To me, Colin Powell spent whatever credibility he had by trying to sell the administrations case for war at the UN, even though he apparently wasn't any too convinced of the facts.
Agreed. I would consider voting for either Obama or McCain, though I favor Obama. However, if Obama picked Colin Powell as his VP, I would vote for McCain faster than a U.S. Senator can take a bribe^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign contribution.
So true. Heck, I'd be happy if we could just get rid of all the web designers who build bloated Flash-based websites when simple HTML and a handful of graphics would look just as good and work much better....
Precisely the same drives, but with one key difference. Apple abusively tests components, and if a line of drives fail certification or shows a high early failure rate, the product gets yanked from the assembly line until the vendor retools their line and corrects the flaw in that component. Of course, such a benefit is temporary---once any old stock of a flawed drive has been sold from vendors' shelves, everybody gets the benefit from that---but don't be fooled into thinking there's never any benefit. Now whether that benefit is worth the extra cost is another question. As for myself, when it comes to hard drives, after watching two Seagate drives bite the dust within a single week, my level of distrust in spinning drives is so high that no amount of extra testing will make me trust anything less than three independent copies of EVERYTHING, at which point the quality of the components ceases to be of much consequence....:-)
With RAM, IIRC, some cheap RAM vendors don't (or at least didn't at one time) handle low power states quite right, so you might see computers (particularly laptops) fail to wake from sleep sporadically or exhibit random memory corruption after sleep. For that reason, it is always good to pick a vendor that Apple also ships or at least pick a vendor that guarantees compatibility with Macs. I don't know if it is still an issue these days, but at least historically, Macs---laptops in particular---required stricter tolerances than your garden variety Windows laptop, so if you're buying your own RAM, don't skimp on the quality of the parts. (Remember: RAM is crucial, so buy Crucial RAM.)
To be fair, the IIsi was physically much smaller than the IIci, so to expect them to cram a IIci into that form factor complete with a NuBus slot might be going too far. Besides, the PDS slot was much more practical than a NuBus slot when it comes to CPU accelerators, and given that the '040-based Quadras were already looming, the easy ability to upgrade to an '040 CPU was probably a consideration.
The problem is that the guys who are good and honest and don't mask their intentions at all are weeded out in the first round by that sort of behavior. People who are trustworthy assume that they can trust others as a general rule, so when a girl sends confusing signals, they assume the girl is honestly confused. Then, they either A. try to help the girl figure out her feelings by opening up more, thus causing the girl to totally freak out because a guy actually expresses his emotions, B. interpret her ambivalence as indicative of probable future rejection and give up immediately, or C. interpret her ambivalence as a sign of dishonesty and reject the girl outright. As a result, the girl's deception ends up driving off the most loyal and honest possible mates---precisely the guys she should be trying to attract.
The most crucial thing a woman can learn is that it is better to trust and risk getting hurt than to deceive and evade, thus guaranteeing it. As for me, I reject the "game". I don't play games with other people, and I don't expect other people to play games with me. What you see is what you get, and if a girl doesn't like that and can't simply accept me without playing mind games, she isn't worth my time. Life's too short to waste time chasing after somebody who isn't honest, open, and caring.
Yeah, but according to the study, this probably means that she decided it long before she told you.... This is why dating sucks. The guy is always the last one to know that the girl he likes is just screwing with his head, has no interest in him whatsoever, and is just using him to piss off her parents, get free home repairs, make her ex jealous, etc.
I'm assuming, of course, that you're a guy. If you're a girl, she probably decided whether she would or would not sleep with you way back in college....:-D
I don't think you understood my post. First, I didn't say we should clean house every time. I said three cycles because it takes three consecutive elections to get rid of all of the members of the Senate, two cycles for the House. And yes, you might be replacing a bunch of dirtbags with more dirtbags, but at least they would have less history of accepting bribes^H^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign contributions and might be more sympathetic to the public's desire to reform things. If not, do it again until they are. If we could pull that off as a nation, the message would come through loud and clear pretty quickly.
Good luck with that being effective. So instead of donating money as a corporation or an organization, they'll just do it as private donors. You'd have to check the background of each and every person everytime they donate any money. I highly doubt that every person that donates money to Obama's campaign has no affiliation with a large corporation.
The problem is the inherent inequality of the out-of-band contributions by corporations---contributions that are not given directly to the campaign, but do effectively reduce the expenditures of the campaign, e.g. by establishing an "issue" PAC that runs ads that promote or beat up a candidate without actually crossing the line and saying whether or not to vote for that candidate. Those PACs can also pay for things like travel expenses for the candidates, etc. so long as they don't get spent on ads for the candidate. Of course, the net effect of this is exactly the same as simply allowing corporate contributions to the candidate directly, since every dollar they don't spend on those things can be spent on attack ads and other things that corporate funds can't pay for directly.
If we can eliminate all of those back-channel contributions from the corporations, then everyone is on a level playing field. Individuals have dollar limits that they can contribute directly to a campaign and corporations can't contribute at all. As such, the opinion of a corporate CEO becomes a potential loss of at most $2,000, and the opinion of every other person in the country becomes an equal potential loss of up to $2,000, so everyone's opinion carries approximately equal weight again, give or take---certainly far more equal weight than we have now with many corporations contributing hundreds of millions of dollars of soft money each campaign season. Most individuals don't have that sort of money, and thus even fairly significant groups of individuals have a hard time producing the same sort of influence over candidates that corporations manage effortlessly.
So instead of having one organization do it with large sums of money, you'd have lots of people do it with small sums of money. The results would still be the same.
Not at all. Instead of a few individuals being able to contribute so much money that the candidates can't ignore them, you have tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals each contributing small enough amounts of money that their opinions have little more weight as a contributor than the opinions of non-contributors. It's like comparing the influence of the news media versus the influence of bloggers. Every day, the news media shapes public opinion significantly because they are a few voices speaking loudly. The blogger community has much smaller influence in general because there are many more voices, each contributing a smaller piece of the overall signal. That's not saying that they can't have an effect, just that the effect of most individual bloggers is fairly limited unless other bloggers join in. That's the way democracy is supposed to work. One person's voice is limited, but millions of people's voices who happen to all pick up on the same issue and speak in one voice can overcome much. Right now, corporations have subverted that by allowing small numbers of individuals to borrow the voices of millions by accumulating wealth from those millions and using it to buy votes in their favor, and that's not right.
This is why if you're a smart businessperson, you should avoid putting your headquarters and facilities in states that have both sales tax and large populations. The best way to keep costs to a minimum is to pick states with no sales tax, followed by states with low population. So Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon have no sales tax at last count, though not all of them are ideal location-wise. So here's what you do:
Delaware covers the northeastern U.S. New Hampshire would work in a pinch.
Oregon would take care of California and the western U.S.
Billings, Montana area would take care of the midwest.
Arkansas covers the southern U.S. while impacting the smallest number of people.
Headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware (just outside Philadelphia) so you have ample qualified people willing to to work there.
By setting up a company in this way, you can basically cover the entire U.S. comfortably while charging sales tax for less than 1% of the population of the U.S.
They all talk a good game. Then, they vote one way for the roll call so it gets recorded that they voted in the people's favor, then change their vote after the fact. They can do that as long as the change doesn't affect the vote. Yeah. Disgusting. Or they abstain from voting because they want to vote against something but don't want to look like they are against something that has some public support and/or the support of some major corporate backer.
From what I've seen, almost all politicians on both sides of the aisle are corrupt. We would have to completely replace all of Congress in three consecutive electoral seasons if we wanted to take our country back from abusive corporate interests. Of course, such reform would have to start with the elimination of all corporate and organizational contributions. That includes everything from AT&T and the AFL-CIO down to the EFF and the ACLU. No organization should have the right to push its agenda through what amounts to legalized bribery....
If that's the case, why take it to court at all? The threat of lawsuit is only a credible threat if it is backed by a willingness to actually battle it out. Every case they give up on is further weakening their cause, both by showing people that they can fight and win and by creating animosity among judges who feel like their courtroom is being abused. In the long term, they would be much better off not taking any case to court unless they are certain they can win it....
Of the people I know, that position seems to be the majority opinion. Marriage is not between a man and a woman. It is between a couple and their church. Separation of church and state should have nipped this in the bud long ago.
As long as it's the son or daughter of a Senator, that's a good start. I guarantee those laws would change overnight if that happened....:-)
The fact of the matter is that this whole story is a non-story. The only real story here is that three ISPs are admitting to doing extra filtering of content, so anyone who wants maximum performance know which three ISPs to avoid. That said, most people who have dealt with any of those three ISPs already know this, so it's still a non-story for the most part.
One thing is certain: this isn't going to make the slightest dent in child porn. People who want to traffic in illegal information have plenty of avenues available, from Freenet to Tor to encrypted email attachments to... you name it. Further, this would only be blocking specific web sites. If someone is making money by selling content that you know is illegal, does anyone honestly believe that such a person or company can't hop from one IP to the next to stay ahead of the blocking rules?
Unless you are in an extreme fringe area, the most common cause of dropped calls is crashing baseband due to firmware bugs---flaws in the phones themselves.... From what I've seen, this usually manifests itself as a sudden drop from five bars of signal to zero, then coming back up a few seconds later. If that's what you are seeing, it's not your carrier. It's your phone.
Yeah, while we were initially concerned he might have been a Nazi, when we tried to test that theory, as soon as we measured his rate of allegiance, his position became uncertain....
Last I checked, flash write performance (at least for CF and USB stuff) still left something to be desired. A laptop hard drive still exceeds the speed of flash when writing by a factor of about 2-3 or thereabouts. The read performance is almost even for 5400 RPM laptop drives, and within a factor of 1.5 of even 7200 RPM drives, so that's more livable. You probably wouldn't want to capture audio or video to a flash drive or do other tasks that involve continuous high speed writes, at least for now.
Compared with the time to spin up a drive, of course, small flash reads and writes are faster by maybe a factor of a thousand.... From a performance perspective, until flash gets a bit faster, it still probably makes sense to mix the two, IMHO. Medium term, though, I totally agree that in laptops, HDs should ideally go away entirely.
At current prices, flash parts in consumer form factors are still about 7x-12x more expensive (about $3-5 per gig compared with about $0.42 per gig for a laptop hard drive). You're right, though, that the cost of moving to flash drives is getting a lot more palatable. Give it five years and people will be asking what kind of idiot would put a spinning drive in a laptop.:-)
Yes and no. You're right that spinning up and down causes more mechanical wear on the spindle motor. However, leaving drives in laptops running continuously is also bad. Hard drives don't like heat, and laptop enclosures are not designed to dissipate heat from the drive. They basically have zero airflow across the drive, so the top of the drive enclosure and the case develop this layer of heated air that further insulates the drive from dissipating heat.
Further, AFAIK, spindle motors haven't been the most common cause of problems since the move to fluid bearings. The biggest cause of damage in modern hard drives is failure of the heads (electrically or mechanically) due to damage from the parking ramp. The odds of this damage are greatly increased if the drive is heated, as heating causes uneven expansion of the head arm. The second most common cause is a head crash. The odds of a head crash are also dramatically increased at higher temperatures for the same reason---the heads can end up flying closer to the platter, so a much smaller impact can cause a scarring event....
While the drive does park the heads during spin-up/spin-down, the drive may also park the heads at any time when the drive is inactive without spinning the drive down to reduce the risk of head crashes in the event of sudden impact. Also, newer laptop drives automatically park the heads very rapidly if their motion sensors detect the machine is falling for the same reason. That extra parking contributes much more significantly to premature failures than cycling power on the spindle motor. More to the point, this means that idle periods without spinning the drive down are exactly as bad as spinning the drive down, at least where head failures are concerned. Thus, if you can instead park the heads and spin the drive down and leave it down and only spin it up periodically, you are actually reducing the two most common causes of premature drive failure.
Most modern operating systems already limit the number of spin-downs by leaving the drive running for a minimum of a minute at a time. Using flash for write caching would take care of the other piece of the puzzle by eliminating the unnecessary spin-ups and allowing the system drive to spin down where it otherwise might never be able to do so (if the sync daemon spins it up every 30 seconds and it only spins down after a minute of inactivity... you do the math). Don't look at this cache idea in isolation. Look it as just another part of the caching and power management that is already in place. In general, this won't increase the number of spin-ups and spin-downs except in the degenerate case where the number of spin-downs is zero because of continuous trickle activity. It will usually decrease the spin-up/spin-down count by removing one of the most common (and unnecessary) causes of spin-ups.
Note: I am not a storage engineer, so take this with a grain of salt.
Because write caches in RAM go away when your computer crashes, the power fails, etc. Battery-backed RAM is an option, but is a lot harder to get right than a USB flash part connected to an internal USB connector on a motherboard.... In-memory write caching (without battery backup) for more than a handful of seconds (to avoid writing files that are created and immediately deleted) is a very, very bad idea. There's a reason that no OS keeps data in a write cache for more than about 30 seconds (and even that is about five times too long, IMHO).
Write caching is the only way you can avoid constantly spinning up the disk. We already have lots of read caching, so no amount of improvement to read caching is likely to improve things that dramatically over what we have already.
Even for read caching, however, there are advantages to having hot block caches that are persistent across reboots, power failures, crashes, etc. (provided that your filesystem format provides a last modified date at the volume level so you can dispose of any read caches if someone pulls the drive, modifies it with a different computer, and puts the drive back). Think of it as basically prewarming the in-memory cache, but without the performance impact....
Five years ago, I would have agreed. These days, some of the better flash parts are rated as high as a million write cycles. If we're talking about 4 GB of flash, a million write cycles on every block would take a decade of continuous writes at 10 megabytes per second. Real-world workflows obviously won't hit the cache nearly that hard unless your OS has a completely worthless RAM-based write caching algorithm.... Odds are, the computer will wear out and be replaced long before the flash fails. That said, in the event of a flash write failure, you can always spin up the drive and do things the old-fashioned way. And, of course, assuming you put this on a card inside the machine, if it does fail, you wouldn't have to replace the whole motherboard to fix the problem.
That said, to reduce thrashing of the write cache, it might be a good idea to add a cap of a meg or two and spin up the hard drive asynchronously once the write cache size exceed that limit. Continue writing to the flash to avoid causing user delays while the HD spins up (huge perceived user performance win there, too) and flush once the drive is up to speed.
You could also do smart caching of ephemeral data (e.g. anything in/tmp,/var/tmp, etc.). Instead of flushing changes those files to disk on close, wait to flush them until there's no room for them in the RAM buffer cache, and then flush them to the flash. After all, those directories get wiped on reboot anyway, so if the computer crashes, there's no advantage to having flushed anything in those directories to disk....
BTW, in the last week, I've lost two hard drives, both less than a year old. I'm not too impressed with the write lifetimes of Winchester disk mechanisms.:-)
I was thinking about this at Fry's the other day when trying to decide whether I could trust the replacement Seagate laptop drive similar to the one that crashed on me Sunday, and I concluded that the place I most want to see flash deployed is in laptops. Eventually, HDDs should be replaced with SSDs for obvious reliability reasons, particularly in laptops. However, in the short term, even just a few gigs of flash could dramatically improve hard drive reliability and battery life for a fairly negligible increase in the per-unit cost of the machines.
Basically, my idea is a lot like the Robson cache idea, but with a less absurd caching policy. Instead of uselessly making tasks like booting faster (I basically only boot after an OS update, and a stale boot cache won't help that any), the cache policy should be to try to make the hard drive spin less frequently and to provide protection of the most important data from drive failures. This means three things:
A handful of frequently used applications should be cached. The user should be able to choose apps to be cached, and any changes to the app should automatically write through the cache to the disk so that the apps are always identical in cache and on disk.
The most important user data should be stored there. The user should have control over which files get automatically backed up whenever they are modified. Basically a Time Machine Lite so you can have access to several previous versions of selected critical files even while on the go. The OS could also provide an emergency boot tool on the install CD to copy files out of the cache to another disk in case of a hard drive crash.
The remainder of the disk space should be used for a sparse disk image as a write cache for the hard drive, with automatic hot files caching and (to the maximum extent practical) caching of any catalog tree data that gets kicked out of the kernel's in-memory cache.
That last part is the best part. As data gets written to the hard drive, if the disk is not already spinning, the data would be written to the flash. The drive would spin up and get flushed to disk on shutdown to ensure that if you yank the drive out and put it into another machine, you don't get stale data. It would also be flushed whenever the disk has to spin up for some other activity (e.g. reading a block that isn't in the cache). The cache should also probably be flushed periodically (say once an hour) to minimize data loss in the event of a motherboard failure. If the computer crashes, the data would be flushed on the next boot. (Of course this means that unless the computer had boot-firmware-level support for reading data through such a cache, the OS would presumably need to flush the cache and disable write caching while updating or reinstalling the OS to avoid the risk of an unbootable system and/or data loss.)
As a result of such a design, the hard drive would rarely spin up except for reads, and any data frequently read would presumably come out of the in-kernel disk cache, so basically the hard drive should stay spun down until the user explicitly opened a file or launched a new application. This would eliminate the nearly constant spin-ups of the system drive resulting from relatively unimportant activity like registry/preference file writes, log data writes, etc. By being non-volatile, it would do so in a safe way.
This is similar to what some vendors already do, I know, but integrating it with the OS's buffer cache to make the caching more intelligent and giving the user the ability to request backups of certain data seem like useful enhancements.
Thoughts? Besides wondering what kind of person thinks through this while staring at a wall of hard drives at Fry's?:-)
Worse than that. Part of that is the fact that RAID vendors tell people to go with drives from the same manufacturer to optimize performance, when in reality, they should be doing with the most diverse pool of drives possible, dramatically reducing the probability of multiple catastrophic failures at the same time (except through human error, some sort of physical impact, electrical surge, etc.). If a drive has a design defect, it isn't at all uncommon for them all to fail at n+/-k hours for some relatively small value of k. If all your drives are the same model from the same batch, your probability of losing the entire array is suddenly remarkably close to 100%. RAID with the same model of drive dramatically reduces reliability in the name of performance.
Even mirroring is basically useless for reliability if the drives are from the same vendor unless you swap out the mirrored drive daily so that no single backup has been operating more than half as long as the main drive. RAID is a nice idea in theory, but the reality is that with what seems to be a rapid decline in hard drive reliability over the past few years, in practice, performance notwithstanding, RAID just raises your power bill and guarantees you have two drives to ship back to the manufacturer for replacement instead of one.
As an aside, I had two personal hard drives die in the past week (and four within the last year). When you consider that I only have about 5 drives in regular use, that's alarming. Both of these drives were under a year old. One was a Seagate 500 GB drive in continuous operation in a heavily cooled tower (sides off the tower, four fans blowing outside air straight across the drive). Came into the house and it sounded like someone was using a radial arm saw. Cloned off enough data before the drive stopped reading any blocks at all, so my MythTV box is up and running again. That lasted about 9 months. The other was a Seagate 160 GB 5400 RPM laptop drive. Lasted 11 months and suddenly went into click-of-death mode where no data was accessible from the drive. It's going to be a long time and a lot of therapy before I'll ever trust anything important to a Winchester drive again... and Seagate went in a single week from my "high reliability, buy over all other vendors" list to my "not in a million years" list.
Email creates more logs than a fax. It creates a log not only at the server on either end, but in cases of companies with complex relaying setups, potentially multiple servers in between.... I'm assuming what you mean is that a fax creates a third-party log at the phone company. Even this is trivially falsifiable, however, with a trunk line and a device that generates a false Caller ID message. While IIRC there is a secondary log that's harder to falsify, if memory serves, good luck getting access to it except as part of a criminal investigation....
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Agreed. I would consider voting for either Obama or McCain, though I favor Obama. However, if Obama picked Colin Powell as his VP, I would vote for McCain faster than a U.S. Senator can take a bribe^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign contribution.
So true. Heck, I'd be happy if we could just get rid of all the web designers who build bloated Flash-based websites when simple HTML and a handful of graphics would look just as good and work much better....
Well, you'll be happy to know that Safari 3.1.x (at least in Mac OS X) launches in about a second. :-)
Precisely the same drives, but with one key difference. Apple abusively tests components, and if a line of drives fail certification or shows a high early failure rate, the product gets yanked from the assembly line until the vendor retools their line and corrects the flaw in that component. Of course, such a benefit is temporary---once any old stock of a flawed drive has been sold from vendors' shelves, everybody gets the benefit from that---but don't be fooled into thinking there's never any benefit. Now whether that benefit is worth the extra cost is another question. As for myself, when it comes to hard drives, after watching two Seagate drives bite the dust within a single week, my level of distrust in spinning drives is so high that no amount of extra testing will make me trust anything less than three independent copies of EVERYTHING, at which point the quality of the components ceases to be of much consequence.... :-)
With RAM, IIRC, some cheap RAM vendors don't (or at least didn't at one time) handle low power states quite right, so you might see computers (particularly laptops) fail to wake from sleep sporadically or exhibit random memory corruption after sleep. For that reason, it is always good to pick a vendor that Apple also ships or at least pick a vendor that guarantees compatibility with Macs. I don't know if it is still an issue these days, but at least historically, Macs---laptops in particular---required stricter tolerances than your garden variety Windows laptop, so if you're buying your own RAM, don't skimp on the quality of the parts. (Remember: RAM is crucial, so buy Crucial RAM.)
Just my $0.02.
To be fair, the IIsi was physically much smaller than the IIci, so to expect them to cram a IIci into that form factor complete with a NuBus slot might be going too far. Besides, the PDS slot was much more practical than a NuBus slot when it comes to CPU accelerators, and given that the '040-based Quadras were already looming, the easy ability to upgrade to an '040 CPU was probably a consideration.
The problem is that the guys who are good and honest and don't mask their intentions at all are weeded out in the first round by that sort of behavior. People who are trustworthy assume that they can trust others as a general rule, so when a girl sends confusing signals, they assume the girl is honestly confused. Then, they either A. try to help the girl figure out her feelings by opening up more, thus causing the girl to totally freak out because a guy actually expresses his emotions, B. interpret her ambivalence as indicative of probable future rejection and give up immediately, or C. interpret her ambivalence as a sign of dishonesty and reject the girl outright. As a result, the girl's deception ends up driving off the most loyal and honest possible mates---precisely the guys she should be trying to attract.
The most crucial thing a woman can learn is that it is better to trust and risk getting hurt than to deceive and evade, thus guaranteeing it. As for me, I reject the "game". I don't play games with other people, and I don't expect other people to play games with me. What you see is what you get, and if a girl doesn't like that and can't simply accept me without playing mind games, she isn't worth my time. Life's too short to waste time chasing after somebody who isn't honest, open, and caring.
Yeah, but according to the study, this probably means that she decided it long before she told you.... This is why dating sucks. The guy is always the last one to know that the girl he likes is just screwing with his head, has no interest in him whatsoever, and is just using him to piss off her parents, get free home repairs, make her ex jealous, etc.
I'm assuming, of course, that you're a guy. If you're a girl, she probably decided whether she would or would not sleep with you way back in college.... :-D
It's kind of gamey... like spotted owl and bald eagle.... :-D
I don't think you understood my post. First, I didn't say we should clean house every time. I said three cycles because it takes three consecutive elections to get rid of all of the members of the Senate, two cycles for the House. And yes, you might be replacing a bunch of dirtbags with more dirtbags, but at least they would have less history of accepting bribes^H^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign contributions and might be more sympathetic to the public's desire to reform things. If not, do it again until they are. If we could pull that off as a nation, the message would come through loud and clear pretty quickly.
The problem is the inherent inequality of the out-of-band contributions by corporations---contributions that are not given directly to the campaign, but do effectively reduce the expenditures of the campaign, e.g. by establishing an "issue" PAC that runs ads that promote or beat up a candidate without actually crossing the line and saying whether or not to vote for that candidate. Those PACs can also pay for things like travel expenses for the candidates, etc. so long as they don't get spent on ads for the candidate. Of course, the net effect of this is exactly the same as simply allowing corporate contributions to the candidate directly, since every dollar they don't spend on those things can be spent on attack ads and other things that corporate funds can't pay for directly.
If we can eliminate all of those back-channel contributions from the corporations, then everyone is on a level playing field. Individuals have dollar limits that they can contribute directly to a campaign and corporations can't contribute at all. As such, the opinion of a corporate CEO becomes a potential loss of at most $2,000, and the opinion of every other person in the country becomes an equal potential loss of up to $2,000, so everyone's opinion carries approximately equal weight again, give or take---certainly far more equal weight than we have now with many corporations contributing hundreds of millions of dollars of soft money each campaign season. Most individuals don't have that sort of money, and thus even fairly significant groups of individuals have a hard time producing the same sort of influence over candidates that corporations manage effortlessly.
Not at all. Instead of a few individuals being able to contribute so much money that the candidates can't ignore them, you have tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals each contributing small enough amounts of money that their opinions have little more weight as a contributor than the opinions of non-contributors. It's like comparing the influence of the news media versus the influence of bloggers. Every day, the news media shapes public opinion significantly because they are a few voices speaking loudly. The blogger community has much smaller influence in general because there are many more voices, each contributing a smaller piece of the overall signal. That's not saying that they can't have an effect, just that the effect of most individual bloggers is fairly limited unless other bloggers join in. That's the way democracy is supposed to work. One person's voice is limited, but millions of people's voices who happen to all pick up on the same issue and speak in one voice can overcome much. Right now, corporations have subverted that by allowing small numbers of individuals to borrow the voices of millions by accumulating wealth from those millions and using it to buy votes in their favor, and that's not right.
This is why if you're a smart businessperson, you should avoid putting your headquarters and facilities in states that have both sales tax and large populations. The best way to keep costs to a minimum is to pick states with no sales tax, followed by states with low population. So Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon have no sales tax at last count, though not all of them are ideal location-wise. So here's what you do:
By setting up a company in this way, you can basically cover the entire U.S. comfortably while charging sales tax for less than 1% of the population of the U.S.
They all talk a good game. Then, they vote one way for the roll call so it gets recorded that they voted in the people's favor, then change their vote after the fact. They can do that as long as the change doesn't affect the vote. Yeah. Disgusting. Or they abstain from voting because they want to vote against something but don't want to look like they are against something that has some public support and/or the support of some major corporate backer.
From what I've seen, almost all politicians on both sides of the aisle are corrupt. We would have to completely replace all of Congress in three consecutive electoral seasons if we wanted to take our country back from abusive corporate interests. Of course, such reform would have to start with the elimination of all corporate and organizational contributions. That includes everything from AT&T and the AFL-CIO down to the EFF and the ACLU. No organization should have the right to push its agenda through what amounts to legalized bribery....
If that's the case, why take it to court at all? The threat of lawsuit is only a credible threat if it is backed by a willingness to actually battle it out. Every case they give up on is further weakening their cause, both by showing people that they can fight and win and by creating animosity among judges who feel like their courtroom is being abused. In the long term, they would be much better off not taking any case to court unless they are certain they can win it....
Of the people I know, that position seems to be the majority opinion. Marriage is not between a man and a woman. It is between a couple and their church. Separation of church and state should have nipped this in the bud long ago.
As long as it's the son or daughter of a Senator, that's a good start. I guarantee those laws would change overnight if that happened.... :-)
The fact of the matter is that this whole story is a non-story. The only real story here is that three ISPs are admitting to doing extra filtering of content, so anyone who wants maximum performance know which three ISPs to avoid. That said, most people who have dealt with any of those three ISPs already know this, so it's still a non-story for the most part.
One thing is certain: this isn't going to make the slightest dent in child porn. People who want to traffic in illegal information have plenty of avenues available, from Freenet to Tor to encrypted email attachments to... you name it. Further, this would only be blocking specific web sites. If someone is making money by selling content that you know is illegal, does anyone honestly believe that such a person or company can't hop from one IP to the next to stay ahead of the blocking rules?
Unless you are in an extreme fringe area, the most common cause of dropped calls is crashing baseband due to firmware bugs---flaws in the phones themselves.... From what I've seen, this usually manifests itself as a sudden drop from five bars of signal to zero, then coming back up a few seconds later. If that's what you are seeing, it's not your carrier. It's your phone.
Yeah, while we were initially concerned he might have been a Nazi, when we tried to test that theory, as soon as we measured his rate of allegiance, his position became uncertain....
No. You must be new here. :-)
Last I checked, flash write performance (at least for CF and USB stuff) still left something to be desired. A laptop hard drive still exceeds the speed of flash when writing by a factor of about 2-3 or thereabouts. The read performance is almost even for 5400 RPM laptop drives, and within a factor of 1.5 of even 7200 RPM drives, so that's more livable. You probably wouldn't want to capture audio or video to a flash drive or do other tasks that involve continuous high speed writes, at least for now.
Compared with the time to spin up a drive, of course, small flash reads and writes are faster by maybe a factor of a thousand.... From a performance perspective, until flash gets a bit faster, it still probably makes sense to mix the two, IMHO. Medium term, though, I totally agree that in laptops, HDs should ideally go away entirely.
At current prices, flash parts in consumer form factors are still about 7x-12x more expensive (about $3-5 per gig compared with about $0.42 per gig for a laptop hard drive). You're right, though, that the cost of moving to flash drives is getting a lot more palatable. Give it five years and people will be asking what kind of idiot would put a spinning drive in a laptop. :-)
Yes and no. You're right that spinning up and down causes more mechanical wear on the spindle motor. However, leaving drives in laptops running continuously is also bad. Hard drives don't like heat, and laptop enclosures are not designed to dissipate heat from the drive. They basically have zero airflow across the drive, so the top of the drive enclosure and the case develop this layer of heated air that further insulates the drive from dissipating heat.
Further, AFAIK, spindle motors haven't been the most common cause of problems since the move to fluid bearings. The biggest cause of damage in modern hard drives is failure of the heads (electrically or mechanically) due to damage from the parking ramp. The odds of this damage are greatly increased if the drive is heated, as heating causes uneven expansion of the head arm. The second most common cause is a head crash. The odds of a head crash are also dramatically increased at higher temperatures for the same reason---the heads can end up flying closer to the platter, so a much smaller impact can cause a scarring event....
While the drive does park the heads during spin-up/spin-down, the drive may also park the heads at any time when the drive is inactive without spinning the drive down to reduce the risk of head crashes in the event of sudden impact. Also, newer laptop drives automatically park the heads very rapidly if their motion sensors detect the machine is falling for the same reason. That extra parking contributes much more significantly to premature failures than cycling power on the spindle motor. More to the point, this means that idle periods without spinning the drive down are exactly as bad as spinning the drive down, at least where head failures are concerned. Thus, if you can instead park the heads and spin the drive down and leave it down and only spin it up periodically, you are actually reducing the two most common causes of premature drive failure.
Most modern operating systems already limit the number of spin-downs by leaving the drive running for a minimum of a minute at a time. Using flash for write caching would take care of the other piece of the puzzle by eliminating the unnecessary spin-ups and allowing the system drive to spin down where it otherwise might never be able to do so (if the sync daemon spins it up every 30 seconds and it only spins down after a minute of inactivity... you do the math). Don't look at this cache idea in isolation. Look it as just another part of the caching and power management that is already in place. In general, this won't increase the number of spin-ups and spin-downs except in the degenerate case where the number of spin-downs is zero because of continuous trickle activity. It will usually decrease the spin-up/spin-down count by removing one of the most common (and unnecessary) causes of spin-ups.
Note: I am not a storage engineer, so take this with a grain of salt.
Because write caches in RAM go away when your computer crashes, the power fails, etc. Battery-backed RAM is an option, but is a lot harder to get right than a USB flash part connected to an internal USB connector on a motherboard.... In-memory write caching (without battery backup) for more than a handful of seconds (to avoid writing files that are created and immediately deleted) is a very, very bad idea. There's a reason that no OS keeps data in a write cache for more than about 30 seconds (and even that is about five times too long, IMHO).
Write caching is the only way you can avoid constantly spinning up the disk. We already have lots of read caching, so no amount of improvement to read caching is likely to improve things that dramatically over what we have already.
Even for read caching, however, there are advantages to having hot block caches that are persistent across reboots, power failures, crashes, etc. (provided that your filesystem format provides a last modified date at the volume level so you can dispose of any read caches if someone pulls the drive, modifies it with a different computer, and puts the drive back). Think of it as basically prewarming the in-memory cache, but without the performance impact....
Five years ago, I would have agreed. These days, some of the better flash parts are rated as high as a million write cycles. If we're talking about 4 GB of flash, a million write cycles on every block would take a decade of continuous writes at 10 megabytes per second. Real-world workflows obviously won't hit the cache nearly that hard unless your OS has a completely worthless RAM-based write caching algorithm.... Odds are, the computer will wear out and be replaced long before the flash fails. That said, in the event of a flash write failure, you can always spin up the drive and do things the old-fashioned way. And, of course, assuming you put this on a card inside the machine, if it does fail, you wouldn't have to replace the whole motherboard to fix the problem.
That said, to reduce thrashing of the write cache, it might be a good idea to add a cap of a meg or two and spin up the hard drive asynchronously once the write cache size exceed that limit. Continue writing to the flash to avoid causing user delays while the HD spins up (huge perceived user performance win there, too) and flush once the drive is up to speed.
You could also do smart caching of ephemeral data (e.g. anything in /tmp, /var/tmp, etc.). Instead of flushing changes those files to disk on close, wait to flush them until there's no room for them in the RAM buffer cache, and then flush them to the flash. After all, those directories get wiped on reboot anyway, so if the computer crashes, there's no advantage to having flushed anything in those directories to disk....
BTW, in the last week, I've lost two hard drives, both less than a year old. I'm not too impressed with the write lifetimes of Winchester disk mechanisms. :-)
I was thinking about this at Fry's the other day when trying to decide whether I could trust the replacement Seagate laptop drive similar to the one that crashed on me Sunday, and I concluded that the place I most want to see flash deployed is in laptops. Eventually, HDDs should be replaced with SSDs for obvious reliability reasons, particularly in laptops. However, in the short term, even just a few gigs of flash could dramatically improve hard drive reliability and battery life for a fairly negligible increase in the per-unit cost of the machines.
Basically, my idea is a lot like the Robson cache idea, but with a less absurd caching policy. Instead of uselessly making tasks like booting faster (I basically only boot after an OS update, and a stale boot cache won't help that any), the cache policy should be to try to make the hard drive spin less frequently and to provide protection of the most important data from drive failures. This means three things:
That last part is the best part. As data gets written to the hard drive, if the disk is not already spinning, the data would be written to the flash. The drive would spin up and get flushed to disk on shutdown to ensure that if you yank the drive out and put it into another machine, you don't get stale data. It would also be flushed whenever the disk has to spin up for some other activity (e.g. reading a block that isn't in the cache). The cache should also probably be flushed periodically (say once an hour) to minimize data loss in the event of a motherboard failure. If the computer crashes, the data would be flushed on the next boot. (Of course this means that unless the computer had boot-firmware-level support for reading data through such a cache, the OS would presumably need to flush the cache and disable write caching while updating or reinstalling the OS to avoid the risk of an unbootable system and/or data loss.)
As a result of such a design, the hard drive would rarely spin up except for reads, and any data frequently read would presumably come out of the in-kernel disk cache, so basically the hard drive should stay spun down until the user explicitly opened a file or launched a new application. This would eliminate the nearly constant spin-ups of the system drive resulting from relatively unimportant activity like registry/preference file writes, log data writes, etc. By being non-volatile, it would do so in a safe way.
This is similar to what some vendors already do, I know, but integrating it with the OS's buffer cache to make the caching more intelligent and giving the user the ability to request backups of certain data seem like useful enhancements.
Thoughts? Besides wondering what kind of person thinks through this while staring at a wall of hard drives at Fry's? :-)
D**n it, Bill, I'm an actor, not a doctor. Wait, what?
Worse than that. Part of that is the fact that RAID vendors tell people to go with drives from the same manufacturer to optimize performance, when in reality, they should be doing with the most diverse pool of drives possible, dramatically reducing the probability of multiple catastrophic failures at the same time (except through human error, some sort of physical impact, electrical surge, etc.). If a drive has a design defect, it isn't at all uncommon for them all to fail at n+/-k hours for some relatively small value of k. If all your drives are the same model from the same batch, your probability of losing the entire array is suddenly remarkably close to 100%. RAID with the same model of drive dramatically reduces reliability in the name of performance.
Even mirroring is basically useless for reliability if the drives are from the same vendor unless you swap out the mirrored drive daily so that no single backup has been operating more than half as long as the main drive. RAID is a nice idea in theory, but the reality is that with what seems to be a rapid decline in hard drive reliability over the past few years, in practice, performance notwithstanding, RAID just raises your power bill and guarantees you have two drives to ship back to the manufacturer for replacement instead of one.
As an aside, I had two personal hard drives die in the past week (and four within the last year). When you consider that I only have about 5 drives in regular use, that's alarming. Both of these drives were under a year old. One was a Seagate 500 GB drive in continuous operation in a heavily cooled tower (sides off the tower, four fans blowing outside air straight across the drive). Came into the house and it sounded like someone was using a radial arm saw. Cloned off enough data before the drive stopped reading any blocks at all, so my MythTV box is up and running again. That lasted about 9 months. The other was a Seagate 160 GB 5400 RPM laptop drive. Lasted 11 months and suddenly went into click-of-death mode where no data was accessible from the drive. It's going to be a long time and a lot of therapy before I'll ever trust anything important to a Winchester drive again... and Seagate went in a single week from my "high reliability, buy over all other vendors" list to my "not in a million years" list.
Email creates more logs than a fax. It creates a log not only at the server on either end, but in cases of companies with complex relaying setups, potentially multiple servers in between.... I'm assuming what you mean is that a fax creates a third-party log at the phone company. Even this is trivially falsifiable, however, with a trunk line and a device that generates a false Caller ID message. While IIRC there is a secondary log that's harder to falsify, if memory serves, good luck getting access to it except as part of a criminal investigation....