What sort of cultural dysfunction makes wrinkly old people in positions of authority so insufferable? Is it the rock and roll devil music that they were exposed to as children?
There are a lot of violent video games these days and yet crime has continued to go down.
Taking your anger out on pixels on a screen is far easier and cost efficient over running rampant on real people.
Also, anything that keeps early teen through 20something men off the streets in record numbers is practically assured to reduce opportunistic petty violence unless it actively contains subhypnotic kill-programming technology...
... or (maybe more up his creek) take a nice trip island-hopping in the Caribbean in a sailboat without satellite connection.
Either place may lack a proper, always-on Internet connection, but why should that stop the people from enjoying a game on their console?... Oh, DRM!
He might want to worry about the reports of teenagers, especially the poorer ones, accessing the internet primarily on cellphones. If you want to use the internet in seriousness, with massive downloading and low ping, and I'll-connect-however-much-I-want-to-my-router-damn-it, and so on, cellular internet is fucking expensive. If, however, you want to follow your friends' twitfeeds and facebook and whatnot, with light web browsing and so forth, you can get surprisingly endurable lower midrange Android devices for not much, along with a prepaid or no-contract monthly service. The price per kilobyte is pretty painful compared to a landline(just as the price per minute of a prepaid is pretty painful compared to POTS); but your ability to start and stop paying as circumstances require is much greater, your credit score is irrelevant, and it is very convenient. It isn't, though, going to let you connect your xbox to the internet continuously.
Such people probably aren't the best of customers, compared to 100k/year techies who buy all consoles at launch day and have a crazy-high attach rate; but consoles are cheap, especially 6+ months after release, and even people a fair way down the ladder can afford to buy the occasional game(per hour, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than going to the movies). They are probably also the ones least likely to be buying MS software in other contexts(since computer penetration skews wealthy and rich harder than console penetration does). Are those customers really not numerous enough to be worth it?
First, using the 'Gee golly shucks, that's just the way the world is' argument when you are part of making the world that way is a smarmy cop-out.
Sure, it is realistic and pragmatic to deal with conditions that are not within your power to change. However, if you change the conditions and then tell anybody who protests to just be realistic, that's the way it is, as though the matter is somehow one of historical inevitability, you are a shirking little weasel.
Second, during the exchange screenshotted here he responds to the "some people's internet goes out" argument with "Electricity goes out too". Yup, no shit. However(as I hope some MS datacenter or operations people will be willing to take him into the hot aisle and beat into him with spare rack rails) Downtime is additive. If somebody says "Downtime source A exists." the correct answer is not "Oh yeah? Downtime source B also exists!". That isn't a refutation, that's just a confirmation that your uptime will potentially suffer from at least two weak links, rather than just one. Every system-critical component you add is a component that can reduce your uptime. 'Always on', just means that MS' datacenter operations and the customer's ISPs are now system-critical components.
Third, has this guy taken a look at any market penetration numbers for wireline broadband vs. cell-only users and console vs. PC gaming in less connected and/or poorer areas? Whether he likes it or not, Gaming, especially console gaming, is now cheap entertainment(per hour). It also requires minimal technical aptitude or interest, and has historically had low costs of entry and relatively low and flexible ongoing costs. Having adequate wireline broadband, by contrast, tends to require the sort of steady income and financial footing that allows you to keep on good terms with the phone or cable company each month, every month. Is he trying to alienate everyone who has some disposable income and a desire for amusement; but not enough income(or at least not enough stability) for wireline broadband, a golden retriever, and a white picket fence in the suburbs?
A revolutionary technique exists for putting 'pdf' documents on an 'http' server, that doesn't involve flash, registration, or any other bullshit. What, exactly, is the redeeming value here?
Windows Steadystate used to do a decent job of this on XP.
Which, for some reason that probably had nothing to do with pushing AD and group-policy tinkering on a bunch of schools and libraries and other relatively unsophisticated organizational users, is why Microsoft killed it. Support ended a couple of years back, availability 3-ish. No 64-bit or Win7 compatible version ever existed.
Please don't mistake my quotation for agreement. As it happens, Joe Pasco is a slimy shitbag even by the relaxed standards of lobbyists, he has quite the history, and the idea that '[police officers] “need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be.”' is nothing more than a flowery way of saying "We must be given impunity, or the terrorists or somebody win."
New York doesn't quite have LA's pure sleaze; but they make up for it in a more efficient, technocratic, vision of surveillance dystopia(As icing on the cake, a number of totally-ethically-unimpeachable corporate actors, mostly financial sector, even have cozy deals that provide them with access to the surveillance centers, just to keep a watchful eye on their interests...) Heartwarming place, really.
"Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Jim Pasco was quite straightforward about it.
Police officers, he told NPR, “need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be.” He added that law enforcement authorities believe “that anything that’s going to have a chilling effect on an officer moving — an apprehension that he’s being videotaped and may be made to look bad — could cost him or some citizen their life.”"
"As a user-object within the Domain Awareness System you have the permissions to set 'read deny' on your access control list. Any of your attributes can and may be used against you."
Recharging any sort of battery is going to be energy-intensive in (approximate, efficiencies will vary by design) proportion to how energy-dense the depleted battery was. Batteries store, they don't create.
One would, of course, hope that the aluminum refining is done in areas with some fuel supply other than mountains of delightfully cheap high-sulfur coal; but no battery-based system is going to work except with massive input of electricity(what would be interesting would be to get some numbers on how the energy-efficiency of shipping aluminum oxide to the generator and aluminum back stack up to transmitting electricity over conventional transmission lines... Over short distances, it couldn't possibly be more efficient; but it might turn out that bulk-carriers full of aluminum could move Icelandic geothermal energy to the US east coast much more efficiently than an undersea transmission line could...)
That's ridiculous, given how energy-intensive it is to produce aluminum in the first place, and that if it was widely adopted you'd need a huge supply of ready-to-swap aluminum batteries. My suspicion: this isn't really a "battery", it's just recovering some of the substantial energy in the aluminum metal itself.
That's what all batteries do, electrochemically recover, at a rate more or less matched to the application, the chemical potential energy of what they are filled with. Some are also capable of being driven in reverse, to restore them to their original state. Others depend on electrochemistry that isn't so neatly reversible within the confines of a conveniently sized battery, and have to be broken down for recycling. Aluminum is the latter, unless you are willing to pop an entire aluminum smelter into your battery bay.
Aluminum makes the point particularly obvious because the most cost-effective refining process is very similar indeed to driving an aluminum-air battery in reverse, so the amount of electricity going in is blatantly visible(unlike metals for which non-electrochemical refining processes are preferred).
There's this little thing called "Prosecutorial discretion". You may not have heard of it. As it turns out, at least in the US, the prosecutor has fairly broad latitude, within the scope of 'doing their job' to push or not push specific cases. This is arguably a bad thing from a 'rule of laws not of men' perspective; but thems the rules as they stand. In this case, the 'victim' wasn't even asking for prosecution, so their hands' weren't being forced even by 'stakeholder' request or public opinion.
And, of course, I'm told that having a felony on your record has no effect at all on your future prospects... Definitely not the sort of thing that might seriously impair somebody who might want to be able to touch a computer(that isn't a McDonalds POS terminal) in an occupational context ever again.
"Felon" isn't quite the same level of permaban as "Sex Offender"; but the fun doesn't stop when your sentence is up.
No, it's a battery, or at least other designs on the same principle are counted as such. 'Primary Cells' that depend on non-reversible(in the context of the battery, reactions are generally reversible under some conditions) electrochemical reactions, including ones that incorporate air to reduce battery weight are true batteries, and quite common. Zinc-air(just distract an old person for a second and yoink their hearing aid, should be one inside) are the ones you see most commonly. There are other potential elements beside zinc; but some have worse energy densities and others are rather trickier or more badly behaved(Despite its phenomenal energy density, I suspect that the Beryllium-Air cell won't be setting the world on fire anytime soon, and the Lithium-air cell will be doing so only in the literal sense, and not in the market-adoption sense).
Aluminum-air apparently has some obnoxious properties that make building good batteries tricky(Aluminum oxidizes quite readily; but aluminum oxide forms a very effective passivating layer. Good if you want structural aluminum to not crumble in minutes, less good if you want your battery to finish consuming its aluminum electrode...) There are various clever techniques being explored to work around these problems; but they generally mean more complex electrode structures, and thus more costly batteries, than just shoving plates of aluminum sheet stock into the electrolyte bath.
All cellphones are vulnerable to being tracked by parties with physical jurisdiction(your telco, for technical and billing reasons, in addition to any sinister motives/data mining/compliance with The Feds, other telcos with towers using sufficiently similar spectrum(unless they are supplying you with service as part of some roaming agreement you'd be less interesting, one presumes; but they could hear you if they wanted to), The Feds(whatever exactly they are doing with those 'Stingrays' that is so impeccably legal that they don't want to talk about it, at all...)), and all, or overwhelmingly close to all, cell modems are little black boxes whose behavior is largely invisible, so they are suspect on that count as well(yes, even on phones with 'Open Source Firmware', this just means that the cell modem is a black box that communicates with the OS in a polite and well-understood manner, generally one amusingly similar to an AT modem on a serial line, albeit with a bunch of command set extensions).
Smartphones however(and 'featurephones' complex enough to basically be smartphones with shitty 3rd party support) have the disadvantage of running enough fancy software, generally along with an internet connection, that an attacker without physical jurisdiction may well be able to pull off an attack purely in software by planting malware at the OS level. In addition to getting more interesting data than just rough location and calls made/received, this means that Country A can(with minimal risks of repercussions) bug a citizen of Country B.
That's the reason why smartphones, in particular, along with computers and webmail accounts and other network-vulnerable services, tend to be of concern to Tibet activists and other groups that rely substantially on expat populations for coordination/PR/etc.
It's no secret that Ma Bell will be happy to tell Uncle Sam all about you if your phone is inside the US; but it is much less likely that either party would cooperate with Chinese authorities who are looking to crack down on Tibetans or Ugurs or whoever it is these days. Software attacks, though, will work just fine.
Will this increase problems with malware? Just wondering.
More room to implement complex features always means more room for exciting failures; but we've already seen (almost) nonvolatile main memory in ordinary computer systems without much incident. In a laptop with some battery life left, or a desktop plugged into the wall, 'suspend' will burn a small trickle of power to keep the memory controller refreshing the RAM more or less indefinitely. As you'd expect, suspending and then waking a system doesn't clear things up the way a good reboot does(and, if it were to become commonplace for certain sorts of computers to use nonvolatile RAM and never 'shut down' fully, a class of memory-only malware designed to avoid triggering systems that inspect the filesystem would probably arise); but the RAM is still under the control of the memory controller, and 'suspend' is only a convenience feature. If the memory controller blanks the RAM, it's game over.
A system designed to use this flash-based nonvolatile RAM would presumably skip a lot of steps that are presently enforced by the fact that RAM is volatile, and so could end up harboring memory-only malware substantially longer than traditional systems; but there wouldn't be anything preventing them from blanking everything and starting from scratch, it just wouldn't happen automatically-whether-you-want-it-or-not the moment somebody trips over the power cord.
I would strongly suspect that it's an OEM thing, mostly:
Intel, for one, sets some fairly strict boot-time requirement for an OEM to be able to slap "Ultrabook!!!!" on the laptop and possibly get some Intel 'marketing assistance' cash. Microsoft has also been doing a bit of leaning on OEMs in terms of how fast Win8 machines need to boot in order to earn their little sticker of meaningless approval.
OEMs, of course, still need to shove $400 black-friday specials out the door. What will we do? Well, it just so happens that our good buddies at Seagate have a hard drive that is super cheap, being a very undemanding mechanical model with only a small amount of flash; but just so happens to be able to(if configured and pre-cached and whatnot properly) boot the OS like a bat out of hell... Seagate proceeds to sell a giant pile of the things.
Given that Seagate knows that benchmarks are going to happen, they have no realistic hope of pulling the wool over the eyes of informed enthusiasts. I'd be surprised if they care: less cost-sensitive enthusiasts are going to buy SSDs anyway, more cost-sensitive ones may well buy if the price is right, and making the spindle slow and the cache small will definitely help there.
As a strategy for launching a successful enthusiast storage brand, Seagate's choices would be suicide; but 'enthusiast storage' isn't a terribly big market anyway, and the SSD guys own it now, so Seagate doesn't have a choice about not playing there. The OEMs, on the other hand, are caught between certification demands(which generally specify boot time, resume-time, etc. not 'IOPS Random 4k' scores) and price pressures. This product looks like it is tailor-made to be pitched right at them.
Why are we not seeing more 10K drives? Other than the WD Raptors, I haven't seen 10K desktop drives in forever.
I would think it would be a better compromise, am I missing something?
10Ks on the desktop(and, at least to some degree, although less of one, 10 and 15Ks in the enterprise) have been curb-stomped by SSDs, actually harder than their slower brethren.
Everybody knows that 5.4s and 7.2s are horribly slow, for everything except very well behaved linear reads or writes; but they are insanely capacious and cheap, so people who don't need speed buy them anyway, and by the truckload. On the consumer end, cheap shit sells by the pallet, and needs something to boot from, and on the enterprise side the (partial) unification of SAS and SATA means that a lot of stuff that you used to have to dump right to tape can now be handed off to crazy-cheap 'nearline' HDD storage(and, in sufficient quantity, a lot of less demanding storage tasks are perfectly fine on prosaic 7.2K SATA, and since SATA drives drop right into SAS slots/connectors, they all play nicely with the RAID backplanes and hot-swap trays and things, which wasn't the case back in the PATA/SCSI days).
Among people who need I/O above all, any mechanical drive is an amusing little smudge clinging to the X axis when graphed against the performance of any halfway decent SSD. When a good SSD can easily be several orders of magnitude faster, the fact that you might(best case) triple performance by going from 5.4k to 15k barely registers; but the price of increasing spindle speeds certainly does.
Velociraptors, and their ilk, had a brief period of popularity back when all the 15Ks were SCSI(and so were either wildly expensive, or dodgy fleabay gear, and usually needed an add-on card that cost more than most consumer hard drives, even used) and SSDs were either nonexistent or more expensive than entire workstations. Now, they just aren't a terribly impressive offering. If you don't care much, you can get a rather larger and quieter HDD for substantially less money. If you do care, a surprisingly small premium will get you an SSD that will blow the Velociraptor out of the water.
The gulf between good solid state storage and mechanical storage, in terms of latency, is just so enormous that we will probably see more retreating from higher spindle speeds than advancing. High precision, high reliability mechanical parts are stubbornly costly, so increasing spindle speeds isn't free; but the performance gap is sufficiently vast that even some terrifying HDD built with ultracentrifuge technology just isn't going to be as fast as an SSD. Flash prices are still high enough that HDDs have plenty of retreating room into high capacity/high latency applications; but any attempt to achieve parity in low-latency work would just be comedic(if probably impressive from an engineering standpoint, and when it tore itself apart and shredded everything nearby)...
Given that this is HP we are talking about, idolizing the product economy will likely get them nowhere in a shoddy, OEM-outsourced, and increasingly uncompetitive hurry.
At least a real hurry will bear some resemblance to what HP did in the good old days....
Isn't it a trifle interesting to see the language used to describe the (ostensible) owners of the company attempting to exert control over the people who are allegedly just hired to run it?
"Shareholder revolt" in the LA Times, "Shareholder insurrection" in TFS, and this was reporting on a vote, taken by shareholders, on the board members(notably, unlike political elections, the incumbent remains in office unless at least half of voting stock votes against them, not by actually having to compete against other candidates for votes). Two of the directors barely survived, at 54 and 55 percent respectively.
So when can people running ddr1 or ddr2 expect to get some multilayer chips that vastly increase memory bandwidth in older systems?
Given that, for PC applications at any rate, the memory controller is built into either the motherboard or the CPU, there is likely to be a bottleneck there in any case. There would have been no reason for designers of memory controllers of the era to spec them out with the expectation of more than modest improvements.
Also, this '3D memory' stuff includes a memory controller with the DRAM dice stacked on top. To what, exactly, in a DDR2-using system are you going to connect a fancy new memory controller?
If you were a real high roller with a big cluster full of multi-socket hypertransport based systems or something, somebody might be moved to build some very, very, high performance memory modules that occupy CPU sockets; but that's a serious edge case. Most systems(even new ones) simply don't have a spare bus fast enough to hang substantially-faster-than-DDR3 RAM from.
Slashdot Mirror
What sort of cultural dysfunction makes wrinkly old people in positions of authority so insufferable? Is it the rock and roll devil music that they were exposed to as children?
There are a lot of violent video games these days and yet crime has continued to go down.
Taking your anger out on pixels on a screen is far easier and cost efficient over running rampant on real people.
Also, anything that keeps early teen through 20something men off the streets in record numbers is practically assured to reduce opportunistic petty violence unless it actively contains subhypnotic kill-programming technology...
... or (maybe more up his creek) take a nice trip island-hopping in the Caribbean in a sailboat without satellite connection.
Either place may lack a proper, always-on Internet connection, but why should that stop the people from enjoying a game on their console? ... Oh, DRM!
He might want to worry about the reports of teenagers, especially the poorer ones, accessing the internet primarily on cellphones. If you want to use the internet in seriousness, with massive downloading and low ping, and I'll-connect-however-much-I-want-to-my-router-damn-it, and so on, cellular internet is fucking expensive. If, however, you want to follow your friends' twitfeeds and facebook and whatnot, with light web browsing and so forth, you can get surprisingly endurable lower midrange Android devices for not much, along with a prepaid or no-contract monthly service. The price per kilobyte is pretty painful compared to a landline(just as the price per minute of a prepaid is pretty painful compared to POTS); but your ability to start and stop paying as circumstances require is much greater, your credit score is irrelevant, and it is very convenient. It isn't, though, going to let you connect your xbox to the internet continuously.
Such people probably aren't the best of customers, compared to 100k/year techies who buy all consoles at launch day and have a crazy-high attach rate; but consoles are cheap, especially 6+ months after release, and even people a fair way down the ladder can afford to buy the occasional game(per hour, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than going to the movies). They are probably also the ones least likely to be buying MS software in other contexts(since computer penetration skews wealthy and rich harder than console penetration does). Are those customers really not numerous enough to be worth it?
First, using the 'Gee golly shucks, that's just the way the world is' argument when you are part of making the world that way is a smarmy cop-out.
Sure, it is realistic and pragmatic to deal with conditions that are not within your power to change. However, if you change the conditions and then tell anybody who protests to just be realistic, that's the way it is, as though the matter is somehow one of historical inevitability, you are a shirking little weasel.
Second, during the exchange screenshotted here he responds to the "some people's internet goes out" argument with "Electricity goes out too". Yup, no shit. However(as I hope some MS datacenter or operations people will be willing to take him into the hot aisle and beat into him with spare rack rails) Downtime is additive. If somebody says "Downtime source A exists." the correct answer is not "Oh yeah? Downtime source B also exists!". That isn't a refutation, that's just a confirmation that your uptime will potentially suffer from at least two weak links, rather than just one. Every system-critical component you add is a component that can reduce your uptime. 'Always on', just means that MS' datacenter operations and the customer's ISPs are now system-critical components.
Third, has this guy taken a look at any market penetration numbers for wireline broadband vs. cell-only users and console vs. PC gaming in less connected and/or poorer areas? Whether he likes it or not, Gaming, especially console gaming, is now cheap entertainment(per hour). It also requires minimal technical aptitude or interest, and has historically had low costs of entry and relatively low and flexible ongoing costs. Having adequate wireline broadband, by contrast, tends to require the sort of steady income and financial footing that allows you to keep on good terms with the phone or cable company each month, every month. Is he trying to alienate everyone who has some disposable income and a desire for amusement; but not enough income(or at least not enough stability) for wireline broadband, a golden retriever, and a white picket fence in the suburbs?
Why does this 'Scribd' bullshit even exist?
A revolutionary technique exists for putting 'pdf' documents on an 'http' server, that doesn't involve flash, registration, or any other bullshit. What, exactly, is the redeeming value here?
Unless you want crazy 'enterprise' features like "Office Macro support" or "Domain Authentication"....
Windows Steadystate used to do a decent job of this on XP.
Which, for some reason that probably had nothing to do with pushing AD and group-policy tinkering on a bunch of schools and libraries and other relatively unsophisticated organizational users, is why Microsoft killed it. Support ended a couple of years back, availability 3-ish. No 64-bit or Win7 compatible version ever existed.
Please don't mistake my quotation for agreement. As it happens, Joe Pasco is a slimy shitbag even by the relaxed standards of lobbyists, he has quite the history, and the idea that '[police officers] “need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be.”' is nothing more than a flowery way of saying "We must be given impunity, or the terrorists or somebody win."
New York doesn't quite have LA's pure sleaze; but they make up for it in a more efficient, technocratic, vision of surveillance dystopia(As icing on the cake, a number of totally-ethically-unimpeachable corporate actors, mostly financial sector, even have cozy deals that provide them with access to the surveillance centers, just to keep a watchful eye on their interests...) Heartwarming place, really.
With a sufficiently advanced system, such malfunctions could probably even be automated for greater safety and efficiency!
"Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Jim Pasco was quite straightforward about it.
Police officers, he told NPR, “need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be.” He added that law enforcement authorities believe “that anything that’s going to have a chilling effect on an officer moving — an apprehension that he’s being videotaped and may be made to look bad — could cost him or some citizen their life.”"
"As a user-object within the Domain Awareness System you have the permissions to set 'read deny' on your access control list. Any of your attributes can and may be used against you."
A nice radioisotopic generator to trickle-charge you on your way is the obvious solution!
(As a bonus, what asshole would be dumb enough to cut you off if you have several kilograms of plutonium onboard?)
Recharging any sort of battery is going to be energy-intensive in (approximate, efficiencies will vary by design) proportion to how energy-dense the depleted battery was. Batteries store, they don't create.
One would, of course, hope that the aluminum refining is done in areas with some fuel supply other than mountains of delightfully cheap high-sulfur coal; but no battery-based system is going to work except with massive input of electricity(what would be interesting would be to get some numbers on how the energy-efficiency of shipping aluminum oxide to the generator and aluminum back stack up to transmitting electricity over conventional transmission lines... Over short distances, it couldn't possibly be more efficient; but it might turn out that bulk-carriers full of aluminum could move Icelandic geothermal energy to the US east coast much more efficiently than an undersea transmission line could...)
That's ridiculous, given how energy-intensive it is to produce aluminum in the first place, and that if it was widely adopted you'd need a huge supply of ready-to-swap aluminum batteries. My suspicion: this isn't really a "battery", it's just recovering some of the substantial energy in the aluminum metal itself.
That's what all batteries do, electrochemically recover, at a rate more or less matched to the application, the chemical potential energy of what they are filled with. Some are also capable of being driven in reverse, to restore them to their original state. Others depend on electrochemistry that isn't so neatly reversible within the confines of a conveniently sized battery, and have to be broken down for recycling. Aluminum is the latter, unless you are willing to pop an entire aluminum smelter into your battery bay.
Aluminum makes the point particularly obvious because the most cost-effective refining process is very similar indeed to driving an aluminum-air battery in reverse, so the amount of electricity going in is blatantly visible(unlike metals for which non-electrochemical refining processes are preferred).
They were just doing their jobs....
There's this little thing called "Prosecutorial discretion". You may not have heard of it. As it turns out, at least in the US, the prosecutor has fairly broad latitude, within the scope of 'doing their job' to push or not push specific cases. This is arguably a bad thing from a 'rule of laws not of men' perspective; but thems the rules as they stand. In this case, the 'victim' wasn't even asking for prosecution, so their hands' weren't being forced even by 'stakeholder' request or public opinion.
And, of course, I'm told that having a felony on your record has no effect at all on your future prospects... Definitely not the sort of thing that might seriously impair somebody who might want to be able to touch a computer(that isn't a McDonalds POS terminal) in an occupational context ever again.
"Felon" isn't quite the same level of permaban as "Sex Offender"; but the fun doesn't stop when your sentence is up.
a fuel cell, not a battery.
No, it's a battery, or at least other designs on the same principle are counted as such. 'Primary Cells' that depend on non-reversible(in the context of the battery, reactions are generally reversible under some conditions) electrochemical reactions, including ones that incorporate air to reduce battery weight are true batteries, and quite common. Zinc-air(just distract an old person for a second and yoink their hearing aid, should be one inside) are the ones you see most commonly. There are other potential elements beside zinc; but some have worse energy densities and others are rather trickier or more badly behaved(Despite its phenomenal energy density, I suspect that the Beryllium-Air cell won't be setting the world on fire anytime soon, and the Lithium-air cell will be doing so only in the literal sense, and not in the market-adoption sense).
Aluminum-air apparently has some obnoxious properties that make building good batteries tricky(Aluminum oxidizes quite readily; but aluminum oxide forms a very effective passivating layer. Good if you want structural aluminum to not crumble in minutes, less good if you want your battery to finish consuming its aluminum electrode...) There are various clever techniques being explored to work around these problems; but they generally mean more complex electrode structures, and thus more costly batteries, than just shoving plates of aluminum sheet stock into the electrolyte bath.
All cellphones are vulnerable to being tracked by parties with physical jurisdiction(your telco, for technical and billing reasons, in addition to any sinister motives/data mining/compliance with The Feds, other telcos with towers using sufficiently similar spectrum(unless they are supplying you with service as part of some roaming agreement you'd be less interesting, one presumes; but they could hear you if they wanted to), The Feds(whatever exactly they are doing with those 'Stingrays' that is so impeccably legal that they don't want to talk about it, at all...)), and all, or overwhelmingly close to all, cell modems are little black boxes whose behavior is largely invisible, so they are suspect on that count as well(yes, even on phones with 'Open Source Firmware', this just means that the cell modem is a black box that communicates with the OS in a polite and well-understood manner, generally one amusingly similar to an AT modem on a serial line, albeit with a bunch of command set extensions).
Smartphones however(and 'featurephones' complex enough to basically be smartphones with shitty 3rd party support) have the disadvantage of running enough fancy software, generally along with an internet connection, that an attacker without physical jurisdiction may well be able to pull off an attack purely in software by planting malware at the OS level. In addition to getting more interesting data than just rough location and calls made/received, this means that Country A can(with minimal risks of repercussions) bug a citizen of Country B.
That's the reason why smartphones, in particular, along with computers and webmail accounts and other network-vulnerable services, tend to be of concern to Tibet activists and other groups that rely substantially on expat populations for coordination/PR/etc.
It's no secret that Ma Bell will be happy to tell Uncle Sam all about you if your phone is inside the US; but it is much less likely that either party would cooperate with Chinese authorities who are looking to crack down on Tibetans or Ugurs or whoever it is these days. Software attacks, though, will work just fine.
Will this increase problems with malware? Just wondering.
More room to implement complex features always means more room for exciting failures; but we've already seen (almost) nonvolatile main memory in ordinary computer systems without much incident. In a laptop with some battery life left, or a desktop plugged into the wall, 'suspend' will burn a small trickle of power to keep the memory controller refreshing the RAM more or less indefinitely. As you'd expect, suspending and then waking a system doesn't clear things up the way a good reboot does(and, if it were to become commonplace for certain sorts of computers to use nonvolatile RAM and never 'shut down' fully, a class of memory-only malware designed to avoid triggering systems that inspect the filesystem would probably arise); but the RAM is still under the control of the memory controller, and 'suspend' is only a convenience feature. If the memory controller blanks the RAM, it's game over.
A system designed to use this flash-based nonvolatile RAM would presumably skip a lot of steps that are presently enforced by the fact that RAM is volatile, and so could end up harboring memory-only malware substantially longer than traditional systems; but there wouldn't be anything preventing them from blanking everything and starting from scratch, it just wouldn't happen automatically-whether-you-want-it-or-not the moment somebody trips over the power cord.
I would strongly suspect that it's an OEM thing, mostly:
Intel, for one, sets some fairly strict boot-time requirement for an OEM to be able to slap "Ultrabook!!!!" on the laptop and possibly get some Intel 'marketing assistance' cash. Microsoft has also been doing a bit of leaning on OEMs in terms of how fast Win8 machines need to boot in order to earn their little sticker of meaningless approval.
OEMs, of course, still need to shove $400 black-friday specials out the door. What will we do? Well, it just so happens that our good buddies at Seagate have a hard drive that is super cheap, being a very undemanding mechanical model with only a small amount of flash; but just so happens to be able to(if configured and pre-cached and whatnot properly) boot the OS like a bat out of hell... Seagate proceeds to sell a giant pile of the things.
Given that Seagate knows that benchmarks are going to happen, they have no realistic hope of pulling the wool over the eyes of informed enthusiasts. I'd be surprised if they care: less cost-sensitive enthusiasts are going to buy SSDs anyway, more cost-sensitive ones may well buy if the price is right, and making the spindle slow and the cache small will definitely help there.
As a strategy for launching a successful enthusiast storage brand, Seagate's choices would be suicide; but 'enthusiast storage' isn't a terribly big market anyway, and the SSD guys own it now, so Seagate doesn't have a choice about not playing there. The OEMs, on the other hand, are caught between certification demands(which generally specify boot time, resume-time, etc. not 'IOPS Random 4k' scores) and price pressures. This product looks like it is tailor-made to be pitched right at them.
Hybrid drives are a shitty stop-gap. I can't wait for terabyte SSDs to get cheap.
It disgusts me that you would even think of computing with silicon. I'm holding out for hypersentient quantum computronium...
Why are we not seeing more 10K drives? Other than the WD Raptors, I haven't seen 10K desktop drives in forever.
I would think it would be a better compromise, am I missing something?
10Ks on the desktop(and, at least to some degree, although less of one, 10 and 15Ks in the enterprise) have been curb-stomped by SSDs, actually harder than their slower brethren.
Everybody knows that 5.4s and 7.2s are horribly slow, for everything except very well behaved linear reads or writes; but they are insanely capacious and cheap, so people who don't need speed buy them anyway, and by the truckload. On the consumer end, cheap shit sells by the pallet, and needs something to boot from, and on the enterprise side the (partial) unification of SAS and SATA means that a lot of stuff that you used to have to dump right to tape can now be handed off to crazy-cheap 'nearline' HDD storage(and, in sufficient quantity, a lot of less demanding storage tasks are perfectly fine on prosaic 7.2K SATA, and since SATA drives drop right into SAS slots/connectors, they all play nicely with the RAID backplanes and hot-swap trays and things, which wasn't the case back in the PATA/SCSI days).
Among people who need I/O above all, any mechanical drive is an amusing little smudge clinging to the X axis when graphed against the performance of any halfway decent SSD. When a good SSD can easily be several orders of magnitude faster, the fact that you might(best case) triple performance by going from 5.4k to 15k barely registers; but the price of increasing spindle speeds certainly does.
Velociraptors, and their ilk, had a brief period of popularity back when all the 15Ks were SCSI(and so were either wildly expensive, or dodgy fleabay gear, and usually needed an add-on card that cost more than most consumer hard drives, even used) and SSDs were either nonexistent or more expensive than entire workstations. Now, they just aren't a terribly impressive offering. If you don't care much, you can get a rather larger and quieter HDD for substantially less money. If you do care, a surprisingly small premium will get you an SSD that will blow the Velociraptor out of the water.
The gulf between good solid state storage and mechanical storage, in terms of latency, is just so enormous that we will probably see more retreating from higher spindle speeds than advancing. High precision, high reliability mechanical parts are stubbornly costly, so increasing spindle speeds isn't free; but the performance gap is sufficiently vast that even some terrifying HDD built with ultracentrifuge technology just isn't going to be as fast as an SSD. Flash prices are still high enough that HDDs have plenty of retreating room into high capacity/high latency applications; but any attempt to achieve parity in low-latency work would just be comedic(if probably impressive from an engineering standpoint, and when it tore itself apart and shredded everything nearby)...
Given that this is HP we are talking about, idolizing the product economy will likely get them nowhere in a shoddy, OEM-outsourced, and increasingly uncompetitive hurry.
At least a real hurry will bear some resemblance to what HP did in the good old days....
Isn't it a trifle interesting to see the language used to describe the (ostensible) owners of the company attempting to exert control over the people who are allegedly just hired to run it?
"Shareholder revolt" in the LA Times, "Shareholder insurrection" in TFS, and this was reporting on a vote, taken by shareholders, on the board members(notably, unlike political elections, the incumbent remains in office unless at least half of voting stock votes against them, not by actually having to compete against other candidates for votes). Two of the directors barely survived, at 54 and 55 percent respectively.
So when can people running ddr1 or ddr2 expect to get some multilayer chips that vastly increase memory bandwidth in older systems?
Given that, for PC applications at any rate, the memory controller is built into either the motherboard or the CPU, there is likely to be a bottleneck there in any case. There would have been no reason for designers of memory controllers of the era to spec them out with the expectation of more than modest improvements.
Also, this '3D memory' stuff includes a memory controller with the DRAM dice stacked on top. To what, exactly, in a DDR2-using system are you going to connect a fancy new memory controller?
If you were a real high roller with a big cluster full of multi-socket hypertransport based systems or something, somebody might be moved to build some very, very, high performance memory modules that occupy CPU sockets; but that's a serious edge case. Most systems(even new ones) simply don't have a spare bus fast enough to hang substantially-faster-than-DDR3 RAM from.