Exactly. People who eat more prepackaged foods are more likely to be taking in all sorts of stuff---high fructose corn syrup, higher levels of sugar, higher levels of various preservatives (some of which break down into rather nasty stuff in the presence of citric acid), etc., all of which lead to increased levels of disease, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. Those prepackaged foods are frequently packaged in containers made out of plastics that leach... yup, you guessed it... bisphenol A.
The correlation is interesting, but it isn't remotely close to proving causation. What would be required for that would be doing another study that compensates for dietary differences (and genetic predisposition and...).
Exactly what I was thinking. Oh, and of course, I was also thinking that the place to do this is on REAL CAMERAS, not crappy cell phone cameras. Have a touch screen on the back of your DSLR and write with a stylus. That would actually be useful. This is a complete and utter waste of the patent office's time and energy.
Basically, this is a beautiful, easy-to-understand example of why software patents are inherently wrong. First, it ensures that a potentially useful technology will only be available on the most utterly useless hardware. Second, it stifles further innovation in this area and harms the market as a whole by producing a host of competing standards that will not be interoperable. Third, it harms the public good by denying them access to what appears to be nothing more than a trivial lipstick-on-a-pig treatment to the EXIF comment tag because most people are locked into their phones and couldn't switch to Nokia even if they wanted to. Finally, it guarantees that few peope will bother to use the technology even on Nokia handsets because the people they send the photos to won't be able to decode the notes....
Repeat after me: Thou shalt not patent thine file formats, nor thine XML dialects, nor thine EXIF tags.
I just browsed the article and it looks like what he's saying is that as GPU's become more like highly parallel cpu's we will begin to see API's go away in favor of writing compiled code for the GPU itself.
Translation: in the future, OpenGL will be supplanted by OpenCL or similar. Okay, maybe I might buy that in theory, but... not soon. I would think that the abstraction in things like OpenGL provides some benefits over writing raw C code in terms of making it easier to do graphical tasks.
He was acquitted by Congress on all charges brought before them. He was disbarred voluntarily to get the Arkansas prosecutor off his back over the Lewinsky thing. That's not the same thing as being disbarred because you were proven to have done something illegal. Further, the Supreme Court disbarment was an automatic follow-on to the Arkansas disbarment. Therefore, I maintain my original statement: the charges did not stick.
The bill passed with a supermajority. Had it been vetoed, the veto would have been entirely irrelevant. A perfunctory veto would not have done any good. What would have made a difference would have been pressure on the issue prior to the bill's signing, but Clinton was too busy defending his sex life from charges that ultimately didn't stick.
Congratulations! You have won the 'Find the Dupe on Slashdot' contest! To collect your prize, send your social security number, current address, and bank account information to me, the head of the International Find the Dupe on Slashdot contest. I will send you this lovely dinette set, a copy of the home game, and a NEW CAR!
Oh,no, I fell for that once. I'm not falling for it again. You know what they say, fool me once, shame... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again.
I agree with that from an english grammar standpoint. Without any operators (prepositions?), however, neither parse tree makes that much sense, and with them, the ambiguity goes away. That's what makes this such an entertaining mess.:-)
Sounds like bad RAM to me. If a machine kernel panics or freezes more than once every few months, unless you're doing something really unusual (e.g. plugging in a hard drive containing a dubious filesystem), 99% of the time, there's defective hardware involved.... The other 1% of the time, it is some broken third-party driver.
We really REALLY need coherent usage semantics of UIs under Linux; while this situation is never perfect, certainly not under Windows, but also not always on OS X, it is to a big degree better than on Linux because there are many, many standard components available under Windows and under OS X, in any case many more than available through Gtk+, maybe also Qt, even though Qt has a pretty big library.
Well, that's part of it, certainly. That said, I'd like to think that a bigger reason for greater consistency in Mac OS X is that Apple has provided human interface guidelines giving guidance about how to design good user interfaces. The HIG has been around almost as long as Linux has. (The first printing was in 1992 according to the inside jacket of my copy.)
Documentation and standards are two things the Linux community has always been sorely lacking. Now since there's no one single Linux Human Interface Consortium, it's a lot harder to create standards like that in the Linux world, but that's really what is needed, IMHO---a single unifying HI document that tells developers how things should ideally behave so that everybody can work towards unification with that standard.
You could - in theory, with the sources available, swap a modern Linux distro under there instead of the hybrid BSD. Almost no one would notice.
People would notice when all the Mach messaging stopped working. It would break a lot of things. You would also have to find a way to emulate the I/O Kit Framework for interacting with devices, and then there's all the little additional features like volfs that provide access to information that the higher level bits use in file handling. Far from nobody noticing, IMHO, it would be a royal pain in the backside to make any other OS kernel even marginally usable (unless that kernel provides at minimum some sort of Mach messaging emulation like the NetBSD folks were working on). It would, however, be an interesting experiment.
So basically this is a large scale version of a ribbon microphone? Except backwards? Wouldn't it work much better if it actually worked exactly like a ribbon magnet, i.e. fixed magnetic bars on either side of a conductive ribbon? You'd certainly get less drag on the ribbon if it isn't trying to move heavy magnets around. Who wants to build one and find out?:-D
Yeah, I was debating which one should hang from which. Depends on whether you're interpreting eater as an operator whose argument is people or interpreting people as an operator modified by eater. One could argue that people (since it is serving as an adjective that modifies eater) is in effect an operator. It depends on how you are writing your parse rules for English.:-D
Yeah, that's one of those statements that is entertaining for computer parser classes because it shows why English is a poor computer language. The fundamental structure of the sentence sentence boils down to this:
.was ../ \
it people .......\ ......eater
The question then becomes which modifiers should hang off the left side of people and which should hang off of eater, i.e. if people modifies eater, do the other words modify eater or people? There five valid parsings for the sentence. It could eat one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people. It could have one eye and eat one-horned flying purple people. It could have one eye and one horn and eat flying purple people. It could also have one eye, one horn, and fly, but eat purple people. Finally, it could, as most people speculate, have one eye, one horn, fly, and be purple in color, all the while eating people. I'm trying to decide if this is more an issue of precedence or associativity, but given that the operators are implicit, this makes the problem far worse....
I was expecting more of a "Can you hear me now?" followed by him hearing the girl on the other end shout "Yes! Oh, yes!" followed by "Oh, yeah, [optional expletive here] you like it when I talk dirty about dropouts, don't ya."
I bought a pen/flash drive from them. All of a sudden, it started acting up and wouldn't stay active (the pen part). Then, a few days later, their pocket clip fell apart causing the pen to fall out of my pocket and become severely scarred and the little plastic lens on the top got lost as did the clip part. Since the whole point of having flash in a pen was so that I could carry it around (and thus it was basically useless without the clip), I tried to get them to honor their warranty. They finally agreed to repair it. Then, I sent it in to them at my expense and the bastards sent it back without repair claiming that it had been "abused". No shit. It fell apart and abused itself on the sidewalk. Normal use is not abuse. I expect a pen that costs $80 to actually hold up under normal everyday use without falling apart. Further, the condition of the pen was made perfectly clear to their authorized representative when they agreed to repair it. They went back on an agreement to repair it, and I seriously considered filing a lawsuit, but my employer gave us all iPod shuffles that serve the same purpose, so it wasn't worth bothering.
Regardless, as a result of this experience, it will be a cold day in hell before I ever purchase ANY other products from PNY. If they were the last manufacturer in the world, I would go into head-to-head competition with them before I would buy any of their products again. Further, even now (almost four years later), when my friends ask me for advice about memory products, I advise them to buy "anything but PNY". The opinions I've given to my friends and coworkers alone have probably cost them many thousands of dollars worth of lost business all because they decided to screw me over an $80 ballpoint pen. I make it a point to get a similar degree of revenge on every company that screws me over. If everyone acted similarly, companies wouldn't get away with such customer abuse. To the folks at PNY, if you're reading this, treating your customers so badly is a sure way to guarantee that eventually you won't have any customers to abuse.
But to get back on topic, this whole NVIDIA thing is made far more disturbing by the number of laptop users who end up having to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on out-of-warranty repairs or even new laptops over it. I think you owe your users more than a "sorry, our bad" on this one. I think you should be held liable for every penny that every one of your customers had to pay because of your faulty designs. I think you should have to pay far more than the actual damages for every customer who bought one after you became aware of the problem because you could have taken action to prevent the harm and deliberately chose not to do so.
This is due in part to the fact that the DRM on DVDs has been cracked. Movie distributors want very badly to wean us all off DVDs for that reason, but consumers are just not willing to go.
I don't think consumer reluctance has much to do with the DRM issue except among a handful of geeks. I'd love to think that you are right, but from what I've seen, for most consumers, the reasons not to switch are price and price. A basic Blu-Ray player costs about 3x the cost of a basic DVD player, and Blu-Ray discs start at $25 while DVDs start at $5.
Most of the problems I've had stem from Flash, which is buggy and unreliable in any brower, not just Safari. Besides, the plug-in model most commonly used by WebKit plug-ins came from Netscape. It is probably not a good idea to try to blame WebKit for that....:-)
Oh, the other plug-ins that I've seen cause people problems are the haxies. That would be because they aren't using an actual plug-in model and are instead scribbling across arbitrary parts of the process address space hoping that they're looking in the right place. Also not a good idea to blame WebKit for that mess....
That still doesn't mean God intended it to be interpreted literally. If anything, it makes it far less likely because it shows a vast intelligence created it---a vast intelligence who presumably would be capable of understanding that primitive man was incapable of understanding something as complex as evolution....:-)
The Bible is no more proof of something than the Hitchhiker's Guide is. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of faith. Do you believe that the Bible is the word of God, of men, or somewhere in-between? In the absence of proof of the Bible's divine creation, the Bible cannot in and of itself be considered proof of anything except for its own existence as a literary work. It is like hearing expert testimony from someone who has not yet presented his or her credentials in the field of inquiry.
As for myself, I feel that while the Bible is inspired by God, it cannot reasonably be taken as the perfect, unblemished work thereof. It contradicts itself too much, the time scales are too absurd (humans living how many thousand years?), and there's too much overwhelming evidence that contradicts the exact literal interpretation of parts of it. IMHO, Genesis is best interpreted allegorically---an explanation of evolution written very simply so that the relatively primitive people of that era would have a prayer of understanding it. Expecting to read a book from thousands of years ago and read words like "God created the dinosaurs" in a book written more than 2000 years before the discovery of the first intact dinosaur skeleton would be remarkably optimistic to say the least.
In any case, it is not proof, as in the absence of a very strict constructionist view of the Bible, the mere existence of Genesis in print does not compel one to accept its words as truth.
I -think- that vendors generally report amplification numbers (at least when you're talking about SSDs as opposed to disposable keychain drives). The Intel numbers, however, seem (at least to me) to be too good to be true. The more incredible the claim, the more substantiation is needed.
We can infer that Intel is doing something like this, based on the following quote from AnandTech:
Actually, I would interpret that quote in the opposite way as an indication that corners are being cut in this area. Where increasing the spare count would make a huge difference would be with a naive algorithm in which data never moves unless it gets rewritten.
An ideal algorithm needs to use some reasonable weighting mechanism that says "Okay, this block has been rewritten a hundred times and 90% of the used blocks have only been written once, so let's copy data and turn some of those lightly-used cells into spares to level things out a bit." With such a mechanism, once you have a single bad block, ideally every block on the media should be nearly equally worn, including any spares and including all blocks that are used for other data. Therefore, increasing the number of spares (within a reasonable range) should have minimal impact on lifespan. The only effect would be to decrease the number of writes needed by one when the controller decides to swap out a heavily used block for one of those spares.
Over the life of the device, such a change should be very nearly lost in the noise. By increasing the number of spares from 1% to 2%, there's slightly more than a 1% (1/99) chance that the controller would now choose a spare block where otherwise it would have chosen a used block since it represents just over 1% of the total number of blocks. Thus, there's a 1/99 chance that it saves one out of two writes, so the lifespan improvement should be at most slightly over half a percent even if the device constantly swapped blocks around (bad for life expectancy. If it only swaps for one write out of every hundred, the lifespan improvement from doubling the spare count is reduced to a paltry 0.005%, assuming I'm thinking about this correctly.
Assuming a degenerate workload, with a naive algorithm that never remaps existing data except when it is written, death is swift. Assume a 256 KB flash block. Assume a 4 GB flash device with 2% spare. Assume 70 MB/sec. transfer rate. Assume TCQ/NCQ so that you can queue up requests without waiting for the previous request to complete. At 2%, you have about 81.92 MB of spares, or about 328 spares. You have to erase a block containing 256KB at once (one entire flash block). Write random data on a single data block over and over without caching. At 70 MB/sec. divided by a 256 KB block, you can write 280 blocks per second. That comes to about 1.17 seconds to go through all of the spares once. With a 10,000 erasure limit, that means you destroy all the spares in 2.38 hours. At that point, no further writes can occur because erasing and rewriting a block in place is inherently unsafe. Obviously for a 60 GB disk, multiply the numbers by 15. Even with 100,000 cycle flash, one could kill a drive with a naive algorithm in about four months. Okay, so it wouldn't be quite that fast because you'd have to issue write cache flush instructions between each write, but you're in the ballpark.
On the flip side, with a typical workload, a drive would likely last several years even with such a naive algorithm. This is why I'm concerned. It is quite possible for a company to implement a remarkably naive wear leveling algorithm and mostly get away with it except for a few unlucky people who end up with data loss. We saw this in the HD industry not too long ago with IBM claiming after the fact that their drives were not designed for continuous use. With such a history of reliability corner-cutting from storage vendors, I think there's good reason to expect better transparency from the flash drive vendors about how they are doing wear leveling, particularly if these products are expected to be used in enterprise installations as this drive supposedly is. Fool me once and all that....
I won't even get into the question of how one can possibly achieve anything approaching a 1.1 write amplification rate short of building custom flash chips that allow per-page erasure.... Maybe for certain synthetic workloads, but not for a degenerate workload (e.g. write blocks sequentially with a stride length of the same size as (or larger than) the physical flash block size until you exceed the capacity of the write cache, rinse, repeat).... Otherwise, that seems at least an order of magnitude lower than is plausible. I'd have to see white papers explaining exactly how they're doing this miraculously good wear leveling before I'd trust any low-cycle-count SSDs in anything resembling a production server....
IMHO, we also need a couple of orders of magnitude more write cycles. I'm not entirely comfortable even with devices that claim a million write-erase cycles, much less multi-level devices like this one that only go for probably 10,000 write-erase cycles.
If they used a poor wear leveling algorithm, for example (e.g. one that relies solely on a pool of a few percent of spare blocks), you could make a 10k-cycle SSD unwritable in just a couple of hours. Somehow I am very uncomfortable knowing that the only thing between me and a complete drive failure is a proprietary algorithm that I have to blindly trust without the ability to inspect it and without any real peer review from other companies in the field. Short of either open sourcing these algorithms or creating open industry standards for how they work, the thought of relying on a SSD with such a short maximum cycle count is way, way outside my comfort zone.
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Exactly. People who eat more prepackaged foods are more likely to be taking in all sorts of stuff---high fructose corn syrup, higher levels of sugar, higher levels of various preservatives (some of which break down into rather nasty stuff in the presence of citric acid), etc., all of which lead to increased levels of disease, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. Those prepackaged foods are frequently packaged in containers made out of plastics that leach... yup, you guessed it... bisphenol A.
The correlation is interesting, but it isn't remotely close to proving causation. What would be required for that would be doing another study that compensates for dietary differences (and genetic predisposition and...).
Exactly what I was thinking. Oh, and of course, I was also thinking that the place to do this is on REAL CAMERAS, not crappy cell phone cameras. Have a touch screen on the back of your DSLR and write with a stylus. That would actually be useful. This is a complete and utter waste of the patent office's time and energy.
Basically, this is a beautiful, easy-to-understand example of why software patents are inherently wrong. First, it ensures that a potentially useful technology will only be available on the most utterly useless hardware. Second, it stifles further innovation in this area and harms the market as a whole by producing a host of competing standards that will not be interoperable. Third, it harms the public good by denying them access to what appears to be nothing more than a trivial lipstick-on-a-pig treatment to the EXIF comment tag because most people are locked into their phones and couldn't switch to Nokia even if they wanted to. Finally, it guarantees that few peope will bother to use the technology even on Nokia handsets because the people they send the photos to won't be able to decode the notes....
Repeat after me: Thou shalt not patent thine file formats, nor thine XML dialects, nor thine EXIF tags.
Translation: in the future, OpenGL will be supplanted by OpenCL or similar. Okay, maybe I might buy that in theory, but... not soon. I would think that the abstraction in things like OpenGL provides some benefits over writing raw C code in terms of making it easier to do graphical tasks.
I would argue that they were basically just two facets of the same scandal.... :-)
He was acquitted by Congress on all charges brought before them. He was disbarred voluntarily to get the Arkansas prosecutor off his back over the Lewinsky thing. That's not the same thing as being disbarred because you were proven to have done something illegal. Further, the Supreme Court disbarment was an automatic follow-on to the Arkansas disbarment. Therefore, I maintain my original statement: the charges did not stick.
The bill passed with a supermajority. Had it been vetoed, the veto would have been entirely irrelevant. A perfunctory veto would not have done any good. What would have made a difference would have been pressure on the issue prior to the bill's signing, but Clinton was too busy defending his sex life from charges that ultimately didn't stick.
Oh,no, I fell for that once. I'm not falling for it again. You know what they say, fool me once, shame... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again.
I agree with that from an english grammar standpoint. Without any operators (prepositions?), however, neither parse tree makes that much sense, and with them, the ambiguity goes away. That's what makes this such an entertaining mess. :-)
No, the AC who responded after you is a troll.... :-D
Sounds like bad RAM to me. If a machine kernel panics or freezes more than once every few months, unless you're doing something really unusual (e.g. plugging in a hard drive containing a dubious filesystem), 99% of the time, there's defective hardware involved.... The other 1% of the time, it is some broken third-party driver.
Well, that's part of it, certainly. That said, I'd like to think that a bigger reason for greater consistency in Mac OS X is that Apple has provided human interface guidelines giving guidance about how to design good user interfaces. The HIG has been around almost as long as Linux has. (The first printing was in 1992 according to the inside jacket of my copy.)
Documentation and standards are two things the Linux community has always been sorely lacking. Now since there's no one single Linux Human Interface Consortium, it's a lot harder to create standards like that in the Linux world, but that's really what is needed, IMHO---a single unifying HI document that tells developers how things should ideally behave so that everybody can work towards unification with that standard.
People would notice when all the Mach messaging stopped working. It would break a lot of things. You would also have to find a way to emulate the I/O Kit Framework for interacting with devices, and then there's all the little additional features like volfs that provide access to information that the higher level bits use in file handling. Far from nobody noticing, IMHO, it would be a royal pain in the backside to make any other OS kernel even marginally usable (unless that kernel provides at minimum some sort of Mach messaging emulation like the NetBSD folks were working on). It would, however, be an interesting experiment.
So basically this is a large scale version of a ribbon microphone? Except backwards? Wouldn't it work much better if it actually worked exactly like a ribbon magnet, i.e. fixed magnetic bars on either side of a conductive ribbon? You'd certainly get less drag on the ribbon if it isn't trying to move heavy magnets around. Who wants to build one and find out? :-D
Yeah, I was debating which one should hang from which. Depends on whether you're interpreting eater as an operator whose argument is people or interpreting people as an operator modified by eater. One could argue that people (since it is serving as an adjective that modifies eater) is in effect an operator. It depends on how you are writing your parse rules for English. :-D
Yeah, that's one of those statements that is entertaining for computer parser classes because it shows why English is a poor computer language. The fundamental structure of the sentence sentence boils down to this:
it people
The question then becomes which modifiers should hang off the left side of people and which should hang off of eater, i.e. if people modifies eater, do the other words modify eater or people? There five valid parsings for the sentence. It could eat one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people. It could have one eye and eat one-horned flying purple people. It could have one eye and one horn and eat flying purple people. It could also have one eye, one horn, and fly, but eat purple people. Finally, it could, as most people speculate, have one eye, one horn, fly, and be purple in color, all the while eating people. I'm trying to decide if this is more an issue of precedence or associativity, but given that the operators are implicit, this makes the problem far worse....
I was expecting more of a "Can you hear me now?" followed by him hearing the girl on the other end shout "Yes! Oh, yes!" followed by "Oh, yeah, [optional expletive here] you like it when I talk dirty about dropouts, don't ya."
Creepy....
They're discriminated against by nature. More specifically, they had better watch out for the one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater....
I bought a pen/flash drive from them. All of a sudden, it started acting up and wouldn't stay active (the pen part). Then, a few days later, their pocket clip fell apart causing the pen to fall out of my pocket and become severely scarred and the little plastic lens on the top got lost as did the clip part. Since the whole point of having flash in a pen was so that I could carry it around (and thus it was basically useless without the clip), I tried to get them to honor their warranty. They finally agreed to repair it. Then, I sent it in to them at my expense and the bastards sent it back without repair claiming that it had been "abused". No shit. It fell apart and abused itself on the sidewalk. Normal use is not abuse. I expect a pen that costs $80 to actually hold up under normal everyday use without falling apart. Further, the condition of the pen was made perfectly clear to their authorized representative when they agreed to repair it. They went back on an agreement to repair it, and I seriously considered filing a lawsuit, but my employer gave us all iPod shuffles that serve the same purpose, so it wasn't worth bothering.
Regardless, as a result of this experience, it will be a cold day in hell before I ever purchase ANY other products from PNY. If they were the last manufacturer in the world, I would go into head-to-head competition with them before I would buy any of their products again. Further, even now (almost four years later), when my friends ask me for advice about memory products, I advise them to buy "anything but PNY". The opinions I've given to my friends and coworkers alone have probably cost them many thousands of dollars worth of lost business all because they decided to screw me over an $80 ballpoint pen. I make it a point to get a similar degree of revenge on every company that screws me over. If everyone acted similarly, companies wouldn't get away with such customer abuse. To the folks at PNY, if you're reading this, treating your customers so badly is a sure way to guarantee that eventually you won't have any customers to abuse.
But to get back on topic, this whole NVIDIA thing is made far more disturbing by the number of laptop users who end up having to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on out-of-warranty repairs or even new laptops over it. I think you owe your users more than a "sorry, our bad" on this one. I think you should be held liable for every penny that every one of your customers had to pay because of your faulty designs. I think you should have to pay far more than the actual damages for every customer who bought one after you became aware of the problem because you could have taken action to prevent the harm and deliberately chose not to do so.
I don't think consumer reluctance has much to do with the DRM issue except among a handful of geeks. I'd love to think that you are right, but from what I've seen, for most consumers, the reasons not to switch are price and price. A basic Blu-Ray player costs about 3x the cost of a basic DVD player, and Blu-Ray discs start at $25 while DVDs start at $5.
Most of the problems I've had stem from Flash, which is buggy and unreliable in any brower, not just Safari. Besides, the plug-in model most commonly used by WebKit plug-ins came from Netscape. It is probably not a good idea to try to blame WebKit for that.... :-)
Oh, the other plug-ins that I've seen cause people problems are the haxies. That would be because they aren't using an actual plug-in model and are instead scribbling across arbitrary parts of the process address space hoping that they're looking in the right place. Also not a good idea to blame WebKit for that mess....
That still doesn't mean God intended it to be interpreted literally. If anything, it makes it far less likely because it shows a vast intelligence created it---a vast intelligence who presumably would be capable of understanding that primitive man was incapable of understanding something as complex as evolution.... :-)
I have proof that the Earth was destroyed to make way for an hyperspace bypass. It's all there in black and white.
The Bible is no more proof of something than the Hitchhiker's Guide is. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of faith. Do you believe that the Bible is the word of God, of men, or somewhere in-between? In the absence of proof of the Bible's divine creation, the Bible cannot in and of itself be considered proof of anything except for its own existence as a literary work. It is like hearing expert testimony from someone who has not yet presented his or her credentials in the field of inquiry.
As for myself, I feel that while the Bible is inspired by God, it cannot reasonably be taken as the perfect, unblemished work thereof. It contradicts itself too much, the time scales are too absurd (humans living how many thousand years?), and there's too much overwhelming evidence that contradicts the exact literal interpretation of parts of it. IMHO, Genesis is best interpreted allegorically---an explanation of evolution written very simply so that the relatively primitive people of that era would have a prayer of understanding it. Expecting to read a book from thousands of years ago and read words like "God created the dinosaurs" in a book written more than 2000 years before the discovery of the first intact dinosaur skeleton would be remarkably optimistic to say the least.
In any case, it is not proof, as in the absence of a very strict constructionist view of the Bible, the mere existence of Genesis in print does not compel one to accept its words as truth.
I -think- that vendors generally report amplification numbers (at least when you're talking about SSDs as opposed to disposable keychain drives). The Intel numbers, however, seem (at least to me) to be too good to be true. The more incredible the claim, the more substantiation is needed.
Actually, I would interpret that quote in the opposite way as an indication that corners are being cut in this area. Where increasing the spare count would make a huge difference would be with a naive algorithm in which data never moves unless it gets rewritten.
An ideal algorithm needs to use some reasonable weighting mechanism that says "Okay, this block has been rewritten a hundred times and 90% of the used blocks have only been written once, so let's copy data and turn some of those lightly-used cells into spares to level things out a bit." With such a mechanism, once you have a single bad block, ideally every block on the media should be nearly equally worn, including any spares and including all blocks that are used for other data. Therefore, increasing the number of spares (within a reasonable range) should have minimal impact on lifespan. The only effect would be to decrease the number of writes needed by one when the controller decides to swap out a heavily used block for one of those spares.
Over the life of the device, such a change should be very nearly lost in the noise. By increasing the number of spares from 1% to 2%, there's slightly more than a 1% (1/99) chance that the controller would now choose a spare block where otherwise it would have chosen a used block since it represents just over 1% of the total number of blocks. Thus, there's a 1/99 chance that it saves one out of two writes, so the lifespan improvement should be at most slightly over half a percent even if the device constantly swapped blocks around (bad for life expectancy. If it only swaps for one write out of every hundred, the lifespan improvement from doubling the spare count is reduced to a paltry 0.005%, assuming I'm thinking about this correctly.
Am I missing something?
Here's my concern in a nutshell:
Assuming a degenerate workload, with a naive algorithm that never remaps existing data except when it is written, death is swift. Assume a 256 KB flash block. Assume a 4 GB flash device with 2% spare. Assume 70 MB/sec. transfer rate. Assume TCQ/NCQ so that you can queue up requests without waiting for the previous request to complete. At 2%, you have about 81.92 MB of spares, or about 328 spares. You have to erase a block containing 256KB at once (one entire flash block). Write random data on a single data block over and over without caching. At 70 MB/sec. divided by a 256 KB block, you can write 280 blocks per second. That comes to about 1.17 seconds to go through all of the spares once. With a 10,000 erasure limit, that means you destroy all the spares in 2.38 hours. At that point, no further writes can occur because erasing and rewriting a block in place is inherently unsafe. Obviously for a 60 GB disk, multiply the numbers by 15. Even with 100,000 cycle flash, one could kill a drive with a naive algorithm in about four months. Okay, so it wouldn't be quite that fast because you'd have to issue write cache flush instructions between each write, but you're in the ballpark.
On the flip side, with a typical workload, a drive would likely last several years even with such a naive algorithm. This is why I'm concerned. It is quite possible for a company to implement a remarkably naive wear leveling algorithm and mostly get away with it except for a few unlucky people who end up with data loss. We saw this in the HD industry not too long ago with IBM claiming after the fact that their drives were not designed for continuous use. With such a history of reliability corner-cutting from storage vendors, I think there's good reason to expect better transparency from the flash drive vendors about how they are doing wear leveling, particularly if these products are expected to be used in enterprise installations as this drive supposedly is. Fool me once and all that....
I won't even get into the question of how one can possibly achieve anything approaching a 1.1 write amplification rate short of building custom flash chips that allow per-page erasure.... Maybe for certain synthetic workloads, but not for a degenerate workload (e.g. write blocks sequentially with a stride length of the same size as (or larger than) the physical flash block size until you exceed the capacity of the write cache, rinse, repeat).... Otherwise, that seems at least an order of magnitude lower than is plausible. I'd have to see white papers explaining exactly how they're doing this miraculously good wear leveling before I'd trust any low-cycle-count SSDs in anything resembling a production server....
IMHO, we also need a couple of orders of magnitude more write cycles. I'm not entirely comfortable even with devices that claim a million write-erase cycles, much less multi-level devices like this one that only go for probably 10,000 write-erase cycles.
If they used a poor wear leveling algorithm, for example (e.g. one that relies solely on a pool of a few percent of spare blocks), you could make a 10k-cycle SSD unwritable in just a couple of hours. Somehow I am very uncomfortable knowing that the only thing between me and a complete drive failure is a proprietary algorithm that I have to blindly trust without the ability to inspect it and without any real peer review from other companies in the field. Short of either open sourcing these algorithms or creating open industry standards for how they work, the thought of relying on a SSD with such a short maximum cycle count is way, way outside my comfort zone.