Seek time and rotational speed are mostly independent.
Seek time is the time that it takes to move the head to the desired track (including time for the vibrations from the movement to settle down). This is mostly independent of how fast the disk is spinning.
Rotational speed determines how long you have to wait, on average, for the data you want to read to show up under the head.
So a random read will take one seek, plus half a rotation, before the drive can read the data.
Isn't their current 1TB drive only 3 platters? So this isn't really a big increase in density, just adding a platter with a slight density increase. Regardless, I'm disappointed. I was hoping they would be coming out with 2TB drives this year. At least it's coming out in August, in time for the new TV shows in the fall (I need to upgrade my MythTV). Even if I don't buy one, it will help push down the prices on the 1TB drives.
I heard about this at least a decade ago. It was on some future technology program ("Beyond 2000" perhaps?), and they showed some building in Japan where they had glass domes (perhaps a foot or two in diameter) on the roof collecting sunlight, which was distributed via fiber-optic cables to the lobby.
While that sounds a bit snarky, there's a serious point.
Users often want to have access to the latest software. Many distributions provide updated packages over time, so that when a new official release comes out, many users already have a good portion of the changes. Gentoo takes this to the extreme, having eliminated the concept of release entirely (except for the installation system). So how does a synchronized release schedule help anyone when users will be upgrading various packages when they are updated?
I just don't see the value in synchronizing releases.
Absolutely correct. We bought a floppy drive with our Bondi-Blue rev.B iMac (it read 120MB "Super Disks" also, but we never used that). We needed it to copy old files from our previous Mac (which didn't have Ethernet). We (well, actually my wife) continued to use the floppy to transfer files to computers at her school until I bought her a USB flash drive. We finally retired it last summer when we bought a new iMac.
It was still working just fine when we retired it, but it was too slow for YouTube, and the last OS9-compatible Mozilla was incompatible with Yahoo's login system. It may serve as a classroom computer next fall--it's still better than nothing.
Yup, they have no enemies except the environment. Whatever they do to extract nutrients would eventually be done to the entire moon if they got out. If we find a need for the material in its current form, we'll be too late. If we find that the conversion process has side effects that we didn't anticipate (like, say, breaking apart all the rocks into dust), we would be hosed.
We may only get one chance to do this right. If we introduce a bacteria that can survive without artificial shelter (doubtful, but possible), it's there forever. Many of the problems we've had here with invasive species has been due to things introduced intentionally that ended up doing things that weren't anticipated.
Granted, the moon is a harsh enough environment that anything we do will probably only be in a pressurized man-made structure, but that might not be the case if we try it on Mars.
Wasn't it just a month or so ago when the CEO of Seagate said he wasn't worried about SSD impacting their market, but if it became a threat, they would use their patent portfolio to defend against the new competition? So doesn't this mark a very rapid change of outlook on Seagate's part? I guess SSDs are the next big thing--Seagate confirms it.
I remember when I was in college, many of the textbooks that I bought used were in perfect condition, and underneath the "used" stickers the book was stamped "promotional copy, not for resale." The textbook publishers send out free copies to professors, hoping that they will select the book for their class. The professors often sell them to used book companies.
Thanks for the answer. As you can see from the other discussions, it would appear that they did actually make two versions, and they tried to get Comedy Central to air the uncensored version, but it's not completely certain that the alternate version really exists.
Remember after the Mohammad cartoon panic, the episode where they were making a big deal that they were going to show Mohammad? The end where they were going to show him was apparently censored by Comedy Central. Is it cut in the online version?
I'm offended by any material served by Network Solutions. Hence all their customers are in violation of the terms of service, so they should all be shut down.
How many complaints does it take to shut down a site? Let's pick one at random, and get it shut down. Then pick another...
My assertion that moving into a new market has fewer patent issues than moving into an established market is based on the speed of market maturity versus the lifetime of patents. Patents last for something like 18 years. That means that any hard drive technology from 1990 is open season for new companies to pick up. Obviously, to be competitive, you need to incorporate the more recent advancements, as 30MB RLL hard drives are useless today. Unlike the coffee maker market, patents here are effectively permanent--it's rare that a patent expires before the technology it covers is obsoleted by something else that is covered by more patents.
So Intel can get into the storage industry now without needing any hard drive patents, except those that cover the SATA interface implementation (which they already deal with on the motherboard chipset side).
As others have pointed out, Intel is already in the flash chip market, so stepping into the SDD drive market isn't really that big of a step technologically, but it is a big step from a business and marketing standpoint. Intel could have left the market to Seagate and the like, counting on selling them the flash chips to make their products work, but they're going for the whole pie.
Here, too. Excluding media files, I don't see any use for more than 32GB on any of the systems that I use. But that's a big exclusion. My photos probably only take 10GB, but once you get into my music and my MythTV recordings, I'm pushing a TB, and I would have had to buy another drive if not for the writers' strike.
As the other poster mentioned, these are hard drive GB, not memory GB, so it's base 10, not 2 when it comes to advertising the numbers. Also, I'm not sure how the wear leveling and failure handing works, but they may have some small extra space set aside to replace blocks that wear out, just like you see in traditional hard drives (or actually you don't see, since they hide it from you with the drive firmware).
Anyway, in the short term, they would rather waste a GB or two and make the sizes the same as what you see in magnetic drives because the marketing is easier.
It's very difficult to move into an established market, like disk drives. There's tons of technical expertise to acquire, and without your share of patents to negotiate a sharing deal, you're going to be paying through the nose in royalties. You just don't see new disk drive companies popping up. The only way to enter the market is to buy or partner with an existing player.
The shift to flash drives changes all this.
This is Intel's one chance to become a major player in a component that they haven't been involved in until now.
While an issue for whole-disk encryption, this is also an issue for DRM. Just flick the power while the interesting media is being decrypted, and even if the OS had been protecting the key in some "safe" location, you can now find it. It might be little more tricky, but if you can pull the RAM on a video game console, you can do the same thing.
Many of the possibilities have already been mentioned. In particular, the nursing home cat that knew which patients were about to die. I've also heard stories of dogs that can smell cancer. I've observed dogs that recognize pregnancy even before the test. The problem with using animals, though, is that the training is expensive and difficult. You can't have a reliable cancer smelling dog at every doctor's office for annual screenings. But you can have a device.
Of course, there are always the privacy issues. With medical data, we're on track to handle them. Medical records are confidential, and employers shouldn't be able to get at them (though it gets tricky with self-insured employers). The issue with screening impacting insurance coverage is the same as with any other potential test--laws address (or should address) which tests (if any) are allowed for coverage screening.
There are the privacy issues of how this technology could be used without the knowledge of the user. What if the police had something like this for their breathalyser, but not only would it record the BAC level, but also detect any use of other drugs (illegal or prescription). Or just leave it running in a hallway and determine who has various issues without them ever knowing that a check was made. We can't stop the technology, but we can (and should) legislate how it can be used.
Did you look up the domain registration? It might not be a tasting site. If they sold enough ads during the tasting period, then they would have registered it for real.
At least this one is outside the lunar orbit. I seem to recall one a while ago that was much closer.
A quick Google says that lunar orbit is about 385 MM (mega meters), and this is 540 MM. (Why don't we use megameters when we're rounding to the nearest 1000 km? We have all these nice metric units; let's use them!)
TV broadcasts use a fairly wide frequency band. Just define one small part that is restricted to just TV, and make sure there is no signal on that portion, then use the rest. Of course, you have to recheck periodically, as there may still be some stations that go off the air at night, and you would need to stop using that frequency when they come back on.
Slashdot Mirror
Seek time and rotational speed are mostly independent.
Seek time is the time that it takes to move the head to the desired track (including time for the vibrations from the movement to settle down). This is mostly independent of how fast the disk is spinning.
Rotational speed determines how long you have to wait, on average, for the data you want to read to show up under the head.
So a random read will take one seek, plus half a rotation, before the drive can read the data.
1.5*10^12/2^40
So they announced a 1.36TB drive, while the current highest-capacity drives hold 0.909TB (or 931GB).
Isn't their current 1TB drive only 3 platters? So this isn't really a big increase in density, just adding a platter with a slight density increase. Regardless, I'm disappointed. I was hoping they would be coming out with 2TB drives this year. At least it's coming out in August, in time for the new TV shows in the fall (I need to upgrade my MythTV). Even if I don't buy one, it will help push down the prices on the 1TB drives.
So I suppose someone could carefully manage a tree farm to produce some new perfect instruments.
I heard about this at least a decade ago. It was on some future technology program ("Beyond 2000" perhaps?), and they showed some building in Japan where they had glass domes (perhaps a foot or two in diameter) on the roof collecting sunlight, which was distributed via fiber-optic cables to the lobby.
While that sounds a bit snarky, there's a serious point.
Users often want to have access to the latest software. Many distributions provide updated packages over time, so that when a new official release comes out, many users already have a good portion of the changes. Gentoo takes this to the extreme, having eliminated the concept of release entirely (except for the installation system). So how does a synchronized release schedule help anyone when users will be upgrading various packages when they are updated?
I just don't see the value in synchronizing releases.
Absolutely correct. We bought a floppy drive with our Bondi-Blue rev.B iMac (it read 120MB "Super Disks" also, but we never used that). We needed it to copy old files from our previous Mac (which didn't have Ethernet). We (well, actually my wife) continued to use the floppy to transfer files to computers at her school until I bought her a USB flash drive. We finally retired it last summer when we bought a new iMac.
It was still working just fine when we retired it, but it was too slow for YouTube, and the last OS9-compatible Mozilla was incompatible with Yahoo's login system. It may serve as a classroom computer next fall--it's still better than nothing.
Yup, they have no enemies except the environment. Whatever they do to extract nutrients would eventually be done to the entire moon if they got out. If we find a need for the material in its current form, we'll be too late. If we find that the conversion process has side effects that we didn't anticipate (like, say, breaking apart all the rocks into dust), we would be hosed.
We may only get one chance to do this right. If we introduce a bacteria that can survive without artificial shelter (doubtful, but possible), it's there forever. Many of the problems we've had here with invasive species has been due to things introduced intentionally that ended up doing things that weren't anticipated.
Granted, the moon is a harsh enough environment that anything we do will probably only be in a pressurized man-made structure, but that might not be the case if we try it on Mars.
Wasn't it just a month or so ago when the CEO of Seagate said he wasn't worried about SSD impacting their market, but if it became a threat, they would use their patent portfolio to defend against the new competition? So doesn't this mark a very rapid change of outlook on Seagate's part? I guess SSDs are the next big thing--Seagate confirms it.
I remember when I was in college, many of the textbooks that I bought used were in perfect condition, and underneath the "used" stickers the book was stamped "promotional copy, not for resale." The textbook publishers send out free copies to professors, hoping that they will select the book for their class. The professors often sell them to used book companies.
Thanks for the answer. As you can see from the other discussions, it would appear that they did actually make two versions, and they tried to get Comedy Central to air the uncensored version, but it's not completely certain that the alternate version really exists.
Remember after the Mohammad cartoon panic, the episode where they were making a big deal that they were going to show Mohammad? The end where they were going to show him was apparently censored by Comedy Central. Is it cut in the online version?
I'm offended by any material served by Network Solutions. Hence all their customers are in violation of the terms of service, so they should all be shut down.
How many complaints does it take to shut down a site? Let's pick one at random, and get it shut down. Then pick another...
My assertion that moving into a new market has fewer patent issues than moving into an established market is based on the speed of market maturity versus the lifetime of patents. Patents last for something like 18 years. That means that any hard drive technology from 1990 is open season for new companies to pick up. Obviously, to be competitive, you need to incorporate the more recent advancements, as 30MB RLL hard drives are useless today. Unlike the coffee maker market, patents here are effectively permanent--it's rare that a patent expires before the technology it covers is obsoleted by something else that is covered by more patents.
So Intel can get into the storage industry now without needing any hard drive patents, except those that cover the SATA interface implementation (which they already deal with on the motherboard chipset side).
As others have pointed out, Intel is already in the flash chip market, so stepping into the SDD drive market isn't really that big of a step technologically, but it is a big step from a business and marketing standpoint. Intel could have left the market to Seagate and the like, counting on selling them the flash chips to make their products work, but they're going for the whole pie.
Here, too. Excluding media files, I don't see any use for more than 32GB on any of the systems that I use. But that's a big exclusion. My photos probably only take 10GB, but once you get into my music and my MythTV recordings, I'm pushing a TB, and I would have had to buy another drive if not for the writers' strike.
As the other poster mentioned, these are hard drive GB, not memory GB, so it's base 10, not 2 when it comes to advertising the numbers. Also, I'm not sure how the wear leveling and failure handing works, but they may have some small extra space set aside to replace blocks that wear out, just like you see in traditional hard drives (or actually you don't see, since they hide it from you with the drive firmware).
Anyway, in the short term, they would rather waste a GB or two and make the sizes the same as what you see in magnetic drives because the marketing is easier.
It's very difficult to move into an established market, like disk drives. There's tons of technical expertise to acquire, and without your share of patents to negotiate a sharing deal, you're going to be paying through the nose in royalties. You just don't see new disk drive companies popping up. The only way to enter the market is to buy or partner with an existing player.
The shift to flash drives changes all this.
This is Intel's one chance to become a major player in a component that they haven't been involved in until now.
While an issue for whole-disk encryption, this is also an issue for DRM. Just flick the power while the interesting media is being decrypted, and even if the OS had been protecting the key in some "safe" location, you can now find it. It might be little more tricky, but if you can pull the RAM on a video game console, you can do the same thing.
Many of the possibilities have already been mentioned. In particular, the nursing home cat that knew which patients were about to die. I've also heard stories of dogs that can smell cancer. I've observed dogs that recognize pregnancy even before the test. The problem with using animals, though, is that the training is expensive and difficult. You can't have a reliable cancer smelling dog at every doctor's office for annual screenings. But you can have a device.
Of course, there are always the privacy issues. With medical data, we're on track to handle them. Medical records are confidential, and employers shouldn't be able to get at them (though it gets tricky with self-insured employers). The issue with screening impacting insurance coverage is the same as with any other potential test--laws address (or should address) which tests (if any) are allowed for coverage screening.
There are the privacy issues of how this technology could be used without the knowledge of the user. What if the police had something like this for their breathalyser, but not only would it record the BAC level, but also detect any use of other drugs (illegal or prescription). Or just leave it running in a hallway and determine who has various issues without them ever knowing that a check was made. We can't stop the technology, but we can (and should) legislate how it can be used.
Did you look up the domain registration? It might not be a tasting site. If they sold enough ads during the tasting period, then they would have registered it for real.
You are correct. The correct abbreviation is Mm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megametre
At least this one is outside the lunar orbit. I seem to recall one a while ago that was much closer.
A quick Google says that lunar orbit is about 385 MM (mega meters), and this is 540 MM. (Why don't we use megameters when we're rounding to the nearest 1000 km? We have all these nice metric units; let's use them!)
Could they tell the difference between someone playing on Linux with Wine and someone playing on Windows?
TV broadcasts use a fairly wide frequency band. Just define one small part that is restricted to just TV, and make sure there is no signal on that portion, then use the rest. Of course, you have to recheck periodically, as there may still be some stations that go off the air at night, and you would need to stop using that frequency when they come back on.