XP was pretty much optimal as far as gui's go. All they really needed was to prettify the icons and generally fine-tune the look, but instead they wasted their time reinventing square wheels and trying to be "revolutionary" where what we really needed was gradual evolution.
XP was actually a step back from 2000 where you could actually adjust all of the UI colors. XP made some of them fixed. Windows 10 is even worse.
I am sure I do not know every compound that could burn that color of blue,
I know one: Air. When air ionises it turns blue. This happens during a lightning strike, and also happens during HV arcing. Oh and bonus points: It has nothing to do with compounds and everything to do with temperature.
The nitrogen in the air arcs blue-white. Green comes from ionized copper.
The drones are flying withing 50 feet of jet engines at maximum power. Does the initial velocity of the lead pellets now flying directly into the turbine matter?
News at 11, after the memorial service.
Well then it is too bad there were so many jet engines operating that the drones were never more than 50 feet from them.
Have you ever used a shotgun on aerial targets? Have you ever been hit by shot from someone who has?
While range is limited, accuracy and danger are not a problem. Falling shot which would be suitable for a drone reaches a low terminal velocity before reaching the ground. I have used target ranges which were *under* the falling shot from a skeet range and at most it was mildly annoying and no more hazardous than sporadic heavy rain.
Another fine example of how competition leads to duplication of effort: the world only needs one constellation of positioning satellites, but has more than that already, and with more to come (because WE can't trust THEM. Insert your own candidates for WE and THEM)
Could you give an example using last mile internet service providers?
Intel beat its competitors not because x86 was technically better, but because they were able to catch the widespread consumer adoption in PCs which lead to them being able to outspend others in process node technology. Now that TSMC has caught up to them a great deal, the only other major performance hurdle are the ISA extensions and optimizations. If MIPS is truly FOSS then many of those mature features can be re-implemented into RISCV and earn a massive performance boost. Specifically the SIMD extensions and VPE (MIPS equivalent to hyper-threading) will be useful.
It was not only process technology. Intel's development budget was larger than all of the RISC developer budgets combined which allowed features like out-of-order execution. Development tools have improved but a high performance RISC design is not going to be significantly easier to produce than a high performance x86 design.
We need to reduce carbon emissions from the sources with the highest marginal reduction per cost. If only there were some way resources could be allocated to that by some kind of magical, invisible hand....
This is why cap and trade is a viable, market oriented solution to greenhouse gas emissions.
Cap and trade is only a viable solution to facilitate rent seeking. If you want a solution to greenhouse gas emissions, then assign an objective negative cost and tax it without exceptions.
In many countries, the wiretapping and modification of private communication is illegal, and such activities could result in massive fines and/or prison time for those involved. Food for thought.
I have caught AT&T doing the same thing with DSL and FTTN HTTP traffic and interfering with other IP protocols.
It is best to treat all IP traffic as lawfully seized which means it can be lawfully searched as well. If the US government is not doing it, then it has its agents at least in the form of the US telecommunication companies doing it for it.
Too bad Google has the man in charge that they do. He misrepresented everything to Congress and at the same time had building a Big Brother search engine for China as one of his main goals. Get rid of this guy and bring in someone with a sense of ethics.
Given the nature of Google's founding, I always figured national security interests (FBI, CIA, NSA) were involved from the start.
Why did science fiction's ubiquitous surveillance trope have to be the one to become true in my lifetime?
Patreon has joined Google, various credit card network, and various hosting services in denying service to selected individuals and businesses in the name of political correctness.
1) massively improved memory latency, for the hardware mechanism that implements the 'lock' has a real impact on access speeds. 2) massive improvements on power efficiency (the lock and key takes power for each memory access) 3) much higher clock speeds due to 1 and 2
The TLB is used for every memory access so the permission check is free. Intel only acts on the permission check at instruction retirement where other faults are detected. AMD apparently uses the free permission check to prevent further speculation.
Bail-bondsmen are sketchy people, but in what way is it better to not have the option to pay a fee to have someone else front the money? If your bond is $1000 and all you can scrape up is $100, then is it better to stay in jail or pay $100 and get out and maybe keep your job, your house, etc. Either way, you're screwed. But why is having a choice in how you are screwed worse than no choice?
Because it allows prosecutors to use bail punitively and the courts and legislatures go along with it.
I wouldn't say worthless. You have a decade's old company that has millions of active email addresses. That's a captive audience you can advertise to. AOL/Time Warner biggest mistake was getting rid of their chat service. That is what was keeping them alive.
AOL already had created communities that could be accessed by keywords. If those were standardized a bit the platform could have have created and AOL Timeline. So you had AOL Groups. You had an AOL Messenger. Restrict who could see or send you messages and you would have had AOL Facebook.
Yahoo was destroying their chat services before they were purchased. It was big talk in the groups I participated in and they all moved to alternates many of which specifically implemented ways to transfer the contents off.
They are not self powered. They are powered by the telco exchange switch which is also on battery back up should they lose power. If you have even a modest Internet set up you should have the modem, router, and switch on UPS. Put the Ooma on that UPS and your phone works as long as the internet does. Even the telco exchange will eventually go down unless they have a generator.
Both the FTTN DSL and cable ISPs where I am fail during power outages even though my modem and local network are completely backed up which is especially annoying because my POTs phone connection comes through the modem.
When I had DSL over POTs, then the self powered POTs phone still worked.
I assume the FCC regulation is that services which are required for POTs are suppose to be backed up but who wants to change the batteries in the cabinets every year? U-Verse had a bunch of cabinet fires when it was first installed.
I think the big difference is that with a hard drive, failure is usually mechanical and preceded by signs reported in the SMART data like error rate and reallocation count. SSDs failure tend to be data structure corruption which has no antecedent to watch for.
Here is the data available from my Crucial SSDs. It includes remaining operating life. The unexpected power loss events are because it is installed into a Windows 10 test system which keeps crashing with a blue screen and incomplete diagnostic data. Yay Microsoft!
1 Raw Read Error Rate 0 Errors/Page 5 Reallocated NAND Block Count 0 NAND Blocks 9 Power On Hours Count 1176 Hours 12 Power Cycle Count 69 Power Cycles 171 Program Fail Count 0 NAND Page Program Failures 172 Erase Fail Count 0 NAND Block Erase Failures 173 Block Wear-Leveling Count 8 Erases 174 Unexpected Power Loss Count 22 Unexpected Power Loss events 180 Unused Reserved Block Count 100 Blocks 183 SATA Interface Downshift 0 Downshifts 184 Error Correction Count 0 Correction Events 187 Reported Uncorrectable Errors 0 ECC Correction Failures 194 Enclosure Temperature 35 Current Temperature (C) 68 Highest Lifetime Temperature (C) 196 Reallocation Event Count 0 Events 197 Current Pending ECC Count 0 ECC Counts 198 SMART Off-line Scan Uncorrectable Errors 0 Errors 199 Ultra-DMA CRC Error Count 0 Errors 202 Percentage Lifetime Remaining 100 % Lifetime Remaining 206 Write Error Rate 0 Program Fails/MB 210 RAIN Successful Recovery Page Count 0 TUs successfully recovered by RAIN 246 Cumulative Host Sectors Written 1323897591 512 Byte Sectors 247 Host Program Page Count 41371799 NAND Page 248 FTL Program Page Count 21086208 NAND Page
I believe Intel SSDs are programmed to "self brick" when they fail, or at least they used to be. I remember thinking that was a spectacularly stupid way to fail, and the read-only mode would be much preferable. Yes, your computer will likely crash hard in short order either way, but at least with read-only mode you could get (most of) your most recent data off it
Intel did or still does this when the SSD endurance is exhausted which struck me as particularly skeezy. Why not force read only mode so that the data may be recovered?
I heard that outside of "wearing out", the biggest cause of failure by far is the controller, which fails at roughly the same rate as spinning rust. Overall, SSDs fail at roughly the same rate as mech drives, if you ignore the mechanical part of mech drives. The topic rant sounds like someone who would rather have a drive that is over 2x more likely to fail because he better understands that additional 100% failure modes.
It is not the controller or ICs which fail. By themselves they are reliable.
The problem is the way NAND Flash memory behaves when programming and perhaps erase operations are interrupted by for example loss of power. If a log type of file system is used, then you would expect that any interruption could only at most corrupt the data being written but interruption can cause the state machine controlling the write or erase to damage *other* locations. If those other locations include the the Flash translation layer data structures, then for practical purposes the drive is destroyed.
Multi-level Flash storage has an additional failure mode where interrupting a write to a partially programmed page destroys the existing data stored on that page.
The solution is to have backup power sufficient to complete any possible write or erase operation. I laughed when SandForce advertised their controllers as not requiring any power backup for safe operation.
SMART should be able to provide the number of remapped sectors. There should be manufacturer specific counters for the amount of over provisioning that is left for remapping too. That should tell you precisely when you should plan to replace an SSD due to age. How hard would it be to notify something that the drive can't handle any more dead cells, so should not be written to any more? Or that it is down to x% of spare nand?
Crucial does exactly this with their SSDs but it does not save you from spontaneous mysterious death.
That said, I find it sad that you cannot get "high reliability" SSDs where you basically can forget about the risk of them dying. I am talking reliability levels like a typical CPU here. It seems the market for that is just not there.
They can be found in the enterprise market but they use lower density Flash so cost a lot more per gigabyte.
Slashdot Mirror
XP was pretty much optimal as far as gui's go. All they really needed was to prettify the icons and generally fine-tune the look, but instead they wasted their time reinventing square wheels and trying to be "revolutionary" where what we really needed was gradual evolution.
XP was actually a step back from 2000 where you could actually adjust all of the UI colors. XP made some of them fixed. Windows 10 is even worse.
I am sure I do not know every compound that could burn that color of blue,
I know one: Air. When air ionises it turns blue. This happens during a lightning strike, and also happens during HV arcing. Oh and bonus points: It has nothing to do with compounds and everything to do with temperature.
The nitrogen in the air arcs blue-white. Green comes from ionized copper.
The drones are flying withing 50 feet of jet engines at maximum power. Does the initial velocity of the lead pellets now flying directly into the turbine matter?
News at 11, after the memorial service.
Well then it is too bad there were so many jet engines operating that the drones were never more than 50 feet from them.
Have you ever used a shotgun on aerial targets? Have you ever been hit by shot from someone who has?
While range is limited, accuracy and danger are not a problem. Falling shot which would be suitable for a drone reaches a low terminal velocity before reaching the ground. I have used target ranges which were *under* the falling shot from a skeet range and at most it was mildly annoying and no more hazardous than sporadic heavy rain.
Another fine example of how competition leads to duplication of effort: the world only needs one constellation of positioning satellites, but has more than that already, and with more to come (because WE can't trust THEM. Insert your own candidates for WE and THEM)
Could you give an example using last mile internet service providers?
Intel beat its competitors not because x86 was technically better, but because they were able to catch the widespread consumer adoption in PCs which lead to them being able to outspend others in process node technology. Now that TSMC has caught up to them a great deal, the only other major performance hurdle are the ISA extensions and optimizations. If MIPS is truly FOSS then many of those mature features can be re-implemented into RISCV and earn a massive performance boost. Specifically the SIMD extensions and VPE (MIPS equivalent to hyper-threading) will be useful.
It was not only process technology. Intel's development budget was larger than all of the RISC developer budgets combined which allowed features like out-of-order execution. Development tools have improved but a high performance RISC design is not going to be significantly easier to produce than a high performance x86 design.
We need to reduce carbon emissions from the sources with the highest marginal reduction per cost. If only there were some way resources could be allocated to that by some kind of magical, invisible hand....
Inconceivable!
This is why cap and trade is a viable, market oriented solution to greenhouse gas emissions.
Cap and trade is only a viable solution to facilitate rent seeking. If you want a solution to greenhouse gas emissions, then assign an objective negative cost and tax it without exceptions.
In many countries, the wiretapping and modification of private communication is illegal, and such activities could result in massive fines and/or prison time for those involved. Food for thought.
But not in the US where it is completely legal:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
I have caught AT&T doing the same thing with DSL and FTTN HTTP traffic and interfering with other IP protocols.
It is best to treat all IP traffic as lawfully seized which means it can be lawfully searched as well. If the US government is not doing it, then it has its agents at least in the form of the US telecommunication companies doing it for it.
EAE = Encrypt Absolutely Everything
Too bad Google has the man in charge that they do. He misrepresented everything to Congress and at the same time had building a Big Brother search engine for China as one of his main goals. Get rid of this guy and bring in someone with a sense of ethics.
Given the nature of Google's founding, I always figured national security interests (FBI, CIA, NSA) were involved from the start.
Why did science fiction's ubiquitous surveillance trope have to be the one to become true in my lifetime?
The US government is already doing that via things like Operation Choke Point and what New York governor Cuomo is doing to the NRA.
Patreon has joined Google, various credit card network, and various hosting services in denying service to selected individuals and businesses in the name of political correctness.
1) massively improved memory latency, for the hardware mechanism that implements the 'lock' has a real impact on access speeds.
2) massive improvements on power efficiency (the lock and key takes power for each memory access)
3) much higher clock speeds due to 1 and 2
The TLB is used for every memory access so the permission check is free. Intel only acts on the permission check at instruction retirement where other faults are detected. AMD apparently uses the free permission check to prevent further speculation.
Bail-bondsmen are sketchy people, but in what way is it better to not have the option to pay a fee to have someone else front the money? If your bond is $1000 and all you can scrape up is $100, then is it better to stay in jail or pay $100 and get out and maybe keep your job, your house, etc. Either way, you're screwed. But why is having a choice in how you are screwed worse than no choice?
Because it allows prosecutors to use bail punitively and the courts and legislatures go along with it.
I wouldn't say worthless. You have a decade's old company that has millions of active email addresses. That's a captive audience you can advertise to. AOL/Time Warner biggest mistake was getting rid of their chat service. That is what was keeping them alive.
AOL already had created communities that could be accessed by keywords. If those were standardized a bit the platform could have have created and AOL Timeline. So you had AOL Groups. You had an AOL Messenger. Restrict who could see or send you messages and you would have had AOL Facebook.
Yahoo was destroying their chat services before they were purchased. It was big talk in the groups I participated in and they all moved to alternates many of which specifically implemented ways to transfer the contents off.
They are not self powered. They are powered by the telco exchange switch which is also on battery back up should they lose power. If you have even a modest Internet set up you should have the modem, router, and switch on UPS. Put the Ooma on that UPS and your phone works as long as the internet does. Even the telco exchange will eventually go down unless they have a generator.
Both the FTTN DSL and cable ISPs where I am fail during power outages even though my modem and local network are completely backed up which is especially annoying because my POTs phone connection comes through the modem.
When I had DSL over POTs, then the self powered POTs phone still worked.
I assume the FCC regulation is that services which are required for POTs are suppose to be backed up but who wants to change the batteries in the cabinets every year? U-Verse had a bunch of cabinet fires when it was first installed.
In California we would probably try to do something about it, and probably fail because we would need federal resources and they would be denied us.
I have a plan - Otisburg.
There is no requirement for states to honor drivers licenses from other states so no problem.
Hey now, those court rooms and prisons are not going to fill themselves.
I think the big difference is that with a hard drive, failure is usually mechanical and preceded by signs reported in the SMART data like error rate and reallocation count. SSDs failure tend to be data structure corruption which has no antecedent to watch for.
Here is the data available from my Crucial SSDs. It includes remaining operating life. The unexpected power loss events are because it is installed into a Windows 10 test system which keeps crashing with a blue screen and incomplete diagnostic data. Yay Microsoft!
1 Raw Read Error Rate 0 Errors/Page
5 Reallocated NAND Block Count 0 NAND Blocks
9 Power On Hours Count 1176 Hours
12 Power Cycle Count 69 Power Cycles
171 Program Fail Count 0 NAND Page Program Failures
172 Erase Fail Count 0 NAND Block Erase Failures
173 Block Wear-Leveling Count 8 Erases
174 Unexpected Power Loss Count 22 Unexpected Power Loss events
180 Unused Reserved Block Count 100 Blocks
183 SATA Interface Downshift 0 Downshifts
184 Error Correction Count 0 Correction Events
187 Reported Uncorrectable Errors 0 ECC Correction Failures
194 Enclosure Temperature 35 Current Temperature (C)
68 Highest Lifetime Temperature (C)
196 Reallocation Event Count 0 Events
197 Current Pending ECC Count 0 ECC Counts
198 SMART Off-line Scan Uncorrectable Errors 0 Errors
199 Ultra-DMA CRC Error Count 0 Errors
202 Percentage Lifetime Remaining 100 % Lifetime Remaining
206 Write Error Rate 0 Program Fails/MB
210 RAIN Successful Recovery Page Count 0 TUs successfully recovered by RAIN
246 Cumulative Host Sectors Written 1323897591 512 Byte Sectors
247 Host Program Page Count 41371799 NAND Page
248 FTL Program Page Count 21086208 NAND Page
I believe Intel SSDs are programmed to "self brick" when they fail, or at least they used to be. I remember thinking that was a spectacularly stupid way to fail, and the read-only mode would be much preferable. Yes, your computer will likely crash hard in short order either way, but at least with read-only mode you could get (most of) your most recent data off it
Intel did or still does this when the SSD endurance is exhausted which struck me as particularly skeezy. Why not force read only mode so that the data may be recovered?
I heard that outside of "wearing out", the biggest cause of failure by far is the controller, which fails at roughly the same rate as spinning rust. Overall, SSDs fail at roughly the same rate as mech drives, if you ignore the mechanical part of mech drives. The topic rant sounds like someone who would rather have a drive that is over 2x more likely to fail because he better understands that additional 100% failure modes.
It is not the controller or ICs which fail. By themselves they are reliable.
The problem is the way NAND Flash memory behaves when programming and perhaps erase operations are interrupted by for example loss of power. If a log type of file system is used, then you would expect that any interruption could only at most corrupt the data being written but interruption can cause the state machine controlling the write or erase to damage *other* locations. If those other locations include the the Flash translation layer data structures, then for practical purposes the drive is destroyed.
Multi-level Flash storage has an additional failure mode where interrupting a write to a partially programmed page destroys the existing data stored on that page.
The solution is to have backup power sufficient to complete any possible write or erase operation. I laughed when SandForce advertised their controllers as not requiring any power backup for safe operation.
SMART should be able to provide the number of remapped sectors. There should be manufacturer specific counters for the amount of over provisioning that is left for remapping too. That should tell you precisely when you should plan to replace an SSD due to age.
How hard would it be to notify something that the drive can't handle any more dead cells, so should not be written to any more? Or that it is down to x% of spare nand?
Crucial does exactly this with their SSDs but it does not save you from spontaneous mysterious death.
That said, I find it sad that you cannot get "high reliability" SSDs where you basically can forget about the risk of them dying. I am talking reliability levels like a typical CPU here. It seems the market for that is just not there.
They can be found in the enterprise market but they use lower density Flash so cost a lot more per gigabyte.
IPX was not the only protocol to have that problem with games. Some other early multiplayer games used broadcast UDP/IP which had the same problem.
IPX is not routable but we found a way to bridge and tunnel it between where I lived and a friend's house so we could hold dual LAN parties.