NASA should collect some hilights of its collection and distribute them on DVD to every American. They should mail out a little book with color photos and URLs, with a DVD of what Americans pay NASA to do.
They should hire some people from AOL with the experience in those mass disc mailings. To reduce waste, NASA should include a return envelope with return postage for people who don't want it. And once the DVDs are distributed, NASA should show a TV series on PBS featuring some DVD content along with other material only shown on the TV premiere. Then NASA should sell additional content, including the TV show.
Even if NASA spends as much as AOL spends to spam us with discs, it will be worth every penny. Americans love NASA when we see it on out TVs. It's consistently among the most valued and inspiring government programmes. It's always giving us "free science" that's consistently improving our lives. If NASA just put more of that inspiration in our hands, it wouldn't have to scrape for cash and whore itself to non-science agencies nearly as much.
We deserve NASA. And NASA deserves our appreciation. If it just got sexed up a little more, especially now that shuttle launches are infrequent, winding down, and so often dramas of failure, packaging the science in handy consumer toys would reconnect us with some of our greatest successes.
No, you fucking fool, I am a native New Yorker. I live in Brooklyn, and have a public parking spot right in front of my house. Instead of all the bullshit I just itemized, that you're too stupid to read.
I've been taking public transit since you were sucking your mother's dick. You can take the cabs and put up with their crazy, stupid shit all the time. But if you knew anything about New York, you'd know that we'd rather be the assholes at the wheel than be at the mercy of one.
Anonymous poser Coward thinks they can talk shit about New York to a New Yorker.
I hate cabbies. NYC cabbies have gotten so bad over the past 10 years that I bought a car instead. They don't know where to go, they refuse to take you places they don't want to go - because they would rather a shorter fare for the initial minimum, or they'd rather land somewhere easier to find the next fare, or they don't know their way around, or they're a jerk. They're even worse drivers than ever before. I could go on an on, but that's not my point.
The point is that cabbies are right about this conflict. They could be safer with GPS, but they don't want their every move to be tracked: one of the few perks of being a cabbie is freedom of movement and privacy from "the boss". But most importantly, they are the ones who are being required to pay for all these new devices. Which bad passengers will smash, as they already have, and which cabbies will have to replace at their own cost. Not the fleets they work for, which make practically all the money, but the drivers themselves.
If NYC forces them to do this, the few with any self respect will leave. The ones who will shut up and take it will be the worst cabbies around. Even worse than the current low average.
And for what? So the City can make a few more bucks playing crappy, annoying ads to us? That the cabbie has to hear a thousand times a day, every day? So the City can spy on us, too, cross-referencing our credit cards with the GPS and probably audio (and maybe video) bugs inside the cars? Bloomberg is putting cameras everywhere, connected to probably the biggest database this side of the NSA. Probably part of the NSA system that's spying on us, whether justified by "traffic congestion" or "security" or "counterterrorism" or now, "protecting the cabbies".
This system is bogus. Even sleazoid cabbies are sickened by it. We shouldn't do it. Our civil liberties are often under the most serious threat for everyone when the undesirables scream about their own early sacrifice to the loss of liberty. This time it's us trapped in the metal box with them, in the same boat. We shouldn't let Big Brother use our cab rides to rationalize screwing all of us.
You're an idiot. Nuking some jihadist would just turn the rest of the Muslims (the other 99.9999%) into jihadists, with good reason. Including the Pakistanis, who have the bomb, and the Saudis, who probably have the bomb. Idiots. You and Cheney.
Besides, you Republicans have your own theocrats. Who want nuclear armageddon as much as your Muslim soulmates.
You are the problem with America. But you are not America. You are the cancer. We are shrinking your tumor as fast as we can. Be lucky we don't just chop you out.
We call them "Connecticutters". But since I've know plenty of people from Connecticut who are the same as anyone else in the Northeast, I don't hold it against everyone from the Nutmeg State. In fact, I have sympathy for the rest of you who have to live so close to them. And I understand why the state that the Bushes actually come from votes mostly Democratic.
The best way to deal with people like that is to laugh at them. They're not attached to their "facts", either. They spit them out partly because they think they've got strength in numbers, like the other fools at work who will "ditto" them, and that they hear it on the radio from the rich, famous Dittohead #1.
But, like any other stunted children who don't have the security of actual facts, they also say them to test them. They want to feel the fake security of dittoing Limbo's "presponses" at a live person like you. When they hear something for which they haven't been conditioned, they have no idea what to say or do. They feel insecure, anxious, afraid, and their identity ("just a member of the chorus") is in doubt.
That's the best time to laugh at them. It will spark whatever part of their minds might harbor some doubt about their party line, and make that part feel less alone. It will further decondition them from feeling socially protected by their shrinking fellow radio audience members. And it's the most satisfying, as you can laugh in their face and watch them squirm.
FWIW, I've been laughing in the faces of insulated Connecticut consumers who think they're safe from reality just because there's so many of them in their walled communities. Not everyone from Connecticut, but the worst yuppies, the kind who cut me off in their SUVs on NYC roads, while talking on their cellphones with the "W04" bumperstickers. Connecticut is gradually coming around: Lieberman had to leave the Democratic Party (though it hasn't yet left him), and there are only 3 other Republican Congressmembers left in all New England. That's partly the result of contact with people facing reality (mostly in their own backyards). And with increasing numbers of people laughing in their faces.
There's a lot to do. Fortunately, we've got the rest of our lives to do it. And laughing in the faces of deluded zombies is fun every time, however long it takes.
There is no exclusion for methods of doing business under US patent law. Patent applications for methods of doing business are examined using the same standards as any other invention.
Of course it wasn't. But that's what your Republicans have insisted on lying to us about. Or haven't you noticed that even this next bogus Petraeus Iraq report is scheduled for presentation to Congress on 9/11? You people are sick. Sick. Sick enough to desperately accuse me of what is most wrong with you. Typical Republican denial projection.
You're such a fool that you'll vote for Republicans you've admitted you know lie to you. So I'm not surprised when you say something so grossly absurd.
My anger and hatred are directed at insane killers like you who want nothing but lies and killing. That's the healthy reaction to what you and your kind have done. But unlike you, I don't want to kill people like you. I just want to expose you to ridicule. So I thank you for dancing your crazy jig here where the rest of us can see it.
What is the theoretically minimum power consumption for physical computers?
What's even the unit to measure it? "Joules per bit"? Bits of what? What's the theoretically least power consuming computation? Is it a bitwise comparison like "not equals", or NAND? Maybe something more primitive, like a half adder?
And what's the lowest power consuming physical device, made of molecules (not, say, electrons or quarks) that can compute that minimum unit?
And with that standard established, how "infodynamically" efficient is a 1-W 500MHz Pentium/MMX/SSE2?
The only reason to drop the "Sun" brand is because the company's execs think its brand isn't any good.
The only reason to rebrand the stock symbol as "Java" is because people in the stock industry know about "Java", because that's the market where Java has actually had some good success.
Sun is rebranding in that narrow market only to impress the stockbrokers (and daytrader stockbroker wannabes). That kind of system gaming, rather than building the Sun brand with better products or services, shows that Sun is desperate to promote its business without the underlying good business to promote.
I expect Sun will go the way of SGI. First Sun will become a SW-only company, after ramping down their HW into first only shrinking niche markets and then just add-in cards. Then they'll license Java and Solaris to others, rather than continue to invest in the R&D that earns them their trademark ownership. Then they will give up even that business, as they lose the leverage over competition and investors and employees look to more interesting places to work.
I'll miss Sun. Ever since it dedicated itself to owning Java rather than, say, making Solaris run Linux apps, or making Java/Sparc chips for mobile devices, I've already missed it. I just hope its downward spiral is graceful.
What the PS3 needs is someone to port X/OpenGL and its (TV) graphics rendering libraries to the PS3's DSPs (SPEs). Then we can use any USB tuner and DVR SW we want under PS3 Linux. On a fast multimedia platform that's subsidized by Sony to be much cheaper for the performance and features.
Without depending on Sony not to lock us in with DRM or to snoop on us with spyware. If Sony can do it with their dedicated HW, the rest of us can do it with their opened HW and the open Linux platform.
That's all we need: unkillable devices competing with humans for food. That can lull us to sleep or drive us crazy just by playing the same song over and over.
We'll go out not with a bang, or a whimper, but a "shuffle".
make my living (very lucrative one at that) because of this war, I would say, YES, it does affect me...positively.
No, I'm not a college student. I've been paying taxes post-college for longer than you've been able to hold a gun. So I'm paying for your filthy blood money.
You're so deluded by your greed that you think Iraqis attacked us on 9/11/2001. I live in NYC, where I grew up. So I know the difference. Because my life actually depends on it. Since you're getting paid so well by the Republicans you love, why don't you tell me where is Osama? Since you're such a great warrior and all, how come you're busy making money off us fighting the wrong war, and Osama's still running around free to threaten us? Isn't it because that's good for business?
Thanks for representing exactly what's wrong with your Republican war profiteers.
Thanks for the support (and for retaining your sanity amidst our insane Republican Era).
What's most telling for me in that comment about the "arbitrary judiciary" is that you never said judicial power is arbitary (as another replier to the Bushite also noted). The Republican Party has attracted the crudest system gamers. Post-Nixon, the people who join the Republican Party are people who believe in the system solely as a vehicle for power. Not for government. Their philosophy of "justice" is "it's not a crime if you don't get caught".
A huge fifth column of anti-Americans. Somewhere around 60M strong (the number who voted for Bush in 2004). The best hope for our republic surviving is short-term apathy as their heroes finally wear out their welcome. But only if followed by aggressive programmes of interacting with these people. They need to connect with people other than their alienated neighbors out in America's many backwaters. They need more media diversity than their echo chamber of rightwing talk radio, Fox News, and church hypocrisy. We need them to get back into their right minds. Because we're stuck with them for the long haul.
And because they've demonstrated how their fake "values" can be easily replaced with any ideology if it's just repeated long and consistently enough. They're too easily led. But they can be led back into America, and out of the darkness they've insisted on huddling in and dragging us down into.
So the economy collapsing under $13 TRILLION in bad mortgages won't affect you. So the $10T in government debt doesn't affect you. So the Iraq war killing thousands of Americans, depleting our military, creating thousands of new terrorist enemies, costing another $TRILLION we can't afford don't affect you. All the extra pollution and crippling energy prices don't affect you. The justice system losing all credibility doesn't affect you. Unopposed corporate predations don't affect you. Millions more homeless, uneducated, sick people living around you doesn't affect you. You must love living in Canada.
I don't think I'm a "pawn" of the Federal government. I'm just honest about how my life is affected by what my country does, by how other people are affected by it. Which is why I work to change it.
But I guess if you just don't care about anything but what you watch on cable, then Republicans are no problem. How sad for you.
I think the HD/RAM/battery config is the way to go. Especially for mobile devices, including notebooks, that should only be caching data anyway, for network storage sync ASAP. Which means smaller capacities that need much lower battery.
Eventually "electronic paper" displays that require no power except to change their visible state (much like Flash) will have sold enough units to repay most of their R&D cost, so WUXGA panels cost under $500. By that time, 50GB Flash will probably cost under $200, so 50GB "drive cache" RAM will cost under $200, probably integrated into the controller as main memory partly partitioned into cache by the storage driver (all of which will hibernate to the Flash). The CPU will cost about $200, and the rest of the machine (including the smaller battery) will cost another $200. A $1300 machine, or maybe a $900 one that's got under 10GB storage.
Then they've got to shrink that sucker into your pocket as a "phone" that costs under $500.
I don't expect Festo do do anything that isn't an evolution of their pneumatics biz. And while electro-active polymers might be their next competition, I don't see why yet another company can't beat them both with aerogel muscles. Especially for flying robots, where power:weight is mostly lost in the motor. But all these mobile devices could get longer life on smaller (lighter) batteries with aerogel muscles.
Maybe the current and next generations are already in the pipeline. But I expect we'll eventually see aerogels on the scene. I'm just talking up a cutting edge, or even just beyond it, to hasten its arrival.
I'm talking about bundling it in a single, simple product. So everyone can get the benefit, without extra work configuring, and with the lower prices that a scaled production economy brings.
"Supposed" by whom? By you? Not by the PTO, of course, which is the only expectation that counts. Those patents on ideas aren't the exception, a mistake, "selective enforcement", they're the rule.
That rule needs to be changed. But until it is, it's the law. Deal with it.
Except what that analysis conveniently ignores is that shuffling around the static stored content to ensure even wear from the frequently rewritten content really destroys the performance. Especially when defragmenting so single files are stored more within single blocks readable in bursts, rather than fragmented around many blocks and needing to be filtered for the required bits. And all that shuffling further wears the drive.
Now I don't want to hear any of this "Flash is just like RAM/HD" BS. It's a fantasy.
I know that power outage is the problem with RAM. But how often does that actually happen? Why not include a battery for flushing to Flash/disc in the event?
And though of course more main memory, or even CPU cache, can improve performance, that requires much more config than transparent performance improvements on the drive itself. Probably even recoding, which is not a practical option for the vast majority of users. Bundling it into the drive would improve drive performance transparently, therefore for everyone.
Though perhaps it's better to just put huge caches on the controller. Or maybe the best
But really what we're discussing is "solid state drives". So addressing the problem with Flash, their fewer rewrites before wearing out, means a RAM cache on their drives is the way to go. Since RAM costs 50% what Flash costs, a drive costing 150% of a simple drive would have to last only 50% longer to be cost effective. Of course it would last longer than that, and offer higher performance, too. The extra HW for RAM, including battery and powerdown backup, should be at most as expensive as its base HD counterparts.
So for the actual use case we're discussing, Flash+RAM is a good solution.
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NASA should collect some hilights of its collection and distribute them on DVD to every American. They should mail out a little book with color photos and URLs, with a DVD of what Americans pay NASA to do.
They should hire some people from AOL with the experience in those mass disc mailings. To reduce waste, NASA should include a return envelope with return postage for people who don't want it. And once the DVDs are distributed, NASA should show a TV series on PBS featuring some DVD content along with other material only shown on the TV premiere. Then NASA should sell additional content, including the TV show.
Even if NASA spends as much as AOL spends to spam us with discs, it will be worth every penny. Americans love NASA when we see it on out TVs. It's consistently among the most valued and inspiring government programmes. It's always giving us "free science" that's consistently improving our lives. If NASA just put more of that inspiration in our hands, it wouldn't have to scrape for cash and whore itself to non-science agencies nearly as much.
We deserve NASA. And NASA deserves our appreciation. If it just got sexed up a little more, especially now that shuttle launches are infrequent, winding down, and so often dramas of failure, packaging the science in handy consumer toys would reconnect us with some of our greatest successes.
No, you fucking fool, I am a native New Yorker. I live in Brooklyn, and have a public parking spot right in front of my house. Instead of all the bullshit I just itemized, that you're too stupid to read.
I've been taking public transit since you were sucking your mother's dick. You can take the cabs and put up with their crazy, stupid shit all the time. But if you knew anything about New York, you'd know that we'd rather be the assholes at the wheel than be at the mercy of one.
Anonymous poser Coward thinks they can talk shit about New York to a New Yorker.
I hate cabbies. NYC cabbies have gotten so bad over the past 10 years that I bought a car instead. They don't know where to go, they refuse to take you places they don't want to go - because they would rather a shorter fare for the initial minimum, or they'd rather land somewhere easier to find the next fare, or they don't know their way around, or they're a jerk. They're even worse drivers than ever before. I could go on an on, but that's not my point.
The point is that cabbies are right about this conflict. They could be safer with GPS, but they don't want their every move to be tracked: one of the few perks of being a cabbie is freedom of movement and privacy from "the boss". But most importantly, they are the ones who are being required to pay for all these new devices. Which bad passengers will smash, as they already have, and which cabbies will have to replace at their own cost. Not the fleets they work for, which make practically all the money, but the drivers themselves.
If NYC forces them to do this, the few with any self respect will leave. The ones who will shut up and take it will be the worst cabbies around. Even worse than the current low average.
And for what? So the City can make a few more bucks playing crappy, annoying ads to us? That the cabbie has to hear a thousand times a day, every day? So the City can spy on us, too, cross-referencing our credit cards with the GPS and probably audio (and maybe video) bugs inside the cars? Bloomberg is putting cameras everywhere, connected to probably the biggest database this side of the NSA. Probably part of the NSA system that's spying on us, whether justified by "traffic congestion" or "security" or "counterterrorism" or now, "protecting the cabbies".
This system is bogus. Even sleazoid cabbies are sickened by it. We shouldn't do it. Our civil liberties are often under the most serious threat for everyone when the undesirables scream about their own early sacrifice to the loss of liberty. This time it's us trapped in the metal box with them, in the same boat. We shouldn't let Big Brother use our cab rides to rationalize screwing all of us.
You misspelled "pervert".
You're an idiot. Nuking some jihadist would just turn the rest of the Muslims (the other 99.9999%) into jihadists, with good reason. Including the Pakistanis, who have the bomb, and the Saudis, who probably have the bomb. Idiots. You and Cheney.
Besides, you Republicans have your own theocrats. Who want nuclear armageddon as much as your Muslim soulmates.
You are the problem with America. But you are not America. You are the cancer. We are shrinking your tumor as fast as we can. Be lucky we don't just chop you out.
We call them "Connecticutters". But since I've know plenty of people from Connecticut who are the same as anyone else in the Northeast, I don't hold it against everyone from the Nutmeg State. In fact, I have sympathy for the rest of you who have to live so close to them. And I understand why the state that the Bushes actually come from votes mostly Democratic.
Everyone knows Cheney lies to blame Iraq for the 9/11/2001 attacks, but here's one, just for the sheer amusement of punching you in your face:
Dick Cheney, is that you?
The best way to deal with people like that is to laugh at them. They're not attached to their "facts", either. They spit them out partly because they think they've got strength in numbers, like the other fools at work who will "ditto" them, and that they hear it on the radio from the rich, famous Dittohead #1.
But, like any other stunted children who don't have the security of actual facts, they also say them to test them. They want to feel the fake security of dittoing Limbo's "presponses" at a live person like you. When they hear something for which they haven't been conditioned, they have no idea what to say or do. They feel insecure, anxious, afraid, and their identity ("just a member of the chorus") is in doubt.
That's the best time to laugh at them. It will spark whatever part of their minds might harbor some doubt about their party line, and make that part feel less alone. It will further decondition them from feeling socially protected by their shrinking fellow radio audience members. And it's the most satisfying, as you can laugh in their face and watch them squirm.
FWIW, I've been laughing in the faces of insulated Connecticut consumers who think they're safe from reality just because there's so many of them in their walled communities. Not everyone from Connecticut, but the worst yuppies, the kind who cut me off in their SUVs on NYC roads, while talking on their cellphones with the "W04" bumperstickers. Connecticut is gradually coming around: Lieberman had to leave the Democratic Party (though it hasn't yet left him), and there are only 3 other Republican Congressmembers left in all New England. That's partly the result of contact with people facing reality (mostly in their own backyards). And with increasing numbers of people laughing in their faces.
There's a lot to do. Fortunately, we've got the rest of our lives to do it. And laughing in the faces of deluded zombies is fun every time, however long it takes.
Business Method Patent, US:
Of course it wasn't. But that's what your Republicans have insisted on lying to us about. Or haven't you noticed that even this next bogus Petraeus Iraq report is scheduled for presentation to Congress on 9/11? You people are sick. Sick. Sick enough to desperately accuse me of what is most wrong with you. Typical Republican denial projection.
You're such a fool that you'll vote for Republicans you've admitted you know lie to you. So I'm not surprised when you say something so grossly absurd.
My anger and hatred are directed at insane killers like you who want nothing but lies and killing. That's the healthy reaction to what you and your kind have done. But unlike you, I don't want to kill people like you. I just want to expose you to ridicule. So I thank you for dancing your crazy jig here where the rest of us can see it.
What is the theoretically minimum power consumption for physical computers?
What's even the unit to measure it? "Joules per bit"? Bits of what? What's the theoretically least power consuming computation? Is it a bitwise comparison like "not equals", or NAND? Maybe something more primitive, like a half adder?
And what's the lowest power consuming physical device, made of molecules (not, say, electrons or quarks) that can compute that minimum unit?
And with that standard established, how "infodynamically" efficient is a 1-W 500MHz Pentium/MMX/SSE2?
The only reason to drop the "Sun" brand is because the company's execs think its brand isn't any good.
The only reason to rebrand the stock symbol as "Java" is because people in the stock industry know about "Java", because that's the market where Java has actually had some good success.
Sun is rebranding in that narrow market only to impress the stockbrokers (and daytrader stockbroker wannabes). That kind of system gaming, rather than building the Sun brand with better products or services, shows that Sun is desperate to promote its business without the underlying good business to promote.
I expect Sun will go the way of SGI. First Sun will become a SW-only company, after ramping down their HW into first only shrinking niche markets and then just add-in cards. Then they'll license Java and Solaris to others, rather than continue to invest in the R&D that earns them their trademark ownership. Then they will give up even that business, as they lose the leverage over competition and investors and employees look to more interesting places to work.
I'll miss Sun. Ever since it dedicated itself to owning Java rather than, say, making Solaris run Linux apps, or making Java/Sparc chips for mobile devices, I've already missed it. I just hope its downward spiral is graceful.
What the PS3 needs is someone to port X/OpenGL and its (TV) graphics rendering libraries to the PS3's DSPs (SPEs). Then we can use any USB tuner and DVR SW we want under PS3 Linux. On a fast multimedia platform that's subsidized by Sony to be much cheaper for the performance and features.
Without depending on Sony not to lock us in with DRM or to snoop on us with spyware. If Sony can do it with their dedicated HW, the rest of us can do it with their opened HW and the open Linux platform.
That's all we need: unkillable devices competing with humans for food. That can lull us to sleep or drive us crazy just by playing the same song over and over.
We'll go out not with a bang, or a whimper, but a "shuffle".
No, I'm not a college student. I've been paying taxes post-college for longer than you've been able to hold a gun. So I'm paying for your filthy blood money.
You're so deluded by your greed that you think Iraqis attacked us on 9/11/2001. I live in NYC, where I grew up. So I know the difference. Because my life actually depends on it. Since you're getting paid so well by the Republicans you love, why don't you tell me where is Osama? Since you're such a great warrior and all, how come you're busy making money off us fighting the wrong war, and Osama's still running around free to threaten us? Isn't it because that's good for business?
Thanks for representing exactly what's wrong with your Republican war profiteers.
Thanks for the support (and for retaining your sanity amidst our insane Republican Era).
What's most telling for me in that comment about the "arbitrary judiciary" is that you never said judicial power is arbitary (as another replier to the Bushite also noted). The Republican Party has attracted the crudest system gamers. Post-Nixon, the people who join the Republican Party are people who believe in the system solely as a vehicle for power. Not for government. Their philosophy of "justice" is "it's not a crime if you don't get caught".
A huge fifth column of anti-Americans. Somewhere around 60M strong (the number who voted for Bush in 2004). The best hope for our republic surviving is short-term apathy as their heroes finally wear out their welcome. But only if followed by aggressive programmes of interacting with these people. They need to connect with people other than their alienated neighbors out in America's many backwaters. They need more media diversity than their echo chamber of rightwing talk radio, Fox News, and church hypocrisy. We need them to get back into their right minds. Because we're stuck with them for the long haul.
And because they've demonstrated how their fake "values" can be easily replaced with any ideology if it's just repeated long and consistently enough. They're too easily led. But they can be led back into America, and out of the darkness they've insisted on huddling in and dragging us down into.
So the economy collapsing under $13 TRILLION in bad mortgages won't affect you. So the $10T in government debt doesn't affect you. So the Iraq war killing thousands of Americans, depleting our military, creating thousands of new terrorist enemies, costing another $TRILLION we can't afford don't affect you. All the extra pollution and crippling energy prices don't affect you. The justice system losing all credibility doesn't affect you. Unopposed corporate predations don't affect you. Millions more homeless, uneducated, sick people living around you doesn't affect you. You must love living in Canada.
I don't think I'm a "pawn" of the Federal government. I'm just honest about how my life is affected by what my country does, by how other people are affected by it. Which is why I work to change it.
But I guess if you just don't care about anything but what you watch on cable, then Republicans are no problem. How sad for you.
Thanks for the confirmation. But, since you pulled all that already, this time we're just going to kill you. See you at the polls!
I think the HD/RAM/battery config is the way to go. Especially for mobile devices, including notebooks, that should only be caching data anyway, for network storage sync ASAP. Which means smaller capacities that need much lower battery.
Eventually "electronic paper" displays that require no power except to change their visible state (much like Flash) will have sold enough units to repay most of their R&D cost, so WUXGA panels cost under $500. By that time, 50GB Flash will probably cost under $200, so 50GB "drive cache" RAM will cost under $200, probably integrated into the controller as main memory partly partitioned into cache by the storage driver (all of which will hibernate to the Flash). The CPU will cost about $200, and the rest of the machine (including the smaller battery) will cost another $200. A $1300 machine, or maybe a $900 one that's got under 10GB storage.
Then they've got to shrink that sucker into your pocket as a "phone" that costs under $500.
For one, all that shuffling to even the wear reduces the performance (and increases the wear).
For another, I proposed a solution, an optimization by cache.
My suggestion addresses a real problem with a real solution. Which incidentally solves the sequential read time problem.
I don't expect Festo do do anything that isn't an evolution of their pneumatics biz. And while electro-active polymers might be their next competition, I don't see why yet another company can't beat them both with aerogel muscles. Especially for flying robots, where power:weight is mostly lost in the motor. But all these mobile devices could get longer life on smaller (lighter) batteries with aerogel muscles.
Maybe the current and next generations are already in the pipeline. But I expect we'll eventually see aerogels on the scene. I'm just talking up a cutting edge, or even just beyond it, to hasten its arrival.
I'm talking about bundling it in a single, simple product. So everyone can get the benefit, without extra work configuring, and with the lower prices that a scaled production economy brings.
"Supposed" by whom? By you? Not by the PTO, of course, which is the only expectation that counts. Those patents on ideas aren't the exception, a mistake, "selective enforcement", they're the rule.
That rule needs to be changed. But until it is, it's the law. Deal with it.
Except what that analysis conveniently ignores is that shuffling around the static stored content to ensure even wear from the frequently rewritten content really destroys the performance. Especially when defragmenting so single files are stored more within single blocks readable in bursts, rather than fragmented around many blocks and needing to be filtered for the required bits. And all that shuffling further wears the drive.
Now I don't want to hear any of this "Flash is just like RAM/HD" BS. It's a fantasy.
I know that power outage is the problem with RAM. But how often does that actually happen? Why not include a battery for flushing to Flash/disc in the event?
And though of course more main memory, or even CPU cache, can improve performance, that requires much more config than transparent performance improvements on the drive itself. Probably even recoding, which is not a practical option for the vast majority of users. Bundling it into the drive would improve drive performance transparently, therefore for everyone.
Though perhaps it's better to just put huge caches on the controller. Or maybe the best
But really what we're discussing is "solid state drives". So addressing the problem with Flash, their fewer rewrites before wearing out, means a RAM cache on their drives is the way to go. Since RAM costs 50% what Flash costs, a drive costing 150% of a simple drive would have to last only 50% longer to be cost effective. Of course it would last longer than that, and offer higher performance, too. The extra HW for RAM, including battery and powerdown backup, should be at most as expensive as its base HD counterparts.
So for the actual use case we're discussing, Flash+RAM is a good solution.