HOA rules to see if they'll let you even touch the roof, or their electrical systems.
Find out what rebates IL has to offer for solar PV install... without a good rebate, then solar doesn't make good financial sense (but you may still want to save the planet and do it anyway).
I think that most solar installs in city/suburban areas only provide part of the power (out in rural areas there may be more off-grid applications).
I think you'll need net metering even if you never spin the meter backwards.
A couple of panels aren't going to generate a huge amount... figure a couple of hundred watts each at peak (and unless you can set them up to track the sun's motion, they'll hardly ever be generating at peak).
Slashdot Mirror
are in ".doc" format files generated with Microsoft Wrod. Not so open source.
Yes we have ... the first draft was published almost 7 years ago.
"and when we finish mapping it, we won't understand it."
We do understand a few parts of it ... but I agree that we don't have any "big picture" view.
But progress is being made in Moore's law style. See
http://www.economist.com/theworldin/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=8134230&d=2007
Over thirty years ago the word "gigabyte" was mostly just of theoretical interest. Almost nobody (apart from governments and major corporations) could afford even one gigabyte. I'd guess that gigabyte didn't hit common usage (outside of computer data center professionals) until the mid to late nineties.
So the question for the court is really did the marketting types at disk drive manufacturers switch definitions on an unsuspecting public, or have they been using gigabyte = 10^9 bytes for as long as the general public have had any interest in gigabytes?
The track record for marketting in the computer industry isn't good. "19 inch" CRT monitors (with only 17 inches of actual screen). "Full speed USB 2.0 devices" (where "full speed" means just 11 mb/s ... not the highest speed that USB 2.0 is capable of). Etc.
I called MSN and asked what was going on. They said that I'd signed up at Best Buy. I said "oh no I didn't". After a couple of iterations of this the guy on the phone agreed to cancel the subscription and refund my money.
Assuming the lawyers take $30M of the $100M judgement, and assuming that there were 100,000 customers (complete random guess ... the article only says "thousands of customers"), then my share ought to be $700. That would actually be quite cool. But I bet that I'll just end up with a $10 coupon good for discounts on Microsoft Vista :-(
Almost certainly yes. Lots of people have been asking about the number of write(erase) cycles that a flash drive can perform, and many others have been answering "wear levelling". This means that when you re-write block 100000, the flash controller will actually write the data to some other physical block and just internally renumber that new block as 100000. This of course means that the data you "overwrote" is still in the original location.
Because you have no control over the wear levelling algorithm, even writing to the whole drive may not remove all traces of old data. The drive may internally have a larger than rated capacity with plenty of spare blocks to use as replacements for ones that reach their wear level limit.
-Tony
A: The movies.
Narrator: In this week's episode of Mythbusters Adam and Jamie build their own nuclear reactor in Jamie's workshop in San Francisco to try and debunk the myth that a nuclear power plant can cause a nuclear explosion. But first they need to find someone who will sell them some enriched uranium ...
In the self proclaimed "Capitol of Silicon Valley" my allegedly 3Mbit download DSL link maxes out at 2.4Mbit ... so I see little point in paying them more for an alleged 6Mbit connection.
For this machine, it doesn't matter if someone can hack the machine ... the best they can achieve is a denial of service attack by spoiling the election. If the electronically tabulated result doesn't match what is on the roll of paper (combined with the tally of how many people voted that is kept by the humans who handle the sign-in process).
Just in case any TiVO people are reading this thread ... here's my wish list of features before I'll upgrade from my old TiVo
... so I can still access on-demand content from Comcast ... so I can customize capacity
1) 2-way cablecards
2) Standby mode that sucks 2W (current system eats 40W 24x7, yech!)
3) External drive
I just upgraded my pre-historic (well >3 year old) phone for new one. At the Sprint store the clerk asked whether I'd like my old phone book transferred to the new phone. I said yes and she hitched the old phone to a small box (took her a while to find the right cable for my old phone). After a couple of minutes she hooked the new phone to the box ... and tada! all contacts transferred without a hitch.
Isn't DVD ripping (video transcoding) just a perfect application for 4 (or more) cores? CPU intensive, trivially parallelizable, takes long enough now that user will notice and appreciate a 4x (or more) speedup.
If the distribution is uneven ... then we'd be pretty unlucky to have our planet parked directly in the path of one of these jets.
How many likely-to-go-supernova-sometime-soon are there in our near (100LY) neighborhood?
According to this article the cable companies have to make cable cards work, because starting July 1st all new cable boxes they give to customers have to use the same cable cards to decode video that they give out for uses like this.
So why not pass a law that says that banks are responsible for all the debt racked up in such accounts. That might focus the banks minds a little on making sure that the customer really is who (s)he says (s)he is.
Then just to make it really clear that the government would like everyone to stop relying on SSN as a valid form or idendification, ssn.gov should post every single SSN ever issued together with name and birthdate.
I'm generating a small excess of power in the peak charging time (1pm-7pm on the E-6 tariff). Each extra kWh I make in that period gets me a $0.20865 credit with which to buy power at night (at $0.09418). On the standard E-1 tariff my excess daytime power would only reap $0.1143, the same as my cost for buying night time power.
Forcing people onto TOU tariffs will make it hard for small systems to break even, but shouldn't have as much effect on larger systems.
The long term trend is toward TOU systems for everyone (at least if the PUC grants the wishes of the utility companies). So another way to look at the current situation is that people who use large amounts of power during the peak hours are currently getting a free (well cheap) ride from the utility companies, and those days are numbered.
Six months later MSN billed my card. I called MSN and asked what was going on, they told me that I'd signed up through Best Buy. I said "Oh no I didn't". They canceled the membership and refunded my money.
Lawsuits going all the way to the supreme court? Sounds like some lawyers getting richer.
Perhaps I'd better get in line outside the Apple store to buy one on the first day it goes on sale so I can turn around and resell it on EBay for some ludicrous sum if Apple really are that far off on their demand predictions.
Not necessarily. Last week Dan Glickman (CEO of MPAA) was reported to have announced "a plan to let consumers rip DVDs for use on home media servers and iPods".
Lets see how fast you can release an update to iTunes that can rip DVDs (as well as CDs).
Do it fast, before they change their minds.
Lifetime of the inverters is perhaps half that (the financial projections from the installer include the cost of replacing the inverters once at about the 15 year point).
Damage due to weather etc. ... could be a problem. I really need
to check with my insurance agent on whether my existing policy
covers the panels, and if so for what sort of events, and how much
will they cover.
Solar panel theft may be an new upcoming crime spree. The panels are expensive. Some crooks with a boom arm lift and a truck could strip them from a house in a few hours. Some expertise is needed (during the day there are 600V DC wires involved ... very bad for
the health). But I think it would be tough to hit more than two
houses in a city before the local population got wise to the "solar
repair" guys.
But it doesn't matter to me that some hydro-electric plant far from my house is making power at $0.02 per kWh, what matters to my economic reality is that my local power company charges just over $0.08 for the first dozen kWh delivered each day and then has a sliding scale that goes up to $0.36 kWh for increased amounts of power.
Before I installed solar panels a high percentage of my power was costing me that top rate. So the relevent economic calculation for me is the cost to install my panels divided by the expected number of kWh that they will generate across their lifetime. This number comes out at about $0.16 per kWh. So I'm better than breaking even now, and assuming that energy prices continue to rise, I'll do even better in years to come.
The final kicker in the equation is that I've switched to a time-of-use tariff so across the summer the power company will credit me with $0.209 for excess power that I generate in peak hours (between 1pm and 7pm), and $0.112 for partial-peak (10am-1pm + 7pm-9pm).
If I'd taken the capital that I used to install the panels and invested it instead, I'd have to maintain a >19% annual pre-tax rate of return to beat the panels. Possible, but extremely unlikely (especially with my stock-picking track record!).
Unless there is an emergency, then nobody should be running the redlights ... but this "solution" looks
like a nightmare.
How about adding a small RF transmitter to the siren & lights in emergency vehicles so that when *both* are on, any redlight cameras in the vicinity add a notation to photographs they take that there was an emergency in progress. This would allow the emergency vehicles through without tickets and without bureaucracy.
For me this meant that the "part-peak" tariff ran from 6pm to 9pm, instead of from 5pm to 8pm for the past three weeks. This cost me two ways:
1) Electricity generated by my solar PV system between 5pm and 6pm spun the meter backwards counting off-peak kWh instead of part-peak kWh.
2) I use very little power from 5pm to 6pm (I'm generally not home from work), I definitely use more from 8pm to 9pm (I'm home, and it is dark so I have lights on). So moving the part-peak time an hour later meant that I bought more of the higher priced power than the cheaper off-peak power.
-Tony
It will take just one second to download a complete HD movie.
I think I can survive with waiting 8 seconds to download a movie (it will take me 90+ minutes to watch it anyway).
So I'll be looking to buy up some of the "old" cards when people toss them out to upgrade to these new cards.
Find out what rebates IL has to offer for solar PV install ... without a good rebate, then solar doesn't make good financial sense (but you may still want to save the planet and do it anyway).
I think that most solar installs in city/suburban areas only provide part of the power (out in rural areas there may be more off-grid applications).
I think you'll need net metering even if you never spin the meter backwards.
A couple of panels aren't going to generate a huge amount ... figure a couple of hundred watts each at peak (and unless you can set them up to track the sun's motion, they'll hardly ever be generating at peak).