Yeah. That'll make for a killer app. After all, voice command has been promised for general computing for what, 20 years now?
I personally wonder about all the technical issues. Like, a console is usually placed in the living room. And in the living room there's usually more than one person and constantly some noises around. Then there could also be several people talking simultaneously. Somehow the console has to filter out everything except the voice of the person controlling it, and that's going to be tricky and likely not work all that well in lively homes. And how about a situation where you're just watching something and someone in the same room says a word that the console (mis-)recognizes?
...Helleso, who is famous not only for his art, but also for being a strong advocate of keeping digital photography real and speaking out against manipulation or theft of material...
Ha ha is right..
Well, it's easy to preach something you're not following yourself....he'd make a fine politician.
I'm quite certain this clause wouldn't be legal almost anywhere; taking away the right to join a class-action suit that could very well be targeted at the contract's owner is such a basic right that I doubt any US judge would allow it, and in most non-US countries we have actual rights and EULAs cannot take away rights already given by laws, EULAs can only extend them. Atleast here in Finland no matter what you do, if you click on "agree" online or if you go to Sony's offices and write "I agree" in person, you still cannot give away such rights.
EC2 is really expensive compared to other (better) cloud providers
That could well be true, I am only familiar with EC2 and I've actually never used it myself. There's plenty of people suggesting asking universities for CPU time and that might well be cheaper. The point is though that running your own cluster with only £4000 available is likely to end in tears, not actual research getting done.
I've never used the service, but if what another poster says is true, that you pay for a full hour when you use any time at all, the cost per hour can be huge (theoretically infinite). The first debugging session will use up all your money. (There is no avoiding doing some debugging and testing on the finial compute configuration, which will involve a bunch of short runs of your code - each run of a few seconds will count as an hour.)
The hour starts running when you power up the instance. How many tasks you run inside the instance itself doesn't matter. So the obvious solution would be to only power up one instance for one hour and do as many debugging runs as you can within that time, then examine the results and fire up another instance once you feel you can again use the full hour.
Ie. you got things mixed up. You interpreted it as "do a test run == get billed for an hour", whereas it's "do as many test runs as you can within an hour == get billed for an hour."
4000 pounds wont get you very far at all on Amazon.
Let's say the researchers in question took 4x "High-CPU Extra Large Instance" from EC2. Each one of them sports the following: 7 GB of memory 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each) 1690 GB of instance storage 64-bit platform
That's helluva lot of computing power right there, at $0.76 an hour. £4000 translates to about $6 316.8, which in terms of useable hours at 4x$0.76 would be roughly 2077 hours. 2077 hours is roughly 86 days of 24/7 computing. Thus it sounds like a good deal to me.
I love it when people take the question given and then insist that the problem can only be solved by changing the specifications to using "cloud" computing or some other nonsense. It makes you guys look like paid shrills.
We were asked a question without much information as to who does what, how, when, and for how long. Based on what we were told Amazon EC2 or something similar sounded like a much better deal than having to deal with building a cluster yourself, then installing, configuring and running it, especially since the point was to do research, not tinkering. Less time spent on tinkering == more time spent on the research itself.
If you don't like the answer given then ignore it. Calling the answer nonsense when it clearly has its advantages, and insinuating that we have some personal angle here at stake is just meanspirited.
Once you count all the costs of running your own cluster, ie. electricity, cooling, man-hours spent on configuring, installing and maintaining them, repairing broken parts etc. suddenly EC2 is likely cheaper than your own cluster, not to mention you can scale up on-demand if your requirements suddenly require such.
Many of them only have 2MB, already close to capacity with just the stock BIOS.
Tbh, I haven't seen that small flash chips used in motherboards for YEARS. All the modern motherboards I've personally seen have had two 4MB chips, and my current one has as large as 8MB. And no, the BIOS usually takes only about 50% of the space available, the rest is for system builders and such for customizations. Ie. a BIOS virus would easily fit there and wouldn't even need to compress itself.
Since when is WiFi signal strength measured in bars? It's a pressure unit.
The writer is likely a person that doesn't have much experience with WiFi technology and is only familiar with the GUI WiFi signal icon. I agree that telling some actual numbers of expect boost to signal would be more useful, but.. well, the point is that it boosts the signal reception somewhat, ignoring the point and nitpicking about the wording expresses only arrogance.
Erm, isn't that what we already do, at least on Linux? I mean, the application simply uses read/write and possibly seek against an arbitrary filename - it's up to the OS and FS to handle actually getting or saving the data. Which means that the application doesn't know or care whether the file's on spinning media, a slow flash drive, SSD or cached in system ram!
No, that's not the same thing. Using the regular Linux/Windows/etc file API reads/writes the data as fast as possible from/to the media and ignores completely system resources, nor does it actually try to optimize reads/writes in a way that causes least amount of stutter on the rest of the system. It's left to the applications themselves to handle, and applications rarely have access to all hardware details and knowledge about how to optimize their operation.
Why should a disk intensive operation halt the rest of my OS especially when the entire OS could fit in RAM?
It depends on the devices in question, but often in desktop computers the CPU requests data from storage, the storage replies with the data, then the CPU transfers the data to memory, and goes back to step 1, ie. the CPU is constantly busy transferring data or waiting for the storage device to submit the data. If the storage device is slow to reply then the CPU is just waiting on it and can't do anything else in the meantime.
DMA is a method for removing the CPU out of the equation allowing the device to transfer data to memory directly, without keeping the CPU busy. But this still doesn't work for all cases and the system might have to fall back to non-DMA transfer. It should not be common anymore these days, but you never know.
Then there's various kinds of overhead involved, like e.g. if the file you're accessing is compressed then it obviously needs to be decompressed, and decompressing consumes CPU time. Magnetic media also poses the limitation of the heads inside the device having to move around in order to read files, and if you're reading multiple files at the same time the heads have to constantly keep moving back-and-forth slowing the transfer down by huge amounts. Similarly, the OS itself is likely programmed somewhat inefficiently if it can't run all of its stuff on one core and run the file transfer on another.
Point is, there's plenty of reasons for that.
[quote]The question is is this a fault in how programs or the operating system handle secondary storage? [/quote]
Both.
Tbh, I think an OS should provide applications with improved read/write methods where the application can supply a function for doing compression, decompression, obfuscation or whatever to the read/write method and a timeframe within which the application deems the operation should finish, and then it would be up to the OS to optimize the actual operation within hardware limits so as to fit inside the timeframe. This way the application wouldn't need to care about hardware details, like e.g. if it's writing on magnetic or flash storage, but the OS would know what size blocks to write and how many at a time. And if the application e.g. wants the OS to write 1 gigabytes of data to a file and gives the OS 30 seconds to do that in the OS can then stretch the write operation out so that it does take the full 30 seconds but consumes the least amount of CPU resources while doing it, thus leaving more for other applications and resulting in better user experience.
I've always wondered about the insistence of various parties on using FPS as The Benchmarking Standard[TM] while ignoring all the things that contribute or limit the FPS achieved. A real benchmark should atleast keep track of CPU usage, GPU usage, bus bandwidth usage (ie. if for example GPU is idling a lot of its time because the bus can't keep up) and memory bandwidth usage. Then it would be much easier to find bottle-necks and make proper comparisons by ensuring that only the item to be benchmarked is causing bottlenecks, no other part in the equation.
Then again, I am not aware of a single benchmarking suite (or website, for that matter!) actually caring about bus saturation or providing meaningful information, only FPS numbers or some other inflated score to shake e-peens at.
People seem to think that because a fax machine scans physical documents that it represents an authentic signature on a document. Solid reasoning? Not a chance, but when has that stopped anyone from reaching stupid conclusions?
You fail to see the big picture: with faxes both the sender and receiver can be verified. Fax-machines are built with robust logging-capabilities, they often keep in memory the last few faxes sent/received, and there's also a 3rd party that can verify the time and date of the call placed, plus whom the actual participants were.
THAT is the reason why faxes are treated like that. E-mails are very hard to really verify and that's why they aren't trusted.
1. Sheet Fed Good Quality Scanner 2. Simple interface to enter an email address 3. Price competitively compared to fix machines..... 4. PROFIT!
I hate single use machines, but some times the simplicity of one alone justifies it's existence. Keep it simple and cost competitive and you'd have a winner.
Fax isn't only about sending, it's equally much about atleast SOMEBODY receiving what you're sending: if the fax went through then you know there's a physical copy of whatever you just sent lying in the destination. But with e-mail you have no guarantee it won't just be dumped in junk e-mail. And then there's the whole receiving-thing itself: you just plug two cords in -- the phone-line and power -- and you're set to receive faxes, but with e-mail you need a printer, a separate or integrated scanner, a computer, and if you want several people to be able to utilize the printer/scanner you need a network... that's a whole lot of stuff compared to faxes which can be used by multiple people by just walking up to them.
Of course you could create machines that work almost like fax-machines: you create the machine with a sheet-feeder, a reasonable scanner, an RJ45 connector and power, a printer, and a keyboard for typing in the e-mail address quickly, and then you code it so that whenever it receives an e-mail with a line in the header that the e-mail is aimed for these kinds of devices it would print it out immediately. Then it would work similarly to fax-machines. Except that it would still have the problem of spam mails; people would definitely just start sending modified e-mails with the exact same line in the header just so that these devices would print those out, and voila! You've just turned spam e-mails into physical spam. With a fax machine you atleast need a dedicated phone-line that can only call a single phone-number at a time and that's why spammers don't use them, but with e-mail you don't need anything more than a single PC with Internet connection and can spam to your heart's content.
The ones that survive who looked to the future instead of eating all the grass in the field this quarter
I'm not entirely certain if you're just trying to be funny, but I'll say this just-in-case (I actually know people who really do think like that): most of the time it's us, the humans, who cause a species to go extinct, not the species itself.
I hope AMD can get back on their feet soon, and hopefully will some day in the future offer some real competition to Intel. It would be generally good for consumers by lowering prices and pushing both companies to keep on innovating. But it doesn't look likely:/
I've always liked AMD's products and the whole underdog-fighting-for-its-life is easy to symphatize with, it's just sad to see they don't ever seem to be able to properly compete with Intel, there's always something wrong or amiss.
But what the hell does someone do with 100 PB? As is the case with CPU speeds, we will eventually hit a ceiling. Except in this case, the ceiling will be what is practical vs. what is possible. I can't imagine someone ever using that much HD space except for perhaps a company that never destroys old customer data.
You lack imagination then. I can easily think of someone using that much without even breaking a sweat, like e.g. many people like to keep a pristine collection of their music files as FLAC files, and those tend to take a lot of space. Similarly, many people like to keep 1:1 copies of their movies and animation and TV series, and even at 1080p those tend to eat space like crazy. And just think about it: in 2020 1080p will be really low resolution and movies will likely weigh in at about 200Gb even with reasonable compression.
And think about it, sometimes people have computers serving the whole family. I too have a home server with 2.5Tb storage at the moment, and it's starting to get full, and it's only serving 3 PCs. With a moderately-sized family it could get filled up pretty fast with everyone storing their stuff there.
I do give you that that text-documents and Excel spreadsheets don't use that much space, but many people use their PCs for much more than just using those kinds of files.
Based on my reading of the law (thanks for posting the link to the PDF, AC), you can still encrypt traffic (think banks, online retailers, etc.) as long those who employ it add additional network links to the Pakistani government, pass all traffic to the government and provide them with the appropriate keys. Said additional links and any supporting hardware and/or software to be implemented at the TLS/SSL users' expense.
AFAICT, The 120 days that the OP refers to isn't how long they have to keep the data, it's how long ISPs have to implement the environment.
N.B. IANAL
This stuff still screws over any small companies and newstarters who wish to e.g. offer their products online. Having to provide the government with all that means a lot higher operational costs, not to mention the extra hardware and maintenance needed, and it could very well even mean the company is no longer sustainable.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. That'll make for a killer app. After all, voice command has been promised for general computing for what, 20 years now?
I personally wonder about all the technical issues. Like, a console is usually placed in the living room. And in the living room there's usually more than one person and constantly some noises around. Then there could also be several people talking simultaneously. Somehow the console has to filter out everything except the voice of the person controlling it, and that's going to be tricky and likely not work all that well in lively homes. And how about a situation where you're just watching something and someone in the same room says a word that the console (mis-)recognizes?
Ha ha is right..
Well, it's easy to preach something you're not following yourself. ...he'd make a fine politician.
I'm quite certain this clause wouldn't be legal almost anywhere; taking away the right to join a class-action suit that could very well be targeted at the contract's owner is such a basic right that I doubt any US judge would allow it, and in most non-US countries we have actual rights and EULAs cannot take away rights already given by laws, EULAs can only extend them. Atleast here in Finland no matter what you do, if you click on "agree" online or if you go to Sony's offices and write "I agree" in person, you still cannot give away such rights.
EC2 is really expensive compared to other (better) cloud providers
That could well be true, I am only familiar with EC2 and I've actually never used it myself. There's plenty of people suggesting asking universities for CPU time and that might well be cheaper. The point is though that running your own cluster with only £4000 available is likely to end in tears, not actual research getting done.
I've never used the service, but if what another poster says is true, that you pay for a full hour when you use any time at all, the cost per hour can be huge (theoretically infinite). The first debugging session will use up all your money. (There is no avoiding doing some debugging and testing on the finial compute configuration, which will involve a bunch of short runs of your code - each run of a few seconds will count as an hour.)
The hour starts running when you power up the instance. How many tasks you run inside the instance itself doesn't matter. So the obvious solution would be to only power up one instance for one hour and do as many debugging runs as you can within that time, then examine the results and fire up another instance once you feel you can again use the full hour.
Ie. you got things mixed up. You interpreted it as "do a test run == get billed for an hour", whereas it's "do as many test runs as you can within an hour == get billed for an hour."
4000 pounds wont get you very far at all on Amazon.
Let's say the researchers in question took 4x "High-CPU Extra Large Instance" from EC2. Each one of them sports the following:
7 GB of memory
20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
That's helluva lot of computing power right there, at $0.76 an hour. £4000 translates to about $6 316.8, which in terms of useable hours at 4x$0.76 would be roughly 2077 hours. 2077 hours is roughly 86 days of 24/7 computing. Thus it sounds like a good deal to me.
I love it when people take the question given and then insist that the problem can only be solved by changing the specifications to using "cloud" computing or some other nonsense. It makes you guys look like paid shrills.
We were asked a question without much information as to who does what, how, when, and for how long. Based on what we were told Amazon EC2 or something similar sounded like a much better deal than having to deal with building a cluster yourself, then installing, configuring and running it, especially since the point was to do research, not tinkering. Less time spent on tinkering == more time spent on the research itself.
If you don't like the answer given then ignore it. Calling the answer nonsense when it clearly has its advantages, and insinuating that we have some personal angle here at stake is just meanspirited.
EC2 is really expensive, brah.
Once you count all the costs of running your own cluster, ie. electricity, cooling, man-hours spent on configuring, installing and maintaining them, repairing broken parts etc. suddenly EC2 is likely cheaper than your own cluster, not to mention you can scale up on-demand if your requirements suddenly require such.
But he does understand how to use buzzwords. That has to count for something, right?
Aye, it does: he won't make for a good administrator, but he'll make for a fine CEO.
all the viruses, worms and other malware?
No. Does that make it superior to real Windows?
Many of them only have 2MB, already close to capacity with just the stock BIOS.
Tbh, I haven't seen that small flash chips used in motherboards for YEARS. All the modern motherboards I've personally seen have had two 4MB chips, and my current one has as large as 8MB. And no, the BIOS usually takes only about 50% of the space available, the rest is for system builders and such for customizations. Ie. a BIOS virus would easily fit there and wouldn't even need to compress itself.
I'm sure OP is devastated by the loss of your respect...
Probably.
Fucktard. Go shoot yourself you illiterate nigger.
To be honest, I respect illiterate people much more than rude, arrogant and rasistic people.
Interesting. A mental mod-up as I cannot give a real one.
Since when is WiFi signal strength measured in bars? It's a pressure unit.
The writer is likely a person that doesn't have much experience with WiFi technology and is only familiar with the GUI WiFi signal icon. I agree that telling some actual numbers of expect boost to signal would be more useful, but.. well, the point is that it boosts the signal reception somewhat, ignoring the point and nitpicking about the wording expresses only arrogance.
Erm, isn't that what we already do, at least on Linux? I mean, the application simply uses read/write and possibly seek against an arbitrary filename - it's up to the OS and FS to handle actually getting or saving the data. Which means that the application doesn't know or care whether the file's on spinning media, a slow flash drive, SSD or cached in system ram!
No, that's not the same thing. Using the regular Linux/Windows/etc file API reads/writes the data as fast as possible from/to the media and ignores completely system resources, nor does it actually try to optimize reads/writes in a way that causes least amount of stutter on the rest of the system. It's left to the applications themselves to handle, and applications rarely have access to all hardware details and knowledge about how to optimize their operation.
Why should a disk intensive operation halt the rest of my OS especially when the entire OS could fit in RAM?
It depends on the devices in question, but often in desktop computers the CPU requests data from storage, the storage replies with the data, then the CPU transfers the data to memory, and goes back to step 1, ie. the CPU is constantly busy transferring data or waiting for the storage device to submit the data. If the storage device is slow to reply then the CPU is just waiting on it and can't do anything else in the meantime.
DMA is a method for removing the CPU out of the equation allowing the device to transfer data to memory directly, without keeping the CPU busy. But this still doesn't work for all cases and the system might have to fall back to non-DMA transfer. It should not be common anymore these days, but you never know.
Then there's various kinds of overhead involved, like e.g. if the file you're accessing is compressed then it obviously needs to be decompressed, and decompressing consumes CPU time. Magnetic media also poses the limitation of the heads inside the device having to move around in order to read files, and if you're reading multiple files at the same time the heads have to constantly keep moving back-and-forth slowing the transfer down by huge amounts. Similarly, the OS itself is likely programmed somewhat inefficiently if it can't run all of its stuff on one core and run the file transfer on another.
Point is, there's plenty of reasons for that.
[quote]The question is is this a fault in how programs or the operating system handle secondary storage? [/quote]
Both.
Tbh, I think an OS should provide applications with improved read/write methods where the application can supply a function for doing compression, decompression, obfuscation or whatever to the read/write method and a timeframe within which the application deems the operation should finish, and then it would be up to the OS to optimize the actual operation within hardware limits so as to fit inside the timeframe. This way the application wouldn't need to care about hardware details, like e.g. if it's writing on magnetic or flash storage, but the OS would know what size blocks to write and how many at a time. And if the application e.g. wants the OS to write 1 gigabytes of data to a file and gives the OS 30 seconds to do that in the OS can then stretch the write operation out so that it does take the full 30 seconds but consumes the least amount of CPU resources while doing it, thus leaving more for other applications and resulting in better user experience.
I've always wondered about the insistence of various parties on using FPS as The Benchmarking Standard[TM] while ignoring all the things that contribute or limit the FPS achieved. A real benchmark should atleast keep track of CPU usage, GPU usage, bus bandwidth usage (ie. if for example GPU is idling a lot of its time because the bus can't keep up) and memory bandwidth usage. Then it would be much easier to find bottle-necks and make proper comparisons by ensuring that only the item to be benchmarked is causing bottlenecks, no other part in the equation.
Then again, I am not aware of a single benchmarking suite (or website, for that matter!) actually caring about bus saturation or providing meaningful information, only FPS numbers or some other inflated score to shake e-peens at.
People seem to think that because a fax machine scans physical documents that it represents an authentic signature on a document. Solid reasoning? Not a chance, but when has that stopped anyone from reaching stupid conclusions?
You fail to see the big picture: with faxes both the sender and receiver can be verified. Fax-machines are built with robust logging-capabilities, they often keep in memory the last few faxes sent/received, and there's also a 3rd party that can verify the time and date of the call placed, plus whom the actual participants were.
THAT is the reason why faxes are treated like that. E-mails are very hard to really verify and that's why they aren't trusted.
Unless you are using a Mac.....then, "it just works"
Macs are almost as limited as fax-machines, too!
Not to mention that e-mail is hardly a superior choice.
1. Sheet Fed Good Quality Scanner .....
2. Simple interface to enter an email address
3. Price competitively compared to fix machines
4. PROFIT!
I hate single use machines, but some times the simplicity of one alone justifies it's existence. Keep it simple and cost competitive and you'd have a winner.
Fax isn't only about sending, it's equally much about atleast SOMEBODY receiving what you're sending: if the fax went through then you know there's a physical copy of whatever you just sent lying in the destination. But with e-mail you have no guarantee it won't just be dumped in junk e-mail. And then there's the whole receiving-thing itself: you just plug two cords in -- the phone-line and power -- and you're set to receive faxes, but with e-mail you need a printer, a separate or integrated scanner, a computer, and if you want several people to be able to utilize the printer/scanner you need a network... that's a whole lot of stuff compared to faxes which can be used by multiple people by just walking up to them.
Of course you could create machines that work almost like fax-machines: you create the machine with a sheet-feeder, a reasonable scanner, an RJ45 connector and power, a printer, and a keyboard for typing in the e-mail address quickly, and then you code it so that whenever it receives an e-mail with a line in the header that the e-mail is aimed for these kinds of devices it would print it out immediately. Then it would work similarly to fax-machines. Except that it would still have the problem of spam mails; people would definitely just start sending modified e-mails with the exact same line in the header just so that these devices would print those out, and voila! You've just turned spam e-mails into physical spam. With a fax machine you atleast need a dedicated phone-line that can only call a single phone-number at a time and that's why spammers don't use them, but with e-mail you don't need anything more than a single PC with Internet connection and can spam to your heart's content.
The ones that survive who looked to the future instead of eating all the grass in the field this quarter
I'm not entirely certain if you're just trying to be funny, but I'll say this just-in-case (I actually know people who really do think like that): most of the time it's us, the humans, who cause a species to go extinct, not the species itself.
I hope AMD can get back on their feet soon, and hopefully will some day in the future offer some real competition to Intel. It would be generally good for consumers by lowering prices and pushing both companies to keep on innovating. But it doesn't look likely :/
I've always liked AMD's products and the whole underdog-fighting-for-its-life is easy to symphatize with, it's just sad to see they don't ever seem to be able to properly compete with Intel, there's always something wrong or amiss.
But what the hell does someone do with 100 PB? As is the case with CPU speeds, we will eventually hit a ceiling. Except in this case, the ceiling will be what is practical vs. what is possible. I can't imagine someone ever using that much HD space except for perhaps a company that never destroys old customer data.
You lack imagination then. I can easily think of someone using that much without even breaking a sweat, like e.g. many people like to keep a pristine collection of their music files as FLAC files, and those tend to take a lot of space. Similarly, many people like to keep 1:1 copies of their movies and animation and TV series, and even at 1080p those tend to eat space like crazy. And just think about it: in 2020 1080p will be really low resolution and movies will likely weigh in at about 200Gb even with reasonable compression.
And think about it, sometimes people have computers serving the whole family. I too have a home server with 2.5Tb storage at the moment, and it's starting to get full, and it's only serving 3 PCs. With a moderately-sized family it could get filled up pretty fast with everyone storing their stuff there.
I do give you that that text-documents and Excel spreadsheets don't use that much space, but many people use their PCs for much more than just using those kinds of files.
Based on my reading of the law (thanks for posting the link to the PDF, AC), you can still encrypt traffic (think banks, online retailers, etc.) as long those who employ it add additional network links to the Pakistani government, pass all traffic to the government and provide them with the appropriate keys. Said additional links and any supporting hardware and/or software to be implemented at the TLS/SSL users' expense.
AFAICT, The 120 days that the OP refers to isn't how long they have to keep the data, it's how long ISPs have to implement the environment.
N.B. IANAL
This stuff still screws over any small companies and newstarters who wish to e.g. offer their products online. Having to provide the government with all that means a lot higher operational costs, not to mention the extra hardware and maintenance needed, and it could very well even mean the company is no longer sustainable.
Such a horribly shortsighted move.