If the filesystem could simply put the filename with the error into a list for some userspace service, the GUI file manager(s) or some health monitoring service could notify the end user with something a little more descriptive.
This could also let the user activate the relocation write scrub for that file.
I wholeheartedly agree, and I'd also like S.M.A.R.T. capabilities to actually be properly integrated with the OS if the drive supports them and reports sane values. Alas, very few OSes by default actually monitor S.M.A.R.T. or provide facilities for reporting component health to the end-user -- if the same facilities also monitored the health status of any other possible components in the system -- GPU, CPU, motherboard, other attached devices that know how to report their health -- it could possibly save people huge amounts of needless headaches.
I guess this is all stuff that can be solved in the more advanced filesystems like ZFS/btrfs where they can simply read the replicated copy or recover with the RS code blocks. Then the end user doesn't even know they had a platter defect outside the relocation count.
Well, it shouldn't be solved completely silently. End-user should still be warned of such defects even if the filesystem can correct them just so that the user can keep this in mind should there appear more such defects in a short amount of time.
I always do a format and a secure erase (one pass of zeros).
That's not a secure erase. Doing that only clears out whatever content the OS has access to, it does not clear reallocated sectors at all, for example.
Could the reallocated sectors mean data was lost? I've seen conflicting information on whether reallocated sectors means data was lost. Are there any other SMART attributes I can look at to determine if data was lost on the drive?
You would know if there was data that was lost. Normally the drive silently copies the data off of failing sectors to new sectors, reallocates the sector, and you don't notice anything. But if the sector is completely unreadable or returns incorrect CRC (that is, drive's internal CRC that is irrelevant of how the drive is formatted) then the drive will return an error to the operating system and you will be notified of it. The drive does not automatically reallocate such sectors as it will wait until the OS tries to write data to the broken sector before the drive reallocates it exactly for the reason that there wouldn't be silent corruption to files without users' knowledge. Case in point: the power supply on my server caught on fire and disrupted the other electrical components and on one of my drives there was a bunch of sectors with broken internal CRC -- nothing I could do about it, but atleast I was informed of what files I lost when I tried to read them. I proceeded to delete the files in question and wrote random data to the affected sectors after which the reallocated sectors count was increased.
Set up the smartd.conf file to do the example short-test daily and long-test weekly, and email you when something is fishy. It's a trivial amount of effort, resulting in a significant amount of peace of mind. (In many cases, you'll have some amount of warning before your drive kicks the bucket and it's too late)
This is the setup I've used on my server for a while now.
I see all these defrags, fscks and such inferior when compared to S.M.A.R.T. self-tests simply because the drive itself will always know more about its condition than any 3rd-party tools that just try to guess its state via secondary effects, and as such it sometimes baffles me how few people even in this day and age ignores S.M.A.R.T. I recommend smartmontools and smartd under Linux and Hard Disk Sentinel under Windows, though HD Sentinel ain't free.
Well, she can melt steel just by staring at it. And if she's in the mood for it she can have such a chilling effect on any gathering of people that your fart will freeze mid-air. I have no doubt she could sway the Senate if she felt like it.
1) Can you use out of band communications to trigger a special mode of the router (assuming you control it)? (e.g., A special listening mode that gives certain devices priority)
This isn't about routing the data, this is about getting the data to reach the other end at all. Besides, routing priority has already been handled by QoS for years now.
2) Rather than use typical QAM type of modulation, can you use a more limited constellation but BOOST the power so you can punch it through the noise? (which would also allow you to make very good use of forward error correction (FEC); again assumes that you are able to program both the sender and the router.
Assuming you can't alter the Network Stack on either device than you have to look at the communications itself
3) Other than that, it would seem you would need to use a programmable antenna/software antenna, Etc. turning your own Antenna into a high directional Antenna with as much gain as possible. Basically find the WIFI router you want (geo locate it, perhaps triangulation with the help of friendly nearby devices) and the push all your signal towards (a dynamic Yagi antenna that auto-magically maintains it's "aim" at the router even as the sender and/or the receiver move about.
Just increasing the power until the signal is heard is one way of doing it, sure, but there is always a limit to how high you can go. Plus then you're contributing yourself to the noise and broadcasting your location on the battlefield to everyone around you.
For multiplayer you NEED headroom for when you have tons of explosions going off with 16 - 32+ players. This way you can STILL keep everything silky smooth.
That's exactly the thing I was saying: having high average FPS does NOT guarantee that the FPS will be acceptable during the short, hectic moments where it would matter. To use a car analogy: the way you think is similar to driving with just one gear on at all times, at 100kmph in 60kmph areas, just so that when you come upon an upwards slope the speed wouldn't dip under that 60kmph, whereas the proper way would be to drive at 60kmph until you come upon an upwards slope, then switch gear while you're on the slope to maintain that 60kmph, and then switch gear back when you come off of it. The first method is the brute-force method and the second one is the right method -- it's just that the brute-force method is easier to employ and therefore it's used so much in games.
How are they handling Direct X? I assume it's not simply a WINE port.
There is no DirectX under Linux, so obviously Steam cannot support DirectX at all. If you want to play a game the game itself must use OpenGL and support Linux natively. And no, Steam for Linux does not use Wine in any way or form.
Isn't Steam pretty much just a package manager for games? It doesn't mean all the games available through Steam on Windows will now be available for Linux, does it?
Correct, only the games that specifically support Linux will be available. That means almost no already-released games will be supported, and it still remains to be seen how many of the not-yet-released ones will support it.
Maybe you should realize that you're barking at the middle-man? It's the publishers who insist on using DRM and therefore buying a modern game entails the very thing you said: you lose access to it sooner or later anyways, whether or not you use Steam or something else. All Ubisoft-games, for example, insist on using UPlay these days and when UPlay goes down... well, a quick google tells you everything you need: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=uplay+down
With the above in mind I actively choose to support Steam. Atleast Valve tries to do well by its community, their DRM-measures are very benign and they offer features in Steam that are actually useful to me. If I avoided any game whatsoever with no DRM I'd be left with out-of-date games or Indie crap, neither of which I want to touch.
Another monkey wrench is that games unfortunately have uneven latency. Sadly not all gamers value > 60 fps.:-(
Why should they value such? Most displays these days are 60Hz so having higher FPS gives absolutely nothing. Also, high average FPS doesn't guarantee in any way or form that there won't be occasional severe framerate drops: having 350 FPS when you're roaming around in general and not doing anything specific is useless if the framerate drops to 15 FPS during the short moments when the framerate matters. No, even framerate across the board matters more than having high average FPS.
But for a "game" you can't afford the frame rate hit to do it "right".:-/
Yes, you can, just time it right: if the CPU is under-utilized at the moment then you can safely have it run a check or another. Of course it would be silly to run a check when the CPU is already pegged at 100%, but then again, OP clearly said they run their checks when there's spare resources.
Well that's understandable. If you don't believe you can trust MS then it's a good thing you believe them when they say that by ticking the opt out box, they don't just go share your details anyway, right?
Atleast in the EU they'd likely be liable for quite a lot of damages if they did that.
If you can't trust them, why use the OS at all? Do you use their OS while going online to do internet banking? How can you do that w/o being afraid that they aren't monitoring what websites you go to and what keystrokes you input, sending all that information back to Redmond?
If Microsoft did that it'd be likely that one or another security researcher would have already found that out and you can just imagine how much bad PR that would've been for Microsoft at a time when they're still working hard to get people to use the OS.
Is this just paranoia, or a really real threat to users?
The thing is, we just do not know. Ask Microsoft for actual details on what they really collect and maybe then we can answer that question. Until then it's still likely the best choice not to participate in that.
I'd be interested to see if this program can do any better at analyzing my writing than Google does analyzing my search history.
I don't know where you can see what Google thinks you are, but I have used various tools that analyze my writing and then try to guess my age and gender, and well, all those tools typically guess me as a 40+ male. I do not expect any program based on this research to be any better.
OP here. Yeah, I'm gay and proud, so I proudly own a radeon, proudly use linux, and -- most importantly -- proudly suck dick. Last night, I sucked almost 10 dicks and you better believe I was proud of the work I did.
I know you're just trying to troll, but you're doing pretty bad job at that. I mean, this imaginary person you're pretending to be gets laid TEN TIMES during a single night. Most guys would actually be proud of that. Now you, on the other hand, have most likely come close to another person's genitals only once in your life........and that was during your birth.
Energy efficiency consistently doubles approximately every 1.6 years, so if we are at ~16 glops/watt right now, then we will blow past DARPA's target early in 2016... just a little over 3 years from now.
It's not guaranteed, and that's the whole point of this contract; to ensure that we will reach that point. Also, the article talks about chips for sensor systems, not GPUs or similar.
In the spirit of the flame war you may have begun, you do know that AMD generally has faster chips?
I don't know that. I haven't seen any extensive research on such a topic and I do not have the time or money to come to such conclusion myself. Also, I am not taking any stance whatsoever on which one of the two would've been better suited for the task at hand, I'll leave waging such silly flame wars to you.
As things usually do, the results of this research will eventually trickle down to desktops, laptops and mobile devices, and will result in either lesser power consumption or the same power consumption but in higher performance -- either way it's a plus. I just wish the contract could've been given to someone other than NVIDIA as it would be nice if the results of the research were released completely for free to the public instead of being patented up the wazoo, but alas, NVIDIA has so much experience in these things that it just makes sense to slap them with it if you expect results.
I find it difficult to believe that you've not encountered any of the following:
1) At least one major dictionary supporting my definition 2) Literature over thousands of years in which the definition, obviously in various languages, has been disputed. Somehow I don't think you're resolving that debate in a pseudonymous Slashdot post
a person who holds neither of two opposing positions on a topic
a person who is unwilling to commit to an opinion about something
One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.
Perhaps I have just misunderstood something, but to me those definitions do support my view of what agnosticism is. If I am incorrect then I do not know the proper definition for a person who takes no stance on the existence of gods or such beings.
Slashdot Mirror
If the filesystem could simply put the filename with the error into a list for some userspace service, the GUI file manager(s) or some health monitoring service could notify the end user with something a little more descriptive.
This could also let the user activate the relocation write scrub for that file.
I wholeheartedly agree, and I'd also like S.M.A.R.T. capabilities to actually be properly integrated with the OS if the drive supports them and reports sane values. Alas, very few OSes by default actually monitor S.M.A.R.T. or provide facilities for reporting component health to the end-user -- if the same facilities also monitored the health status of any other possible components in the system -- GPU, CPU, motherboard, other attached devices that know how to report their health -- it could possibly save people huge amounts of needless headaches.
I guess this is all stuff that can be solved in the more advanced filesystems like ZFS/btrfs where they can simply read the replicated copy or recover with the RS code blocks. Then the end user doesn't even know they had a platter defect outside the relocation count.
Well, it shouldn't be solved completely silently. End-user should still be warned of such defects even if the filesystem can correct them just so that the user can keep this in mind should there appear more such defects in a short amount of time.
I always do a format and a secure erase (one pass of zeros).
That's not a secure erase. Doing that only clears out whatever content the OS has access to, it does not clear reallocated sectors at all, for example.
If my SMART data is showing the following:
Reallocated Sectors Count = 15
Reallocation Event Count = 15
Current Pending Sector Count = 0
Uncorrectable Sector Count = 0
Could the reallocated sectors mean data was lost? I've seen conflicting information on whether reallocated sectors means data was lost. Are there any other SMART attributes I can look at to determine if data was lost on the drive?
You would know if there was data that was lost. Normally the drive silently copies the data off of failing sectors to new sectors, reallocates the sector, and you don't notice anything. But if the sector is completely unreadable or returns incorrect CRC (that is, drive's internal CRC that is irrelevant of how the drive is formatted) then the drive will return an error to the operating system and you will be notified of it. The drive does not automatically reallocate such sectors as it will wait until the OS tries to write data to the broken sector before the drive reallocates it exactly for the reason that there wouldn't be silent corruption to files without users' knowledge. Case in point: the power supply on my server caught on fire and disrupted the other electrical components and on one of my drives there was a bunch of sectors with broken internal CRC -- nothing I could do about it, but atleast I was informed of what files I lost when I tried to read them. I proceeded to delete the files in question and wrote random data to the affected sectors after which the reallocated sectors count was increased.
Set up the smartd.conf file to do the example short-test daily and long-test weekly, and email you when something is fishy. It's a trivial amount of effort, resulting in a significant amount of peace of mind. (In many cases, you'll have some amount of warning before your drive kicks the bucket and it's too late)
This is the setup I've used on my server for a while now.
I see all these defrags, fscks and such inferior when compared to S.M.A.R.T. self-tests simply because the drive itself will always know more about its condition than any 3rd-party tools that just try to guess its state via secondary effects, and as such it sometimes baffles me how few people even in this day and age ignores S.M.A.R.T. I recommend smartmontools and smartd under Linux and Hard Disk Sentinel under Windows, though HD Sentinel ain't free.
Can she punch a budget through the Senate?
Well, she can melt steel just by staring at it. And if she's in the mood for it she can have such a chilling effect on any gathering of people that your fart will freeze mid-air. I have no doubt she could sway the Senate if she felt like it.
1) Can you use out of band communications to trigger a special mode of the router (assuming you control it)? (e.g., A special listening mode that gives certain devices priority)
This isn't about routing the data, this is about getting the data to reach the other end at all. Besides, routing priority has already been handled by QoS for years now.
2) Rather than use typical QAM type of modulation, can you use a more limited constellation but BOOST the power so you can punch it through the noise? (which would also allow you to make very good use of forward error correction (FEC); again assumes that you are able to program both the sender and the router.
Assuming you can't alter the Network Stack on either device than you have to look at the communications itself
3) Other than that, it would seem you would need to use a programmable antenna/software antenna, Etc. turning your own Antenna into a high directional Antenna with as much gain as possible. Basically find the WIFI router you want (geo locate it, perhaps triangulation with the help of friendly nearby devices) and the push all your signal towards (a dynamic Yagi antenna that auto-magically maintains it's "aim" at the router even as the sender and/or the receiver move about.
Just increasing the power until the signal is heard is one way of doing it, sure, but there is always a limit to how high you can go. Plus then you're contributing yourself to the noise and broadcasting your location on the battlefield to everyone around you.
Mother-in-law.
For multiplayer you NEED headroom for when you have tons of explosions going off with 16 - 32+ players. This way you can STILL keep everything silky smooth.
That's exactly the thing I was saying: having high average FPS does NOT guarantee that the FPS will be acceptable during the short, hectic moments where it would matter. To use a car analogy: the way you think is similar to driving with just one gear on at all times, at 100kmph in 60kmph areas, just so that when you come upon an upwards slope the speed wouldn't dip under that 60kmph, whereas the proper way would be to drive at 60kmph until you come upon an upwards slope, then switch gear while you're on the slope to maintain that 60kmph, and then switch gear back when you come off of it. The first method is the brute-force method and the second one is the right method -- it's just that the brute-force method is easier to employ and therefore it's used so much in games.
How are they handling Direct X? I assume it's not simply a WINE port.
There is no DirectX under Linux, so obviously Steam cannot support DirectX at all. If you want to play a game the game itself must use OpenGL and support Linux natively. And no, Steam for Linux does not use Wine in any way or form.
They made a DirectX wrapper script that translates the calls into OpenGL
No, they didn't.
Isn't Steam pretty much just a package manager for games? It doesn't mean all the games available through Steam on Windows will now be available for Linux, does it?
Correct, only the games that specifically support Linux will be available. That means almost no already-released games will be supported, and it still remains to be seen how many of the not-yet-released ones will support it.
Maybe you should realize that you're barking at the middle-man? It's the publishers who insist on using DRM and therefore buying a modern game entails the very thing you said: you lose access to it sooner or later anyways, whether or not you use Steam or something else. All Ubisoft-games, for example, insist on using UPlay these days and when UPlay goes down... well, a quick google tells you everything you need: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=uplay+down
With the above in mind I actively choose to support Steam. Atleast Valve tries to do well by its community, their DRM-measures are very benign and they offer features in Steam that are actually useful to me. If I avoided any game whatsoever with no DRM I'd be left with out-of-date games or Indie crap, neither of which I want to touch.
Another monkey wrench is that games unfortunately have uneven latency. Sadly not all gamers value > 60 fps. :-(
Why should they value such? Most displays these days are 60Hz so having higher FPS gives absolutely nothing. Also, high average FPS doesn't guarantee in any way or form that there won't be occasional severe framerate drops: having 350 FPS when you're roaming around in general and not doing anything specific is useless if the framerate drops to 15 FPS during the short moments when the framerate matters. No, even framerate across the board matters more than having high average FPS.
But for a "game" you can't afford the frame rate hit to do it "right". :-/
Yes, you can, just time it right: if the CPU is under-utilized at the moment then you can safely have it run a check or another. Of course it would be silly to run a check when the CPU is already pegged at 100%, but then again, OP clearly said they run their checks when there's spare resources.
Damn. That must be the ONLY honest, customer-friendly ISP on the whole planet. Cling to them like your lives depended on it!
Well that's understandable. If you don't believe you can trust MS then it's a good thing you believe them when they say that by ticking the opt out box, they don't just go share your details anyway, right?
Atleast in the EU they'd likely be liable for quite a lot of damages if they did that.
If you can't trust them, why use the OS at all? Do you use their OS while going online to do internet banking? How can you do that w/o being afraid that they aren't monitoring what websites you go to and what keystrokes you input, sending all that information back to Redmond?
If Microsoft did that it'd be likely that one or another security researcher would have already found that out and you can just imagine how much bad PR that would've been for Microsoft at a time when they're still working hard to get people to use the OS.
Is this just paranoia, or a really real threat to users?
The thing is, we just do not know. Ask Microsoft for actual details on what they really collect and maybe then we can answer that question. Until then it's still likely the best choice not to participate in that.
I'd be interested to see if this program can do any better at analyzing my writing than Google does analyzing my search history.
I don't know where you can see what Google thinks you are, but I have used various tools that analyze my writing and then try to guess my age and gender, and well, all those tools typically guess me as a 40+ male. I do not expect any program based on this research to be any better.
Moreover, I have a dick
Oh, you suffer from delusions, too. I feel sorry for you, man :(
You seem to be conflating "guy" (gayness notwithstanding) with "slut". Some guys are sluts, but please don't tar us all with the same brush.
Well, I didn't use the word "all" exactly for that reason.
OP here. Yeah, I'm gay and proud, so I proudly own a radeon, proudly use linux, and -- most importantly -- proudly suck dick. Last night, I sucked almost 10 dicks and you better believe I was proud of the work I did.
I know you're just trying to troll, but you're doing pretty bad job at that. I mean, this imaginary person you're pretending to be gets laid TEN TIMES during a single night. Most guys would actually be proud of that. Now you, on the other hand, have most likely come close to another person's genitals only once in your life........and that was during your birth.
Energy efficiency consistently doubles approximately every 1.6 years, so if we are at ~16 glops/watt right now, then we will blow past DARPA's target early in 2016... just a little over 3 years from now.
It's not guaranteed, and that's the whole point of this contract; to ensure that we will reach that point. Also, the article talks about chips for sensor systems, not GPUs or similar.
In the spirit of the flame war you may have begun, you do know that AMD generally has faster chips?
I don't know that. I haven't seen any extensive research on such a topic and I do not have the time or money to come to such conclusion myself. Also, I am not taking any stance whatsoever on which one of the two would've been better suited for the task at hand, I'll leave waging such silly flame wars to you.
DARPA wants to reach 75 GFLOPS/watt.
As things usually do, the results of this research will eventually trickle down to desktops, laptops and mobile devices, and will result in either lesser power consumption or the same power consumption but in higher performance -- either way it's a plus. I just wish the contract could've been given to someone other than NVIDIA as it would be nice if the results of the research were released completely for free to the public instead of being patented up the wazoo, but alas, NVIDIA has so much experience in these things that it just makes sense to slap them with it if you expect results.
I find it difficult to believe that you've not encountered any of the following:
1) At least one major dictionary supporting my definition
2) Literature over thousands of years in which the definition, obviously in various languages, has been disputed. Somehow I don't think you're resolving that debate in a pseudonymous Slashdot post
Well, a quick google search gives lots of result ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agnostic , http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agnostic , http://www.thefreedictionary.com/agnostic and so on) with descriptions like the following:
a person who holds neither of two opposing positions on a topic
a person who is unwilling to commit to an opinion about something
One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.
Perhaps I have just misunderstood something, but to me those definitions do support my view of what agnosticism is. If I am incorrect then I do not know the proper definition for a person who takes no stance on the existence of gods or such beings.