there is often a requirement that ISPs throttle some of the more bandwidth intensive protocols so that everyone on their network can have an enjoyable Internet experience.
No; ISPs could throttle the bandwidth-hogging customers while remaining ignorant of protocols.
Mozilla only spends about $12M per year, and they have a lot in the bank ($70M?). If you do the math, they can survive for several years if the search engines pull the plug.
There's always the possibility that ISPs could voluntarily (after receiving a few visits from the NN Mafia, er Squad) adopt network neutrality principles.
Today's motherboards use I2C/SMBus for sensor access, and it is a total mess. There are hundreds of models of sensor chips that need drivers, and there's no way to know the mapping from sensor numbers to the real world (which fan is "fan 0"?). Then some vendors add microcontrollers that are not on the SMBus and have totally undocumented interfaces (hello AIGuru). I haven't looked at ESA, but hopefully it solves some of these problems.
There is one CableCard tuner card from ATI; by Googling you can find a ton of articles explaining why CableLabs won't allow you to buy it (unless you buy a complete PC).
Could ZFS be used to make plugging disks into Apple TVs easier?
No, I think ZFS would make that use case unreliable, since unplugging the external disk would fault the entire pool (aka you lose access to all your data until you plug the external disk back in).
This isn't a new physical format; they are using a red laser to write to standard DVD-R media (4.7GB single layer, 8.5GB dual layer). But when you write Blu-ray logical format to a DVD-R (aka BD-5, BD-9) you can use HD video.
Apple wanted the UNII band, and they got it. 5.3 and 5.8GHz are now available for unlicensed use, but instead vendors are churning out more 2.4GHz devices.
"CPU(s) begin in lowest performance state and then get slower and slower"
This is remarkably sloppy writing for a supposedly technical article. Is there a performance state even lower than the lowest? Is he talking about clock modulation? Does it get "slower and slower" but never faster and faster?
With small but fast flash drives appearing on the market, it would be nice to have storage systems that can automatically migrate data between disk and flash to maximize performance.
Once the networks are up and running the equipment will become available. WiMax CPEs will still be an extra cost compared to WiFi that is included "for free" in computers.
The article oversimplifies a little when it says that WiFi uses unlicensed spectrum and WiMax used licenses spectrum; in theory WiMax can operate in the unlicensed 3.8GHz band, but equipment that actually supports that band is scarce and performance will be worse in 5.8GHz than in licensed 2.5GHz. Also, it's not clear that municipalities could get 2.5GHz licenses even if they wanted them; AFAIK the licenses have virtually all been bought by Sprint and Clearwire, who presumably have no desire to divest them. Given these factors, cities appear to have a choice between 2.4GHz WiFi, 5.8GHz WiFi, and 5.8GHz WiMax; it's not clear to me that one has a decisive advantage.
Now, as far as I know, there are many schemes for correcting and detecting errors. Some, like FEC, fix infrequent, scattered errors. Others, like turbocodes, fix sizeable blocks of errors. This leads to two questions: what is the benefit in using plain CRCs any more?
CRCs are only used for detecting errors. Once you've detected a bad disk block, you can use replication (RAID 1), parity (RAID 4/5/Z), or some more advanced FEC (RAID 3/6/Z2) to correct the error. The benefit of CRCs is that you can read only the data blocks (saving bandwidth), check the CRC, and ignore the check blocks if the CRC is correct; you only need to read check blocks from disk when the CRC is wrong.
For example, errors can corrupt ZFS data in a way that turns out to have the same checksum. Or errors can corrupt both the data and the checksum so they match each other.
You can use SHA as the checksum algorithm; the chance of undetected corruption is infinitesimal.
ZFS's end-to-end checksums detect many of these types of corruption; as long as ZFS itself, the CPU, and RAM are working correctly, no other errors can corrupt ZFS data.
I am looking forward to the day when all RAM has ECC and all filesystems have checksums.
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there is often a requirement that ISPs throttle some of the more bandwidth intensive protocols so that everyone on their network can have an enjoyable Internet experience.
No; ISPs could throttle the bandwidth-hogging customers while remaining ignorant of protocols.
Mozilla only spends about $12M per year, and they have a lot in the bank ($70M?). If you do the math, they can survive for several years if the search engines pull the plug.
Yeah, it's not really Java, only you write all your code in Java and the VM has Java semantics.
There's always the possibility that ISPs could voluntarily (after receiving a few visits from the NN Mafia, er Squad) adopt network neutrality principles.
Today's motherboards use I2C/SMBus for sensor access, and it is a total mess. There are hundreds of models of sensor chips that need drivers, and there's no way to know the mapping from sensor numbers to the real world (which fan is "fan 0"?). Then some vendors add microcontrollers that are not on the SMBus and have totally undocumented interfaces (hello AIGuru). I haven't looked at ESA, but hopefully it solves some of these problems.
There is one CableCard tuner card from ATI; by Googling you can find a ton of articles explaining why CableLabs won't allow you to buy it (unless you buy a complete PC).
It doesn't have to change, but since digital is more efficient cable companies will switch to it.
Hadoop is already free and EC2 isn't that expensive.
Could ZFS be used to make plugging disks into Apple TVs easier?
No, I think ZFS would make that use case unreliable, since unplugging the external disk would fault the entire pool (aka you lose access to all your data until you plug the external disk back in).
How does the firmware get updated?
Either the device downloads it over the Net or the vendor mails you a CD or you download a firmware file and burn it to CD, etc.
Are you required to connect them to the internet just to use a Blu-ray player?
No.
This isn't a new physical format; they are using a red laser to write to standard DVD-R media (4.7GB single layer, 8.5GB dual layer). But when you write Blu-ray logical format to a DVD-R (aka BD-5, BD-9) you can use HD video.
The money will be a down payment on another war.
Apple wanted the UNII band, and they got it. 5.3 and 5.8GHz are now available for unlicensed use, but instead vendors are churning out more 2.4GHz devices.
"CPU(s) begin in lowest performance state and then get slower and slower"
This is remarkably sloppy writing for a supposedly technical article. Is there a performance state even lower than the lowest? Is he talking about clock modulation? Does it get "slower and slower" but never faster and faster?
With small but fast flash drives appearing on the market, it would be nice to have storage systems that can automatically migrate data between disk and flash to maximize performance.
"You idiot! The point of the doomsday license is lost if you keep it a secret!"
Typo; I meant 5.8GHz.
Once the networks are up and running the equipment will become available. WiMax CPEs will still be an extra cost compared to WiFi that is included "for free" in computers.
The article oversimplifies a little when it says that WiFi uses unlicensed spectrum and WiMax used licenses spectrum; in theory WiMax can operate in the unlicensed 3.8GHz band, but equipment that actually supports that band is scarce and performance will be worse in 5.8GHz than in licensed 2.5GHz. Also, it's not clear that municipalities could get 2.5GHz licenses even if they wanted them; AFAIK the licenses have virtually all been bought by Sprint and Clearwire, who presumably have no desire to divest them. Given these factors, cities appear to have a choice between 2.4GHz WiFi, 5.8GHz WiFi, and 5.8GHz WiMax; it's not clear to me that one has a decisive advantage.
PowerTop does use a physical power meter: the battery in your laptop.
Being for-profit is also a good way to hide the Google money so the IRS and open-source community don't ask too many questions about it.
The red flag for MailCo is not its for-profit status, but the combination of for-profit and no-revenue sounds like a recipe for failure.
Now, as far as I know, there are many schemes for correcting and detecting errors. Some, like FEC, fix infrequent, scattered errors. Others, like turbocodes, fix sizeable blocks of errors. This leads to two questions: what is the benefit in using plain CRCs any more?
CRCs are only used for detecting errors. Once you've detected a bad disk block, you can use replication (RAID 1), parity (RAID 4/5/Z), or some more advanced FEC (RAID 3/6/Z2) to correct the error. The benefit of CRCs is that you can read only the data blocks (saving bandwidth), check the CRC, and ignore the check blocks if the CRC is correct; you only need to read check blocks from disk when the CRC is wrong.
Intel or AMD could force ECC adoption if they wanted to; the increase in cost would be easily hidden by Moore's Law.
For example, errors can corrupt ZFS data in a way that turns out to have the same checksum. Or errors can corrupt both the data and the checksum so they match each other.
You can use SHA as the checksum algorithm; the chance of undetected corruption is infinitesimal.
ZFS's end-to-end checksums detect many of these types of corruption; as long as ZFS itself, the CPU, and RAM are working correctly, no other errors can corrupt ZFS data.
I am looking forward to the day when all RAM has ECC and all filesystems have checksums.