Well, if you're running Linux, set swappiness to less than 10 (even 0). The system will swap if it absolutely has to, but it will try very hard to avoid it. For example:
echo "5" >/proc/sys/vm/swappiness
This will avoid writing to the flash swap area unless the system is very low on available RAM. In most cases, the swap area will never be touched.
I remember it being in the 1980's, and there were two primary vendors: Memorex and a little startup called Intel.
The solid state paging devices were great; the only problem was that they needed a driver written by (if I remember correctly) Cambridge University. The driver writers ran 6 months to a year behind operating system releases, so our operating system upgrades (VM/CMS) were held back. The vendors didn't care; they were the only game in town.
Fortunately, IBM released their 3380 drives around that time. By spreading the paging area across multiple spindles/controllers/channels in small seek areas allowing low contention parallel paging I/O, we were able to exceed the performance of the solid state devices.
I had the great please of telling Intel and Memorex that we were not renewing our contract. Suddenly, they were bending over backward. They continued to ship the driver to us, only a month or two after OS releases, to show they could maintain the schedule. Apparently, we weren't the only ones to cancel our contracts.
It's funny to see how history repeats itself from time to time in the IT industry.
Well why didn't they just say that? Sheesh, lawyers make everything so complicated. If laws were written this way, you could replace the judicial system with a compiler. Ah.
If the video uses a documented instruction set, doesn't this imply that AMD/ATI CPU/GPU chips will be open source compatible? Shouldn't that be all the information needed (from the GPU perspective) to create a 3D hardware accelerated driver?
The truth is that Microsofts business model has failed and they know it.
Yeah, I'd call any business with a market cap of 287 billion dollars a failure. Wish I could fail that way.
That's what I used to say about AT&T, back when they had 1.2 million employees. It took 22 years for it to become nothing more than a name, but even back then it was clear it wasn't going to survive. The same is now true of Microsoft.
It seems you forgot that we did pay for faster service, via our taxes, to the tune of $200 Billion. Not that we got the promised performance, but we did pay for it.
* RC Saints - Saint Thomas of Villanueva? ; Saint Paulinus of York (in England)
* Also see October 10 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
* Republic of China (on Taiwan) - National Day (Double Tenth Day)
* Fiji - Fiji Day (National Day)
* Japan - National Health-Sports Day
* World Mental Health Day
* Old Michelmas - Celtic holiday
* French Republican Calendar - Tournesol (Sunflower) Day, nineteenth day in the Month of Vendémiaire
* North Korea - Foundation of the Korean Workers Party
* India - Apraila Murkha, equivalent to April Fools in the United States of America
Last year, Apple had about 80% market share in legal, downloadable music distribution. Even now they're still considered the market leader http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=25572 [cio.com] and it seems unlikely that their market share has dropped down to your 2-3% in a single year.
There's a difference between legal downloads and total downloads. Right now, legal services are only capturing a tiny share of the market. That indicates that the market price for the product has not been set correctly.
Someone else posted that per-viewer estimates for ad-supported TV are at about $0.54. You need to add $0.34 to your price just to break even. Then you have to worry about bandwidth.
So the content providers (production companies) are selling the content to the networks at a loss, and the networks are then selling the content to my cable company at a loss? That's really nice of them, but I doubt that's a sustainable business model. Which makes more sense: everyone is losing money when my cable company offers me the content for $15/month, or everyone is making money on the transaction? Remember, much of this content can be had for $0 - the major networks broadcast their content - paid for by advertising.
And you lose high-cost production shows, big name actors, etc. You need capital to do something like this, and usually that capital os fronted by the networks. Yes, you can do low-budget things with no-name actors, but that's not what the public wants.
If the production companies make more, I think they will be happy. Re-read my comment: "By selling the program directly - bypassing a network and a cable TV provider - the actual content creator can dramatically increase their profit." In addition, the public has shown that they are fine with little known actors, as long as there is good content: Lost, Scrubs, House, Standoff, etc.
There's nothing more realistic about $0.10/track versus $0.99/track. ITMS is a phenomenal hit at $0.99. That buck looks like it is definitely within the 'market will bear' curve.
To make that statement, you have to know what percentage of downloads is being handled by iTunes. I would be very surprised to hear that even 2-3% of downloads are via services that charge $.99/track.
The difference with TV is that it's available much more cheaply through the old distribution channels. If all you care about is music, $10 for an album (or the ability to pick and choose what you purchase) might be worth it.
Radio provides music much more cheaply, as you indicate yourself, below.
With TV, a given episode will air between 2 and 4 times a year for new shows, and possibly more often for shows in syndication. There is greater scarcity in this case, compared to a popular song which is likely to play more than a dozen times per day per pop-radio station (the free, legal equivalent for music).
I don't watch re-runs, but I do buy series DVDs for the subset of programs I consider worth watching again. Downloading a program with skipable commercials is no different than taping/PVRing a program and skipping the commercials. If I can get that show for $.20 today (I can on my cable, even though it's going through a third party), then cutting out the middleman should increase profits for the content providers.
Of course, there are problems with this, too. TV shows are scheduled in advance, so people know when they will be on. This mitigates (to some extent) the reduced number of airings. Consider, though, that TV shows are roughly 7-14 times longer than the average song and include video along with the audio. They take longer to prepare for ITMS and require much more bandwidth (well more than twice the bandwidth, compared to just being twice the price).
By selling the program directly - bypassing a network and a cable TV provider - the actual content creator can dramatically increase their profit. No matter what argument you use, the reality is that I pay $15/month for that content. A piece goes to the network, and a piece goes to the cable company. In addition, the content creator will receive incremental payment (as each program is produced), instead of having to create a block of programming and selling that to the network. It will actually make it easier for content creators to provide new material - that the networks may not have been interested in. One example of this is the program "Charlie Jade", which I thought was very good - but it was never picked up by USA networks.
Something to consider in your math is that you are probably paying for your cable every month, even when there are no new episodes of the shows you watch. For example, Fox isn't airing many new episodes of its shows during the World Seriece due to their baseball coverage. If you were a season purchaser on ITMS, that's a lot of money you aren't spending right now. Same for the summer. Also, if every television show was offered on ITMS, then slumps where there just aren't many good shows on TV would benefit you financially.
That's a very important issue. Why aren't new programs being offered 52 weeks of the year? The reason is that the networks want to maximize profit from each episode that they have purchased. If the content providers were paid for 52 episodes a year, why wouldn't they make them? Real people have to work for a living; they don't work 20 weeks and then get 26 weeks off. You can bet that content provider would jump at the chance to sell twice as much product.
All that said, I'm not about to drop cable. The convenience of having the shows right there beats having to download them. DVR makes the scheduling commitment almost meaningless, and (until they start blocking ad-skip) means I watch the shows in the same amount of time as if I had downloaded them from ITMS. And having something on in the background is nice, even if
"If the shows were available online for purchase, and if they were offered in a format that was conducive to what we want (ie no DRM), we would consider purchasing them. The total cost should still be less than our DirecTV."
And that's exactly where the content creators are failing.
At a charge of $1.99/episode, the 21 programs my wife and I watch in a week would cost $84/month. Instead, I pay for minimal basic cable, $15/month, which gives me DRM-free content (with skipable advertising). To be competative, the cost per episode would need to be 20 cents each. There is no way that the content providers would even consider that.
Part of the problem is the unrealistic cost of music. Because people are bad at math, and are willing to pay 99 cents a track instead of 10 cents - a more realistic value - TV content providers set the bar higher.
Until music is 10 cents and TV shows are 20 cents, this battle will continue. While the "horse and buggy" industries laments the changing business model, people will bypass the system (download illegally uploaded content), costing the content providers increasing lost revenue. At the same time, the loss of statistical data will cause the media providers to make bad decisions, hurting their revenue even more. The more they fight reality, the more it costs them.
The best way to encourage the use of open source, is to use it yourself. Run it on your laptop. Run it on your desktop. Run it on your server. Run it on your PDA. Run it on your cell phone. Put penguin/distribution stickers on everything.
As more people - that others recognize for their technical ability - run a piece of software, the more it attracts attention. As other environments have problems, but your SELinux/ExecShield protected machine keeps chugging, people will notice. When they ask tell them, but don't try to sell them. Say "Linux" not Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, SuSE, etc. Use a common term, so they can begin to associate the environment with the benefits in their own minds.
When other people are watching, don't use the command line. Yes it's easier to do some things that way, even on Mac OSX or WindowsXP. But when you use the command line, that's the association that people make with Linux.
Linux is already much bigger (installed base) than people recognize. It runs under the radar. No registration, no cost, no audit trail of downloads or copies. To help manufacturers understand that, everytime you purchase a product ask the vendor a question and mention Linux. Does it work with Linux? Are there Linux drivers? Is it Linux compatible? Even if the vendor is providing a product for another OS. Are the files this program creates compatible with "program X" on Linux? Can I move this USB device between "OS X" and Linux? Is the compact flash/USB/Firewire in this camera/camcorder/PDA/phone/etc. Linux friendly?
It doesn't take much to change the world; you just have to do something to let the world know you're there.
Your dad may be skilled, and I'm sure he is. However, for every skilled elderly person there'll be many more with no clue how the Internet works.
And the same just can't be true of some under 25-something. I wouldn't trust any of my (4) nephews to setup their own cable routers and home networks, even though they were all born with keyboards in their hands. Exposure to technology doesn't imply cluefulness. Your statement is ageist.
Re:Question about lifespan MTBF of flash vs hdd
on
16GB Flash USB Dongle
·
· Score: 1
It's more than adequate, with proper sparing and reallocation algorithms (built into the drive itself). I used to work for a large telecom, and we had thousands of flash drives in production edge switches in central offices all over the USA. Their failure rate was comparable to the regular drives. They were written to nearly continuously (circular log files).
I have no problem using flash drives. My laptop HDs need to be replaced every 18 months to 2 years as it is - I'm on the third HD in the machine I'm using now, and it's just 5 years old. The major issue with portable devices is physical shock and vibration, which is a killer for rotational media.
At 16GB, it's starting to be large enough to be a useful replacement for a 2.5" hard drive. Lower power, heat and noise and zero seek. If they can get 16GB under $100US, I'll buy one.
My parents established an RF shield on our home back in the 1960s. Of course, back then it was called foil and flock wallpaper and it was quite hideous. It still was an effective RF shield. It also made a dandy electrical conductor as I found out, when a foil edge made contact to the hot in an outlet. Something to keep in mind as you RF shield your buildings.
Blogger has had a long standing problem with ssh/sftp on non-standard ports. It didn't work, then they fixed it, then they broke it, then they fixed it, then they documented that it's not supported.
This leads me to believe that they aren't using a standard client, but rather wrote their own, with all that implies.
I had hoped that when Google acquired them, all that would be quickly resolved, but apparently not.
I went into a CompUSA to check out the various Windows-based PDAs. I picked up one, played with a few applications, and it hung. I picked up another, and again after a minute or two, it failed. I tried a third, just opened the text editor, and the same thing happened. All were different manufacturers. My brother just got a Windows-based "smart" cell phone. He resets it at least twice a week.
I think I'll keep my boring Zaurus PDA; uptime is over 100 days (the last time I loaded an OpenZaurus update), and there's just something really cool about sshing *in* to my PDA, or syncing it with rsync.
"This is crazy. I had never heard of this fact before. After reading the PBS thing and a bunch more on the web, I can't believe that fuel reprocessing/breeder reactors haven't been put more widely into use."
Well, the USA isn't (yet) using this technology, but the Chinese are. Even Toshiba has one of these super-safe "pre-fab" tiny reactors, that are intended for distributed use. By distributing power generation, you eliminate many of the grid effects (like blacking out a significant portion of the country when there's a problem). Oh, and as a byproduct, you also get a plentiful supply of hydrogen. It's a crime that instead we are burning coal - releasing more "natural" radioactivity than any reactor ever has, as well as poisoning our seafood with mercury.
We can achieve the same goal by allowing the reprocessing of nuclear "waste". PBS had a good interview on the subject, which mentions that power generating reactors are only permitted to extract less than 1 percent of the energy. This is what leaves the "waste" highly radioactive.
I keep putting the word waste in quotes, because it's more like a nuclear fuel reserve than an unusable energy source. Use all the energy, and the half-life of what's left is a few decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they should have asked a baker, instead of a scientist?
Well, if you're running Linux, set swappiness to less than 10 (even 0). The system will swap if it absolutely has to, but it will try very hard to avoid it. For example:
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness
echo "5" >
This will avoid writing to the flash swap area unless the system is very low on available RAM. In most cases, the swap area will never be touched.
The solid state paging devices were great; the only problem was that they needed a driver written by (if I remember correctly) Cambridge University. The driver writers ran 6 months to a year behind operating system releases, so our operating system upgrades (VM/CMS) were held back. The vendors didn't care; they were the only game in town.
Fortunately, IBM released their 3380 drives around that time. By spreading the paging area across multiple spindles/controllers/channels in small seek areas allowing low contention parallel paging I/O, we were able to exceed the performance of the solid state devices.
I had the great please of telling Intel and Memorex that we were not renewing our contract. Suddenly, they were bending over backward. They continued to ship the driver to us, only a month or two after OS releases, to show they could maintain the schedule. Apparently, we weren't the only ones to cancel our contracts.
It's funny to see how history repeats itself from time to time in the IT industry.
Anyone else getting a probe on port 500 when visiting the article link?
Compliance(Terms_Conditions(Agreement));
Condition(Parties || '/.*/g');
Release('/.*/g' || claims('/.*/g'));
Well why didn't they just say that? Sheesh, lawyers make everything so complicated. If laws were written this way, you could replace the judicial system with a compiler. Ah.
If the video uses a documented instruction set, doesn't this imply that AMD/ATI CPU/GPU chips will be open source compatible? Shouldn't that be all the information needed (from the GPU perspective) to create a 3D hardware accelerated driver?
Yeah, I'd call any business with a market cap of 287 billion dollars a failure. Wish I could fail that way.
That's what I used to say about AT&T, back when they had 1.2 million employees. It took 22 years for it to become nothing more than a name, but even back then it was clear it wasn't going to survive. The same is now true of Microsoft.
It seems you forgot that we did pay for faster service, via our taxes, to the tune of $200 Billion. Not that we got the promised performance, but we did pay for it.
Argggh, you're right. I didn't check the edit history. Sigh, my fault. Thanks for pointing it out.
The article you pointed to says:
Holidays and observances
* RC Saints - Saint Thomas of Villanueva? ; Saint Paulinus of York (in England)
* Also see October 10 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
* Republic of China (on Taiwan) - National Day (Double Tenth Day)
* Fiji - Fiji Day (National Day)
* Japan - National Health-Sports Day
* World Mental Health Day
* Old Michelmas - Celtic holiday
* French Republican Calendar - Tournesol (Sunflower) Day, nineteenth day in the Month of Vendémiaire
* North Korea - Foundation of the Korean Workers Party
* India - Apraila Murkha, equivalent to April Fools in the United States of America
There's a difference between legal downloads and total downloads. Right now, legal services are only capturing a tiny share of the market. That indicates that the market price for the product has not been set correctly.
Someone else posted that per-viewer estimates for ad-supported TV are at about $0.54. You need to add $0.34 to your price just to break even. Then you have to worry about bandwidth.
So the content providers (production companies) are selling the content to the networks at a loss, and the networks are then selling the content to my cable company at a loss? That's really nice of them, but I doubt that's a sustainable business model. Which makes more sense: everyone is losing money when my cable company offers me the content for $15/month, or everyone is making money on the transaction? Remember, much of this content can be had for $0 - the major networks broadcast their content - paid for by advertising.
And you lose high-cost production shows, big name actors, etc. You need capital to do something like this, and usually that capital os fronted by the networks. Yes, you can do low-budget things with no-name actors, but that's not what the public wants.
If the production companies make more, I think they will be happy. Re-read my comment: "By selling the program directly - bypassing a network and a cable TV provider - the actual content creator can dramatically increase their profit." In addition, the public has shown that they are fine with little known actors, as long as there is good content: Lost, Scrubs, House, Standoff, etc.
To make that statement, you have to know what percentage of downloads is being handled by iTunes. I would be very surprised to hear that even 2-3% of downloads are via services that charge $.99/track.
The difference with TV is that it's available much more cheaply through the old distribution channels. If all you care about is music, $10 for an album (or the ability to pick and choose what you purchase) might be worth it.
Radio provides music much more cheaply, as you indicate yourself, below.
With TV, a given episode will air between 2 and 4 times a year for new shows, and possibly more often for shows in syndication. There is greater scarcity in this case, compared to a popular song which is likely to play more than a dozen times per day per pop-radio station (the free, legal equivalent for music).
I don't watch re-runs, but I do buy series DVDs for the subset of programs I consider worth watching again. Downloading a program with skipable commercials is no different than taping/PVRing a program and skipping the commercials. If I can get that show for $.20 today (I can on my cable, even though it's going through a third party), then cutting out the middleman should increase profits for the content providers.
Of course, there are problems with this, too. TV shows are scheduled in advance, so people know when they will be on. This mitigates (to some extent) the reduced number of airings. Consider, though, that TV shows are roughly 7-14 times longer than the average song and include video along with the audio. They take longer to prepare for ITMS and require much more bandwidth (well more than twice the bandwidth, compared to just being twice the price).
By selling the program directly - bypassing a network and a cable TV provider - the actual content creator can dramatically increase their profit. No matter what argument you use, the reality is that I pay $15/month for that content. A piece goes to the network, and a piece goes to the cable company. In addition, the content creator will receive incremental payment (as each program is produced), instead of having to create a block of programming and selling that to the network. It will actually make it easier for content creators to provide new material - that the networks may not have been interested in. One example of this is the program "Charlie Jade", which I thought was very good - but it was never picked up by USA networks.
Something to consider in your math is that you are probably paying for your cable every month, even when there are no new episodes of the shows you watch. For example, Fox isn't airing many new episodes of its shows during the World Seriece due to their baseball coverage. If you were a season purchaser on ITMS, that's a lot of money you aren't spending right now. Same for the summer. Also, if every television show was offered on ITMS, then slumps where there just aren't many good shows on TV would benefit you financially.
That's a very important issue. Why aren't new programs being offered 52 weeks of the year? The reason is that the networks want to maximize profit from each episode that they have purchased. If the content providers were paid for 52 episodes a year, why wouldn't they make them? Real people have to work for a living; they don't work 20 weeks and then get 26 weeks off. You can bet that content provider would jump at the chance to sell twice as much product.
All that said, I'm not about to drop cable. The convenience of having the shows right there beats having to download them. DVR makes the scheduling commitment almost meaningless, and (until they start blocking ad-skip) means I watch the shows in the same amount of time as if I had downloaded them from ITMS. And having something on in the background is nice, even if
And that's exactly where the content creators are failing.
At a charge of $1.99/episode, the 21 programs my wife and I watch in a week would cost $84/month. Instead, I pay for minimal basic cable, $15/month, which gives me DRM-free content (with skipable advertising). To be competative, the cost per episode would need to be 20 cents each. There is no way that the content providers would even consider that.
Part of the problem is the unrealistic cost of music. Because people are bad at math, and are willing to pay 99 cents a track instead of 10 cents - a more realistic value - TV content providers set the bar higher.
Until music is 10 cents and TV shows are 20 cents, this battle will continue. While the "horse and buggy" industries laments the changing business model, people will bypass the system (download illegally uploaded content), costing the content providers increasing lost revenue. At the same time, the loss of statistical data will cause the media providers to make bad decisions, hurting their revenue even more. The more they fight reality, the more it costs them.
The best way to encourage the use of open source, is to use it yourself. Run it on your laptop. Run it on your desktop. Run it on your server. Run it on your PDA. Run it on your cell phone. Put penguin/distribution stickers on everything.
As more people - that others recognize for their technical ability - run a piece of software, the more it attracts attention. As other environments have problems, but your SELinux/ExecShield protected machine keeps chugging, people will notice. When they ask tell them, but don't try to sell them. Say "Linux" not Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, SuSE, etc. Use a common term, so they can begin to associate the environment with the benefits in their own minds.
When other people are watching, don't use the command line. Yes it's easier to do some things that way, even on Mac OSX or WindowsXP. But when you use the command line, that's the association that people make with Linux.
Linux is already much bigger (installed base) than people recognize. It runs under the radar. No registration, no cost, no audit trail of downloads or copies. To help manufacturers understand that, everytime you purchase a product ask the vendor a question and mention Linux. Does it work with Linux? Are there Linux drivers? Is it Linux compatible? Even if the vendor is providing a product for another OS. Are the files this program creates compatible with "program X" on Linux? Can I move this USB device between "OS X" and Linux? Is the compact flash/USB/Firewire in this camera/camcorder/PDA/phone/etc. Linux friendly?
It doesn't take much to change the world; you just have to do something to let the world know you're there.
Your distribution (or you) must not have a reasonable set of ulimits.
And the same just can't be true of some under 25-something. I wouldn't trust any of my (4) nephews to setup their own cable routers and home networks, even though they were all born with keyboards in their hands. Exposure to technology doesn't imply cluefulness. Your statement is ageist.
It's more than adequate, with proper sparing and reallocation algorithms (built into the drive itself). I used to work for a large telecom, and we had thousands of flash drives in production edge switches in central offices all over the USA. Their failure rate was comparable to the regular drives. They were written to nearly continuously (circular log files).
I have no problem using flash drives. My laptop HDs need to be replaced every 18 months to 2 years as it is - I'm on the third HD in the machine I'm using now, and it's just 5 years old. The major issue with portable devices is physical shock and vibration, which is a killer for rotational media.
At 16GB, it's starting to be large enough to be a useful replacement for a 2.5" hard drive. Lower power, heat and noise and zero seek. If they can get 16GB under $100US, I'll buy one.
Uh, yeah. We meant to do that.
My parents established an RF shield on our home back in the 1960s. Of course, back then it was called foil and flock wallpaper and it was quite hideous. It still was an effective RF shield. It also made a dandy electrical conductor as I found out, when a foil edge made contact to the hot in an outlet. Something to keep in mind as you RF shield your buildings.
For Fedora folks, XaraLX and XaraLX-examples are in the Extras repository, which is enabled by default. Just:
yum -y install XaraLX and XaraLX-examples
Blogger has had a long standing problem with ssh/sftp on non-standard ports. It didn't work, then they fixed it, then they broke it, then they fixed it, then they documented that it's not supported.
This leads me to believe that they aren't using a standard client, but rather wrote their own, with all that implies.
I had hoped that when Google acquired them, all that would be quickly resolved, but apparently not.
I went into a CompUSA to check out the various Windows-based PDAs. I picked up one, played with a few applications, and it hung. I picked up another, and again after a minute or two, it failed. I tried a third, just opened the text editor, and the same thing happened. All were different manufacturers. My brother just got a Windows-based "smart" cell phone. He resets it at least twice a week.
I think I'll keep my boring Zaurus PDA; uptime is over 100 days (the last time I loaded an OpenZaurus update), and there's just something really cool about sshing *in* to my PDA, or syncing it with rsync.
Well, the USA isn't (yet) using this technology, but the Chinese are. Even Toshiba has one of these super-safe "pre-fab" tiny reactors, that are intended for distributed use. By distributing power generation, you eliminate many of the grid effects (like blacking out a significant portion of the country when there's a problem). Oh, and as a byproduct, you also get a plentiful supply of hydrogen. It's a crime that instead we are burning coal - releasing more "natural" radioactivity than any reactor ever has, as well as poisoning our seafood with mercury.
We can achieve the same goal by allowing the reprocessing of nuclear "waste". PBS had a good interview on the subject, which mentions that power generating reactors are only permitted to extract less than 1 percent of the energy. This is what leaves the "waste" highly radioactive.
I keep putting the word waste in quotes, because it's more like a nuclear fuel reserve than an unusable energy source. Use all the energy, and the half-life of what's left is a few decades.