You know that whole business of "information wants to be free", not being able to hide information that anyone can obtain freely, etc.? Well it cuts both ways. Just as they can't protect their content, you can't protect your methods for getting their content. So don't bother trying.
Well, flash drives are already launched, have been for quite a long time. They're not all that common for use as a boot drive, but it's pretty frequent. As an obvious example, the MacBook Air has an SSD option, and it will swap to that drive. I have no idea if it's MLC or SLC flash, although my money would be on MLC just because it's cheaper.
I'm sure you're right about early adopters getting burned. That's true of just about any time you have new technology, so it's to be expected. Hopefully people who need fast and heavy sustained writes will do their research beforehand.
Thanks for that information, I had no idea about MLC or its considerably reduced write cycle.
I would posit that in most real-world situations it still won't matter, though. That 6 months is at a 100% duty cycle doing nothing but writes. Even in a heavy-duty application, you'll come nowhere near, so that 6 months will be multiplied by a lot. But still, you're absolutely right that the theoretical limit is much lower than I said.
Of course SLC still exists, and still lasts essentially forever. For this new technology to be worthwhile, it would have to not only beat MLC on lifetime, but also beat SLC on price.
It doesn't matter what you write, because the logical sectors are not linked to the physical sectors on any reasonable flash drive. The controller circuitry holds a mapping which it adjusts as time goes by to evenly use the entire device no matter what your write patterns are.
As for "not much cheaper", this must be a new meaning of "not much" that I was previously unaware of. Taking a quick sample on newegg.com, I find an 8GB flash drive for $32, and 8GB of RAM going for around five to six times that. The flash drive, in addition to being vastly cheaper, is also much smaller and consumes much less power.
I honestly don't know. If I were implementing it, I would use an algorithm that thrashed on the limited free space for a while, then moved unchanging files into it to create a different block of free space, which could then be thrashed on for a while as well. But I have no idea if that's what they actually do.
I know that some satellite phone systems, namely Iridium and Globalstar use low earth satellites. But I had no idea that geosynchronous satellite phone systems such as Immarsat, ACeS, Thuraya, and MSAT don't actually exist. Thank you for correcting my horrible misconception, Mr. AC!
The extremely long duration comes from using wear leveling algorithms to spread the writes across the entire device. An individual cell, written to continuously, can be blown very rapidly, it's just that the controller hardware won't let you do that. So yes, I imagine that they have tested the lifetime of the individual cell, and then from that figure it's a simple calculation.
You know that there are satellite phones, right? Yes, the latency is annoying, but 500ms and even 1000ms is not crippling for a phone conversation. It will not be natural, for sure, but you can still talk. If his VoIP has been getting worse then it's clearly not due to inherent speed-of-light latency, because those satellites don't suddenly get farther away.
I would have doubted that many people want to talk into a little plastic box all day, or shove magnets into their ears and shut themselves off from the world, or get electronic messages from work in their pocket twenty four hours a day, but here we are.
Regular flash works just fine for swap. If you write nonstop at top speed to a standard chip, you'll wear I'd out in about fifty years. Thus I don't understand why we should care about an even longer lifetime.
I'm sorry that you're apparently incapable of following any argument more complex than a shoe box. I stated that the rates are insane, but the fact that the receiver pays is reasonable. There is no contradiction here.
Now prove it with data, or it's just you shooting the breeze.
Congratulates, you've somehow managed to puzzle out my purpose on this site. Hint: I'm not here to prove anything.
And if you don't see why your second point (way above) shows you should have seen why the first one was a strawman, then you're either an idiot or playing one.
I guess it must be so obvious that you can't possibly be bothered to explain it. Or maybe it's because you're just wrong. I carefully couched everything in my second point in "if X", "if Y", saying that even if you disagreed with my first point, there is still a second one. If you think that this somehow makes the first one a strawman then you are the idiot here.
Uh, your second point shows you clearly grasp why the first one is nonsense.
How so? Are you unable to grasp the concept of a hypothetical?
As to your second point, it's also a strawman: there are indeed women to take these jobs. Many women leave the fields in grad school or afterward because the job prospects are bad (worse for women than men... and yes, there are studies that show this).
Because it is, by and large, a crappy career where you work long hours for little pay and less recognition. So why are we upset that there aren't more women in it? I hypothesize that there are fewer women merely because women have more sense than men, and will take a good job doing something they like over a crap job doing something they love.
First, is it a bad thing that they lack interest? Different people are interested in different things. Different groups of people are interested in different things. Is there something wrong with the things that women are generally interested in?
Second, even if you accept that women are being discouraged in these fields at a young age, and even if you accept that the disparity in interests is bad, how does it make sense to rectify it by making it easier for women to get into the fields they no longer care about? If the problem is bias at an early age, fix that.
The cargo capacity of the shuttle is far too small to even contain the fuel needed for such a mission, much less the fuel plus a bunch of landers. The shuttle orbiter's cargo capacity is only 1/3rd of its empty weight.
And when you receive an SMS, you also pay for the "air time". The fact that this "air time" is charged at an insane rate compared to a voice call is a separate issue. The fact that you get charged is completely reasonable given the system in use.
I understand that, but 3 out of 24 seems like it's way too early to get to the "you will crash and burn" stage. Especially since the 10-knot speed difference should have been easily detected on the plane's INS and GPS systems, and the erroneous pitch attitude should have been easily detected based on the internal gyroscopes.
Lots of existing refineries have been expanded, however, which is not the case with nuclear power plants. Consumption, and thus production, has gone up greatly since 1976 (note: this is not "almost 40 years") so clearly things haven't been sitting completely still in that area.
You're insane if you think they're even remotely equivalent. Stealth is clever shapes and clever use of materials, mostly enabled by the vast increase in computing power which made it possible to model the radar characteristics of the aircraft more completely. (This is why the F-117 was shaped like a 1980s-era 3D rendering, all flat polygons and no curves: that was the best the computers of the time could handle.) Stealth has absolutely zero application outside of the military. On the other hand, electrogravitics would be an enormous revolution in fundamental physics as well as in applied technology, and would revolutionize nearly every aspect of our lives in the same way that quantum mechanics has.
It's plausible for an applied technology that has no use outside of the military to stay locked up in black programs for a while. It is utterly implausible for a massive theoretical breakthrough which changes a great deal of known physics to do the same.
What's not so simple to understand is why you need to get Blizzard's authorization to use a product you purchased from them. There is no indication that copyright law is intended to cover this particular scenario, and a law mentioned in many of the comments to this story which explicitly excludes this sort of copying from copyright protections.
When are personal copies not allowed? My understanding was that fair use allows you to make copies for timeshifting, format shifting, backup, and just about any other purpose. Am I wrong?
I did a bit of googling before my first post and it seems that it's correct about them. Your explanation makes some sense to me. I guess there are many tradeoffs, and exceeding the requirements in one area doesn't mean you're not just meeting them in others.
Slashdot Mirror
You know that whole business of "information wants to be free", not being able to hide information that anyone can obtain freely, etc.? Well it cuts both ways. Just as they can't protect their content, you can't protect your methods for getting their content. So don't bother trying.
Well, flash drives are already launched, have been for quite a long time. They're not all that common for use as a boot drive, but it's pretty frequent. As an obvious example, the MacBook Air has an SSD option, and it will swap to that drive. I have no idea if it's MLC or SLC flash, although my money would be on MLC just because it's cheaper.
I'm sure you're right about early adopters getting burned. That's true of just about any time you have new technology, so it's to be expected. Hopefully people who need fast and heavy sustained writes will do their research beforehand.
Thanks for that information, I had no idea about MLC or its considerably reduced write cycle.
I would posit that in most real-world situations it still won't matter, though. That 6 months is at a 100% duty cycle doing nothing but writes. Even in a heavy-duty application, you'll come nowhere near, so that 6 months will be multiplied by a lot. But still, you're absolutely right that the theoretical limit is much lower than I said.
Of course SLC still exists, and still lasts essentially forever. For this new technology to be worthwhile, it would have to not only beat MLC on lifetime, but also beat SLC on price.
It doesn't matter what you write, because the logical sectors are not linked to the physical sectors on any reasonable flash drive. The controller circuitry holds a mapping which it adjusts as time goes by to evenly use the entire device no matter what your write patterns are.
As for "not much cheaper", this must be a new meaning of "not much" that I was previously unaware of. Taking a quick sample on newegg.com, I find an 8GB flash drive for $32, and 8GB of RAM going for around five to six times that. The flash drive, in addition to being vastly cheaper, is also much smaller and consumes much less power.
I honestly don't know. If I were implementing it, I would use an algorithm that thrashed on the limited free space for a while, then moved unchanging files into it to create a different block of free space, which could then be thrashed on for a while as well. But I have no idea if that's what they actually do.
I know that some satellite phone systems, namely Iridium and Globalstar use low earth satellites. But I had no idea that geosynchronous satellite phone systems such as Immarsat, ACeS, Thuraya, and MSAT don't actually exist. Thank you for correcting my horrible misconception, Mr. AC!
The extremely long duration comes from using wear leveling algorithms to spread the writes across the entire device. An individual cell, written to continuously, can be blown very rapidly, it's just that the controller hardware won't let you do that. So yes, I imagine that they have tested the lifetime of the individual cell, and then from that figure it's a simple calculation.
You know that there are satellite phones, right? Yes, the latency is annoying, but 500ms and even 1000ms is not crippling for a phone conversation. It will not be natural, for sure, but you can still talk. If his VoIP has been getting worse then it's clearly not due to inherent speed-of-light latency, because those satellites don't suddenly get farther away.
I would have doubted that many people want to talk into a little plastic box all day, or shove magnets into their ears and shut themselves off from the world, or get electronic messages from work in their pocket twenty four hours a day, but here we are.
Regular flash works just fine for swap. If you write nonstop at top speed to a standard chip, you'll wear I'd out in about fifty years. Thus I don't understand why we should care about an even longer lifetime.
I'm sorry that you're apparently incapable of following any argument more complex than a shoe box. I stated that the rates are insane, but the fact that the receiver pays is reasonable. There is no contradiction here.
Slashdot: full of frickin morons since 1995.
Now prove it with data, or it's just you shooting the breeze.
Congratulates, you've somehow managed to puzzle out my purpose on this site. Hint: I'm not here to prove anything.
And if you don't see why your second point (way above) shows you should have seen why the first one was a strawman, then you're either an idiot or playing one.
I guess it must be so obvious that you can't possibly be bothered to explain it. Or maybe it's because you're just wrong. I carefully couched everything in my second point in "if X", "if Y", saying that even if you disagreed with my first point, there is still a second one. If you think that this somehow makes the first one a strawman then you are the idiot here.
Uh, your second point shows you clearly grasp why the first one is nonsense.
How so? Are you unable to grasp the concept of a hypothetical?
As to your second point, it's also a strawman: there are indeed women to take these jobs. Many women leave the fields in grad school or afterward because the job prospects are bad (worse for women than men... and yes, there are studies that show this).
Because it is, by and large, a crappy career where you work long hours for little pay and less recognition. So why are we upset that there aren't more women in it? I hypothesize that there are fewer women merely because women have more sense than men, and will take a good job doing something they like over a crap job doing something they love.
First, is it a bad thing that they lack interest? Different people are interested in different things. Different groups of people are interested in different things. Is there something wrong with the things that women are generally interested in?
Second, even if you accept that women are being discouraged in these fields at a young age, and even if you accept that the disparity in interests is bad, how does it make sense to rectify it by making it easier for women to get into the fields they no longer care about? If the problem is bias at an early age, fix that.
The cargo capacity of the shuttle is far too small to even contain the fuel needed for such a mission, much less the fuel plus a bunch of landers. The shuttle orbiter's cargo capacity is only 1/3rd of its empty weight.
Please tell me, then, how do you maintain orientation without outside references?
And don't even think of telling me about ring-laser gyros, that's just a solid-state gyroscope.
And when you receive an SMS, you also pay for the "air time". The fact that this "air time" is charged at an insane rate compared to a voice call is a separate issue. The fact that you get charged is completely reasonable given the system in use.
I understand that, but 3 out of 24 seems like it's way too early to get to the "you will crash and burn" stage. Especially since the 10-knot speed difference should have been easily detected on the plane's INS and GPS systems, and the erroneous pitch attitude should have been easily detected based on the internal gyroscopes.
Lots of existing refineries have been expanded, however, which is not the case with nuclear power plants. Consumption, and thus production, has gone up greatly since 1976 (note: this is not "almost 40 years") so clearly things haven't been sitting completely still in that area.
You're insane if you think they're even remotely equivalent. Stealth is clever shapes and clever use of materials, mostly enabled by the vast increase in computing power which made it possible to model the radar characteristics of the aircraft more completely. (This is why the F-117 was shaped like a 1980s-era 3D rendering, all flat polygons and no curves: that was the best the computers of the time could handle.) Stealth has absolutely zero application outside of the military. On the other hand, electrogravitics would be an enormous revolution in fundamental physics as well as in applied technology, and would revolutionize nearly every aspect of our lives in the same way that quantum mechanics has.
It's plausible for an applied technology that has no use outside of the military to stay locked up in black programs for a while. It is utterly implausible for a massive theoretical breakthrough which changes a great deal of known physics to do the same.
Then I have to wonder why the thing even has 24 sensors if it can be taken out by screwing up 3 of them. As I said, surprising lack of resiliency.
What's not so simple to understand is why you need to get Blizzard's authorization to use a product you purchased from them. There is no indication that copyright law is intended to cover this particular scenario, and a law mentioned in many of the comments to this story which explicitly excludes this sort of copying from copyright protections.
When are personal copies not allowed? My understanding was that fair use allows you to make copies for timeshifting, format shifting, backup, and just about any other purpose. Am I wrong?
I did a bit of googling before my first post and it seems that it's correct about them. Your explanation makes some sense to me. I guess there are many tradeoffs, and exceeding the requirements in one area doesn't mean you're not just meeting them in others.
3 of 24 airspeed sensors, or 3 sensors out of 24 varied sensors for different things?