Sure, burst speed may be comparable: but ram will maintain that burst speed in an almost any number of IOPS. try writing 250KIOPS@1K to a flash drive, watch it slow to a crawl.
Access times, though much better in flash over the last few years are still an order of magnitude slower. and just imagine writing to ram only to find out that the process must wait while the old blocks are re-allocated due to bad sector remapping. (potentially causing micro or even millisecond access times!)
the point is that you can instead of purchasing ram at ~$25/gb you can buy flash at ~$10/gb and still stay dense.
I'm sure where you are there's room for things: but in much of the world this is not the case. try suggesting 4U storage cases for a customer wanting to host a 20TB database in Egypt. you may only get 4-6U in each building to work with, (with little cooling capacity) and $25K/building in hardware budget.
There are cases for everything. I can think of a pile of customers of mine that only filled their Vmware hosts with 64GB (of the 512GB max) of ram (leaving twenty eight sockets free in each of the three hosts for something!) that's 33.6TB of space right there! (though personally I'd PREFER to stick RAM in there, that would only be another 1.344TB of ram)
sure, but you know what the price of ram vs the price of flash is?
16GB dimms run me about $900 each, whereas I can get 64GB X25-E's for $700.
and tit for tat, the performance won't be THAT bad by comparison.
at ~$55/GB for Ram, or ~$10/GB for flash, at 1000GB quantities... that's a pretty easy call to make personally.:P
seriously: sata cables are cheep as hell to build, and doing a fan cable of a custom length to match up to the controller either on board or in the single 16/4x slot would only kind of make sense.
Up here in Canada for example, if you're in range of a city, you're likely in range of a few towers. if you live along a major highway, there'll be a pair either east/west or north/south of you.
the issue here isn't that it'll cause a problem in rural location, it's that people are using them to provide a "better connection" in a controlled area rather than to provide "a connection" at all. This means that BTS's are seeing not only the handset, but also the repeater. (and every other handset AGAIN that is within range of the tower+repeater.)
as far as active repeaters in rural areas: few providers mind them. it's the use of those same devices in the wrong place that they hate.
as much as the "digital" buzzword comes back, at the end of the day signals are broadcasting in analog.
yes, R&D has lead to significantly increased channelizing of the existing spectrum. but analog signals can only be mixed so far and still be discernible. also, at some point you introduce co much overhead to multiplex that you add latency that makes voice communication slow and unbearable.
[sarcasm]though we all know that customers leave providers that provide high latency unbearable voice connections. [/sarcasm]
the USA is 1.8% of the landmass of the globe, and Europe is only slightly larger at 1.9%. sorry, I don't consider T-mobile to be somebody who covers the majority of area. the majority of the globe does not utilize FHSS: because it does little unless there are many towers competing for airtime/problems with peoples ablity to communicate with a tower.
if I take my USRP and modulate a GSM conversation onto the air, I assure you I WON'T be frequency hopping to communicate. most of the providers in canada don't implement it at the BTS unless the tower is experiencing problems receiving or the local landscape provides too many reflections.
one can hop channels all they want, but there are only so many available. the freq hopping is intended to allow people to communicate in higher densities with lower error rates, not to prevent people from trampling on frequencies at the towers. if a tower is within range of a MS, it cannot ignore that MS. all it can do is ignore the frames coming from that MS, by ignoring the times+frequencies it's using. this still reduces the ~3K maximum total potential slots per tower.
in effect: if you put 1 tower in the middle of a city, and put (say, random bullshit number) 2200 subscribers on it (assuming this is the "maximum") you can't just put up another tower next to it to add subscribers. there's no way to do it without increasing latency, or dividing the towers physically.
I guess my wording was a little off. technically, it's the towers can't reduce power far enough to allow other MS's so communicate on the frames occupied by other callers.
there are a maximum of 125 channels for both up and down stream communication in GSM. using the wonders of TDMA, there are 8 slots containing 24 frames for data. each user get's a frame per slot, meaning you can multiplex a maximum of 3000 simultaneous conversations while maintaining 120ms latency per tower.
that's assuming that the amps and devices have access to that whole spectrum, and that it's all usable. everything from noise to reflections to weather will change that whole RF landscape.
the wireless spectrum is only so large, and you can only multiplex so many people onto any one frequency. Even if you hop the around frequencies: they still only have so many total channels available. as much as one wants to think that the air will scale indefinitely: it doesn't. every time you add more time-slots to a frequency or frequencies to a conversation: it increases the latency and error rate.
digital technology doesn't quite do the job one hopes it would, as it's still carrying digital representations of analog data. you can only deal with so much latency before it becomes unusable.
Frequency hopping provides a great increase in the number of signals per band, but this comes at a cost to the surrounding frequencies and introduces an amount of CPU load on BTS's. this in turn leads to increased cost and increased complexity of the network. Frequency hopping is only implemented in dense locations, and not all carriers do it. (in fact, the majority of them don't, though this represents the minority of customers)
at the end of the day we agree though: hardly-regulated repeaters that occupy the GSM frequency bands are not the best idea in the world.
technically, the issue would be fine if it were just that. No FM that I know about would have an issue with this based on how FM works.
the issue here would be more like you repeating an FM station between two towns that BOTH have stations using the same frequency, because you want to hear one of the two stations.
this is a fundamental issue in the way wireless communications works, when you stand in one spot in a city within range of three towers, your cell phone attempts to modulate itself onto a portion of the spectrum that will allow it to speak. This in turn means that all three towers now can hear you.
because all three towers can hear you, but only one is responsible for carrying your traffic the others make that channel unavailable to the people within range of the other two towers. the only thing the towers can do is reduce power to the quadrant the handset is in, allowing people closer to the tower to use it at the same time. even THIS however is limited: if the MobileStation can still reach the other two towers, they can't reduce power far enough to allow anybody else to use those channels.
once you install powered signal boosters, your cell phone now may be able to reach twenty towers. those towers each have a limited number of 'slots' available for users to use, (infact the number of GSM channels is currently around 32, though through timeframing of each channel there are 7-14frames per channel/second) meaning that you effectively are now multiplying your capacity based on how many towers you can hit.
the issue here is NOT with people that are in small towns/remote location, telco's are happy to let people put up their own repeaters to enlarge the telco's network at no cost to the telco. the issue they have is that people in downtown apartments with lead paint think that by hitting every tower in 15 square blocks just so they can repeat it indoors for one customer is a good thing.
by using the air to communicate: you have to learn to share it with others. we only have one global collection of air for which EMR can radiate.
just a random FYI: Mars is only ~20 light-minutes away. it's (about) a 45 minute "communication delay" inclusive of the two way nature of communication.
It's alright. I expect if we do ever send people over there: the hottest thing will be them signing in to places on Facebook over the ~20 minute latency connection.
that'd be a hell of a communication link to maintain. I for one would volunteer to work on it.
Have you ever found a glaring security hole in a major website for a major company?
do you know how hard it is for somebody to even begin reporting something like that?
if you are a young adult (aged 12-24) and you find a security hole, do you know how few people will take you seriously? it's amount to telling your teacher there's a problem in every copy of a textbook: they'll just laugh at you and tell you "you just don't know any better".
Yes, I completely agree that there ARE BETTER WAYS to disclose: but by not making them easy enough for a youngster to understand: you prevent people from reporting in the first place.
because they are fundamentally different processes.
when you move an object from one location to another, it moves. when you make a copy of that object you are willingly and likely knowingly copying somebodies material.
where as making a copy of a digital work is not just trivial, it's required. for you to transmit (or move) that product/service/digital object it requires reproduction.
simply the concept of copyright of information is appalling to me. could you imagine waking up one morning in a distant land with a brilliant idea, going to work, prototyping the idea, finding a few local people thinking that's a great product, developing the final result, and selling/implementing the item: only to find out years later that somebody in the United States invented a similar product a few days prior to yourself? being taken to court, and having all your work taken away from you?
THAT'S what the current copyright system imposes. it's fucking scary.
If I shoot a short film, I have NO interest in publishing the thing with a service like Netflix: I'd much rather publish it myself on youtube, and share the link.
just what I was thinking: somebody could do this and just overlay transparent boxes that represent areas of the page that got different content based on the user-agent string.
first and foremost: let me agree with you. for you and I: they're more than bright enough. I don't know about you, but the first thing I do with any new devices is turn them way the frack down!:P
it's a simple fact of technology: not something that's solvable through any sort of breakthrough:
capacitance does not require contact with anything. you can measure the capacitance an object exhibits without contact: where as with the effect of resistivity you require some form of physical disruption.
think of it in terms of uses: capacitive touch screens are wonderful in the medical field, where you can wrap the device in a plastic bag, and all the touchscreen has to do is zero the area capacitance prior to your contact with the screen. try covering a phone with a resistive touch screen with a bag and using it. best of luck!
Plasma's and LCD's were constantly (even to this day) complained about over brightness. unless it's a high quality screen blacks get washed out, or colors have too low of contrast. add a pair of resistive touch films to the top, and the design side get's more and more complicated: driving up costs.
at this point, it's not a matter of science: that's the easy part. it's pleasing people by balancing things in the right combinations. that's an art.
that it's alright for elected officials to protect their positions from being challenged through democratic processes like anything on the internet/media to "protect the social good"?
maybe I'm just a little crazy, but that screams of a corrupt government to me.
At the end of the day it comes down to one reason:
capacitive screens are brighter.
Even though resistive screens may be superior in almost every other way: it's hard to sell something you have to look through constantly these days. people like bright, colorful screens: alas.
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Sure, burst speed may be comparable: but ram will maintain that burst speed in an almost any number of IOPS. try writing 250KIOPS@1K to a flash drive, watch it slow to a crawl.
Access times, though much better in flash over the last few years are still an order of magnitude slower. and just imagine writing to ram only to find out that the process must wait while the old blocks are re-allocated due to bad sector remapping. (potentially causing micro or even millisecond access times!)
sorry, flash has a LONG way to go replacing ram.
except storage capacity. they're 512GB (raw, 400GB formatted) per Dimm. making them 32 times denser capacity vs RAM.
though yes, you're right: compared to the equivalent AMOUNT of RAM, they suck. compared to the same dollar value of ram: that's another story.
the point is that you can instead of purchasing ram at ~$25/gb you can buy flash at ~$10/gb and still stay dense.
I'm sure where you are there's room for things: but in much of the world this is not the case. try suggesting 4U storage cases for a customer wanting to host a 20TB database in Egypt. you may only get 4-6U in each building to work with, (with little cooling capacity) and $25K/building in hardware budget.
There are cases for everything. I can think of a pile of customers of mine that only filled their Vmware hosts with 64GB (of the 512GB max) of ram (leaving twenty eight sockets free in each of the three hosts for something!) that's 33.6TB of space right there! (though personally I'd PREFER to stick RAM in there, that would only be another 1.344TB of ram)
sure, but you know what the price of ram vs the price of flash is?
:P
16GB dimms run me about $900 each, whereas I can get 64GB X25-E's for $700.
and tit for tat, the performance won't be THAT bad by comparison.
at ~$55/GB for Ram, or ~$10/GB for flash, at 1000GB quantities... that's a pretty easy call to make personally.
two words for all of you:
custom cables.
seriously: sata cables are cheep as hell to build, and doing a fan cable of a custom length to match up to the controller either on board or in the single 16/4x slot would only kind of make sense.
depends on where you live.
Up here in Canada for example, if you're in range of a city, you're likely in range of a few towers. if you live along a major highway, there'll be a pair either east/west or north/south of you.
the issue here isn't that it'll cause a problem in rural location, it's that people are using them to provide a "better connection" in a controlled area rather than to provide "a connection" at all. This means that BTS's are seeing not only the handset, but also the repeater. (and every other handset AGAIN that is within range of the tower+repeater.)
as far as active repeaters in rural areas: few providers mind them. it's the use of those same devices in the wrong place that they hate.
Thank you.
as much as the "digital" buzzword comes back, at the end of the day signals are broadcasting in analog.
yes, R&D has lead to significantly increased channelizing of the existing spectrum. but analog signals can only be mixed so far and still be discernible. also, at some point you introduce co much overhead to multiplex that you add latency that makes voice communication slow and unbearable.
[sarcasm]though we all know that customers leave providers that provide high latency unbearable voice connections. [/sarcasm]
the USA is 1.8% of the landmass of the globe, and Europe is only slightly larger at 1.9%. sorry, I don't consider T-mobile to be somebody who covers the majority of area. the majority of the globe does not utilize FHSS: because it does little unless there are many towers competing for airtime/problems with peoples ablity to communicate with a tower.
if I take my USRP and modulate a GSM conversation onto the air, I assure you I WON'T be frequency hopping to communicate. most of the providers in canada don't implement it at the BTS unless the tower is experiencing problems receiving or the local landscape provides too many reflections.
one can hop channels all they want, but there are only so many available. the freq hopping is intended to allow people to communicate in higher densities with lower error rates, not to prevent people from trampling on frequencies at the towers. if a tower is within range of a MS, it cannot ignore that MS. all it can do is ignore the frames coming from that MS, by ignoring the times+frequencies it's using. this still reduces the ~3K maximum total potential slots per tower.
in effect: if you put 1 tower in the middle of a city, and put (say, random bullshit number) 2200 subscribers on it (assuming this is the "maximum") you can't just put up another tower next to it to add subscribers. there's no way to do it without increasing latency, or dividing the towers physically.
I guess my wording was a little off. technically, it's the towers can't reduce power far enough to allow other MS's so communicate on the frames occupied by other callers.
there are a maximum of 125 channels for both up and down stream communication in GSM. using the wonders of TDMA, there are 8 slots containing 24 frames for data. each user get's a frame per slot, meaning you can multiplex a maximum of 3000 simultaneous conversations while maintaining 120ms latency per tower.
that's assuming that the amps and devices have access to that whole spectrum, and that it's all usable. everything from noise to reflections to weather will change that whole RF landscape.
Whaaaaaaaaaat!
the wireless spectrum is only so large, and you can only multiplex so many people onto any one frequency. Even if you hop the around frequencies: they still only have so many total channels available. as much as one wants to think that the air will scale indefinitely: it doesn't. every time you add more time-slots to a frequency or frequencies to a conversation: it increases the latency and error rate.
digital technology doesn't quite do the job one hopes it would, as it's still carrying digital representations of analog data. you can only deal with so much latency before it becomes unusable.
Frequency hopping provides a great increase in the number of signals per band, but this comes at a cost to the surrounding frequencies and introduces an amount of CPU load on BTS's. this in turn leads to increased cost and increased complexity of the network. Frequency hopping is only implemented in dense locations, and not all carriers do it. (in fact, the majority of them don't, though this represents the minority of customers)
at the end of the day we agree though: hardly-regulated repeaters that occupy the GSM frequency bands are not the best idea in the world.
technically, the issue would be fine if it were just that. No FM that I know about would have an issue with this based on how FM works.
the issue here would be more like you repeating an FM station between two towns that BOTH have stations using the same frequency, because you want to hear one of the two stations.
No, they DON'T like boosters.
this is a fundamental issue in the way wireless communications works, when you stand in one spot in a city within range of three towers, your cell phone attempts to modulate itself onto a portion of the spectrum that will allow it to speak. This in turn means that all three towers now can hear you.
because all three towers can hear you, but only one is responsible for carrying your traffic the others make that channel unavailable to the people within range of the other two towers. the only thing the towers can do is reduce power to the quadrant the handset is in, allowing people closer to the tower to use it at the same time. even THIS however is limited: if the MobileStation can still reach the other two towers, they can't reduce power far enough to allow anybody else to use those channels.
once you install powered signal boosters, your cell phone now may be able to reach twenty towers. those towers each have a limited number of 'slots' available for users to use, (infact the number of GSM channels is currently around 32, though through timeframing of each channel there are 7-14frames per channel/second) meaning that you effectively are now multiplying your capacity based on how many towers you can hit.
the issue here is NOT with people that are in small towns/remote location, telco's are happy to let people put up their own repeaters to enlarge the telco's network at no cost to the telco. the issue they have is that people in downtown apartments with lead paint think that by hitting every tower in 15 square blocks just so they can repeat it indoors for one customer is a good thing.
by using the air to communicate: you have to learn to share it with others. we only have one global collection of air for which EMR can radiate.
Yeah, sold only by the scam-artists at ECost.
conveniently the phone you mentioned is: "out of stock"
and likely will be forever. they're such a scam.
and actually, (having just done the math):
Mars is anywhere from 55M - 401M KM from the earth (depending on where they both are on their rotations)
that means at c, light would take between ~3 and ~22 minutes to reach mars from the earth.
just a random FYI: Mars is only ~20 light-minutes away. it's (about) a 45 minute "communication delay" inclusive of the two way nature of communication.
:P
UDP though, is only ~20 minutes.
It's alright. I expect if we do ever send people over there: the hottest thing will be them signing in to places on Facebook over the ~20 minute latency connection.
that'd be a hell of a communication link to maintain. I for one would volunteer to work on it.
Have you ever found a glaring security hole in a major website for a major company?
do you know how hard it is for somebody to even begin reporting something like that?
if you are a young adult (aged 12-24) and you find a security hole, do you know how few people will take you seriously? it's amount to telling your teacher there's a problem in every copy of a textbook: they'll just laugh at you and tell you "you just don't know any better".
Yes, I completely agree that there ARE BETTER WAYS to disclose: but by not making them easy enough for a youngster to understand: you prevent people from reporting in the first place.
and once you kill a cow, you gotta' make burgers.
I'm with you.
if you don't like how the system treats you for flying: you have a pair of legs for a reason. start walking.
because they are fundamentally different processes.
when you move an object from one location to another, it moves. when you make a copy of that object you are willingly and likely knowingly copying somebodies material.
where as making a copy of a digital work is not just trivial, it's required. for you to transmit (or move) that product/service/digital object it requires reproduction.
simply the concept of copyright of information is appalling to me. could you imagine waking up one morning in a distant land with a brilliant idea, going to work, prototyping the idea, finding a few local people thinking that's a great product, developing the final result, and selling/implementing the item: only to find out years later that somebody in the United States invented a similar product a few days prior to yourself? being taken to court, and having all your work taken away from you?
THAT'S what the current copyright system imposes. it's fucking scary.
I don't see what's wrong with that?
If I shoot a short film, I have NO interest in publishing the thing with a service like Netflix: I'd much rather publish it myself on youtube, and share the link.
just what I was thinking: somebody could do this and just overlay transparent boxes that represent areas of the page that got different content based on the user-agent string.
I wonder how many sites do stuff like this?
first and foremost: let me agree with you. for you and I: they're more than bright enough. I don't know about you, but the first thing I do with any new devices is turn them way the frack down! :P
it's a simple fact of technology: not something that's solvable through any sort of breakthrough:
capacitance does not require contact with anything. you can measure the capacitance an object exhibits without contact: where as with the effect of resistivity you require some form of physical disruption.
think of it in terms of uses: capacitive touch screens are wonderful in the medical field, where you can wrap the device in a plastic bag, and all the touchscreen has to do is zero the area capacitance prior to your contact with the screen. try covering a phone with a resistive touch screen with a bag and using it. best of luck!
Plasma's and LCD's were constantly (even to this day) complained about over brightness. unless it's a high quality screen blacks get washed out, or colors have too low of contrast. add a pair of resistive touch films to the top, and the design side get's more and more complicated: driving up costs.
at this point, it's not a matter of science: that's the easy part. it's pleasing people by balancing things in the right combinations. that's an art.
that it's alright for elected officials to protect their positions from being challenged through democratic processes like anything on the internet/media to "protect the social good"?
maybe I'm just a little crazy, but that screams of a corrupt government to me.
At the end of the day it comes down to one reason:
capacitive screens are brighter.
Even though resistive screens may be superior in almost every other way: it's hard to sell something you have to look through constantly these days. people like bright, colorful screens: alas.