Special snowflakes are the people demanding government protect them from all the imaginary boogiemen they can dream up. I am asking nobody to protect me from anything other than governments making things illegal, simply because people like you can only make binary choices.
Your liberty doesn't extend to flying quadrocopters wherever the fuck you feel like it.
My liberty has nothing to do with flying or not flying quadcopters at all. That is the problem you're not realizing in your haste to critique Libertarians. You're logic is simple binary and thus incapable of judgement. Or as the good saying goes, only the Sith deal in absolutes.
No, the idea of liberty is fraught with messy dangerous things. If you want to live in a nice peaceful totalitarian state, where everything is mandated, regulated and bubble wraped for your protection, then fine, move to North Korea, where the state protects its people from the evils of Liberty. Because that is what you have advocated.
But lets take a look at what is REALLY happening. It is now, against the law to fly a drone within 30 Miles of DC. That means that I cannot fly my drone, over my backyard (acreage) because you're too fucking scared. Now, I am a criminal for not doing anything other than minding my own business, harming, threatening, or otherwise anyone else.
The real spoiled children are the ones crying for big government to protect them from scary imaginary boogiemen.
So yeah, be riduculously afraid of my quadcopter on my property, and make me a criminal simply because you're too fucking stupid to have any judgements and thus deal in the absolute binary world you're comfortable in.
The US has decided teachers are overpaid unionized swine, and have created a new paradigm of minimum wage private corporate schools to pauperize them
I work in education. The "US" hasn't decided anything. Schools hiring teachers are limited to paying UNION wages for far too many subpar teachers, who whine and complain about having to take continuing education without being paid a stipend. The biggest problem IMHO to the problem with Teachers is that there is NO competition for good teachers. Teachers live where they can get a job, and there is very little (if any) incentive to have teachers improve their skill sets.
And due to the complete lack of competition, and the inability for any district to hire "the best, at whatever cost" they are left wanting bodies to fill positions.
And to be very clear, every school district has some really fine and outstanding teachers, most good teachers. What I am talking about are the hanger ons that would otherwise be unemployable without a teacher's credential, who are there to fill seats in chairs in front of students. The problem is, you cannot dodge all the raindrops, and there are enough of them to matter.
And to my point about teachers who won't take basic skills classes (where they need them) to learn how to properly use Technology in the classroom, without getting paid stipend, it really does matter. I simply look at it this way, teachers who don't want to learn, for learning sake aren't good teachers. Period. And this is proven by a recent training a colleague of mine did, training 2nd Grade kids, and Teachers/staff the exact same "introduction to Chromebooks", and the 2nd Graders fared much better than the adults. They paid attention, didn't talk, and learned how to log in (barely able to write) to Google/Chrome with much more ease. So even being paid to learn 2nd Graders were able to out compete the teachers.
When teachers don't want to (or can't) learn, it is a sign they shouldn't be teaching. Best teachers I know, all of them have a singular quality, thirst for knowledge and a passion for learning. Far too many teachers basically said "I don't want to learn anymore, I'm done" and that translates directly into the passion they have in the classroom.
That is what I am suggesting. However, I also believe that we are 2-3 years (short term) away from that. Once you see multiple venders each making 16 TB SSD (first this year), and knowing that HDD aren't likely to reach that size anytime soon, then you'll realize that HDDs are on the cusp of disappearing altogether. This will be especially true if the MTBF of SSDs increase well beyond spinning drives, simply because they do not "wear out" and start failing after 42 months of non-stop use.
It isn't just about initial cost. It is the full Total Cost of Ownership that matters. Spinning drives take more power to spin, cool and otherwise keep running, SSD use much less. I can hardly find a use case scenario except as Tape Drive replacement for HDD (archival) (cold on the shelf backup).
bitter much? Divorce much? Too bitter to get married and thus never divorced?
I can think a a large number of cases where you just sound bitter, and not offer anyone anything of real value, which is probably why you are bitter in the first place.
This year is going to be interesting. When you finally have a 16 TB SSD drive released, which is higher capacity and faster than any HDD. Once those are released, the end is just a matter of production ramping up. The other thing most people don't realize is that and SSD has 100,000 IOPS, where a Spindle drive is somehwere under 1000 IOPS, even for the best/fastest drive. Those IOPS count. 100 times faster is a big deal. One second becomes 100 seconds (not exactly, but illustrative). Then you have to get the data off the drive, and SATA is just not going to cut it with SSDs, which means that there is going to be a huge push for increasing Bus speeds to move the data to the CPU. The problem with Standard HDDs is that they are really 20 year old designs that have been milked along long time. SSDs are game changer, yet most people are still just looking at capacity/cost, and not any of the other benefits that SSDs offer.
My point is, SSDs are worth it in just about every case scenario that requires access to data and getting that data to the CPU. The bottleneck is the HDD, not capacity.
HDD and SSD drives have different performance characteristics, however the differences in failure rates isn't really all that well known. Yes, if you add drives, you're adding to the number of possible failures, but you're also mitigating the chances of a single point of failure ruining an already bad day. That is why you have Backups and Redundant copies and disaster recovery plans. The more valuable the data, the more money you'll spend securing that data.
You can RAID for protection, you can RAID for increased capacity, and you can RAID for both. The type of drive and failure rates mean very little when you're at that level of Enterprise, except for replacement planning. Personally, I hold onto a 2 - 3 year replacement cycle for all "critical" data drives. 4-6 years on non-critical data drives. No drives older than six years, simply because of increasing failure rates.
And since we're talking failure rates, I suppose you have seen BackBlaze reports on drive failure rates which pretty much mirror my expectations before seeing them. 3 - 4 year spindle drive lifetime before failures start impacting long term data protection. But lets just take your use case (data protection, then speed), carrying 20TB of data will likely use a nice RAID (Enterprise like SAN/NAS) using 4 TB drives (common), you'd need at least 48 drives in RAID hold one 20TB file of research data. Minimum. And if you're doing it right, you'd have two NAS of equal, spanning two different locations in mirror (Disaster Recovery) (Mind you, I'm really ballparking it here). So now you have 96 drives with an average failure rate of 3%, means you'll have three drives fail, this year. That is three times your data is in danger until the drive(s) is/are replaced and it syncs back up (no small feat). At 42 months, the failure rates increase substantially.
All of that is to say, that failure is preventable. I don't treat a single drive failure as a threat per se, unless I am running very thin (no Hot Spare, no Cold Spare, simple RAID). So when you're talking about failures of either SSD or HDD, I don't see the difference, other than as a math problem to solve. People using 4 x 8TB drives in RAID 5 to hold 20TB of data are asking for trouble. First off, they probably don't value the data in terms of Real Dollars (1 Million, 5 million, 10 Million), and are being stingy to save a few pennies, risking millions in effort. It works, until it doesn't, then it wasn't worth anything.
So, when I talk about the value of the data, the time accessing it, the protections to prevent disaster and having proper backup/redundancy/recovery it isn't a simple "4 x 8 TB drives should be enough" calculation. Of course, if you don't have the budget for SSDs or proper NAS/SAN systems to protect your data, then when it fails don't blame THIS IT GUY, go chase the bean counters who don't give a shit.
The TL;DR version, "Good IT is expensive, bad IT is costly"
RAM Cached storage is not the same as RAM, though they use the same medium. RAM Cache storage would be great for holding things like NTFS/FAT table information, so that it didn't need to be read every time a hard drive was accessed. It is a cached (non-working) copy of a Hard Drive.
Therefore the price/performance of spinning disk is FAR more attractive than SSD.
HDD rarely outperform SSD. I think you're talking about price/capacity of HDD vs SSD. And if my suspicions are correct, this will really start to change in the next couple years (2-3). If my suspicions are correct, you'll see > 16 TB SSD drives that are cost / TB comparable to slower spindle drives within that time frame.
As the SSD densities increase, and the price continues to drop, as the technology continues to improve, the signs are all there, HDD are at the end of their line. My guess, in 5 years, HDD sales will be tanked.
Not in all cases, or even many. What do I care if the access time is 0.5 seconds longer for my 20+TB file of my research data?
You may not need instant access to that much data. But then again, if your 1/2/sec longer is multiplied thousands of times a day, five days a week, 4.25 weeks a month... That is almost 3 hours each month of wasted time, and almost a full week a year of wasted time. My guess, is that you're actually not waiting 1/2 second per, times 1000 a day, it is more likely that you're wasting 3-5 seconds per, several thousand times a day, but since you aren't measuring, you will never know.
However, based on my Anecdotal evidence (personal experience), there is even a greater cost to your short sightedness that you may be ignoring (or ignorant of). Speed is more than just time, sometimes the difference between whether or not you actually do something. And not doing something, because it takes a long long time, is lost opportunity, and opportunities lost can never be recaptured.
And until you actually experience the speed difference, you're not really able to appreciate what it really means. Booting in 10 seconds vs 2 minutes might not seem impressive, until you actually see it.
HDDs still kick butt in scenarios where high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds.
There is more to SSD than ripping speed, though that is a huge consideration. Denser, slower drives are still useful, but only to a point where the amount of data needing transference, then you start to run into other bottlenecks. Spinning drives are dying, because there hasn't been much improvement over the last 10-15 years (still SATA?) on the one thing that will change in the next couple years, namely bus speeds and getting data from point A to point B, and as dense as HDD are promising to be, it may be better to simply speed up the bus to take advantage of the IOPS available.
The way I have been looking at it for the last several years is fairly unique (IMHO). I see data in terms of distance / speed from core processor, not in density or anything else. Critical data needs to be closer (speed/distance) to the CPU and that is where SSD kick spindle HDDs in the ass. If the CPU is constantly waiting for data, you're wasting cycles.
Keeping the pipelines full of relevant data is key. The faster you can move data to the key point in the pipelines, and that is something HDDs just cannot keep up with any longer, and why people are moving to SSD even though they are less dense. There is a payoff in efficiencies at each level.
Is it okay to use the exact same terminology to discuss such radically different situations?
Yes, if the terminology is insufficient to make a distinction. And terminology will change when such a distinction is 1) needed and 2) accepted by common (relative) understanding. IMHO, calling a mutation of BTC to BTC(XT) is not really a altcoin difference. If the change in coin is permanent (non-reversible) the conversion is essentially an Alt-Coin.
And sometimes, the terminology becomes muddled, like the "hackers" and "crackers" became synonymous in spite of the understanding in the geek crowd. Now, the term "hacker" is considered a bad thing in common language, and almost nobody uses "cracker".
My question is, what happens to BTC(XT) coins when they are no longer usable because nobody went down that path. Do they revert to BTC (strip off the extra Blocks)?
It's also why Linux hasn't become a realistic contender of Windows on the PC desktop.
Chromebooks are a contender, and a variant of Linux. Android is as well. As well as all the other embedded applications that are becoming more mainstream.
By "on the desktop" you're self limiting how you look at Linux. The traditional desktop is withering. The need for Windows PCs is pretty much limited to Office workers, and specialty apps, and even those are changing towards back end databases and web front ends running on Linux servers.
My guess, Linux is running on half the things you do everyday, if not more. The "desktop" is Microsoft and Apples domain, but it is a shrinking market.
This is were the real issue with BTC is, IMHO. For a currency to work, certain percentage of it must be used as "currency", not as some long term investment (stock/bond/asset). It won't take off unless it becomes a "common currency" that everyone carries around.
The second greatest problem with BTC, is that there is no proper institution that can hold the value of your coins, without the need to hold onto those specific coins. No, the laundering./ anonymizing services do not count. I'm talking insured banking type institutions. Which may also be part of the reason for #1.
Suffice it to say, BTC may never, if it ever gets, "Mainstream"
Corporations are constructs of the state. The exist only because the power supports their existence. All power is derived by those exerting it. Not all power is good, not all power is bad.
However, without a defined and meaningful limitation of power, tyranny will always creep into power.
Socialism is a power structure that depends on the state to support it. Taxation required and the forced confiscation of earnings of the workers needed to keep it functioning is the same power tyrants use. There is no difference. Socialism is a form of Statism. Your view that Socialism has no attachment to a state is simply incorrect, as it requires a state to tax the workers (forcibly take) in order to give to those that it chooses to support. Unless you can name a Socialist system that doesn't contain confiscatory taxation policy, your point is simply wrong.
People opposing Liberty are almost (if not) always statists, because they fear it.
Just so you know, I don't believe the government has any right to the earnings of the workers, especially via taxation. The fact that we have become accustomed to it speaks loudly to how far we've fallen in the last 120 years. My view is that ALL taxes are regressive, and I have tons of examples as evidence. Simply put, the rich and powerful will always be able to avoid taxes where the middle class cannot. Ultimately, the rich can move, pay people to avoid taxes, and otherwise simply not consume their wealth in support of the State.
I also don't believe in equality of outcome. Not everyone has equal ability. Giving trophies to everyone just devalues the trophies. There is only one Wimbledon Trophy, only one Heisman. It is what makes those valuable. It is also not possible for everyone to win one. Equal outcome is tyranny. Giving a Heisman to everyone negates its value.
I do believe in equal opportunity. Everyone should have a chance to win the Heisman, or Wimbledon, but those that work hard, have excellent athletic abilities and the willpower to achieve should be rewarded. Taxes are not a reward for success, it is a way for socialists to punish those that they think achieved unfairly. And if you listen closely, you can hear it in every taxation discussion "Unfair" "Fair Share" "Evil one percent".
You saying you'd eat Monsanto Corn with bio-engineered pesticides built in because you don't really know if it will kill you so you'll assume it won't? And you are saying that the bees disappearing is a complete coincidence to the introduction of mass deployed crops that have said pesticides built in? Because Monsanto said it was safe?
Just wondering where you draw the line, if at all?
Those shouting "Anarchy" in the face of Libertarians are simpleton binary choices. And because they cannot fathom liberty, they are on the side of the Statists (Socialists, Fascists, Nazis...). Understanding that statism tends towards tyranny, I've chosen to side with liberty. Being free is messy. Fascists always run on a platform of order (at least the trains run on time).
Me, I would rather play in the mud than be afraid of tyrannical order.
Nobody really wants to discuss the real issue, out of political correctness and fear of becoming a "hater".
We have counter productive statements, nullifying each other, coming as a directive.
1) If you see something, say something 2) Don't be a racist,.
These two things are incompatible with each other, as we found out in San Bernadino, where a neighbor had suspicions but didn't want to be a racist (#2) so they didn't report them (#1) . So, the question is, which is worse, the killing of 14 people or being a racist? Finely nuanced positions are useless. Directions need to be clear and simple for all the simple people out there.
I see Old Greybeard Sys Admin who can't evolve with the times. The old "Get off my lawn" and "Walked up hill in the snow... both directions" type. People ranting about this or that changing and how it SUCKS DONKEY BALLS is nothing more than this.
I swore when I was younger (in the 90s) I wouldn't become one of those old fart Greybeards I was making fun of. Now that my beard is greying more each passing day, I still refuse to become irrelevant by grasping to my dying death the very things I grew up with, simply because of an opinion.
I mean, I love OS/2 and REXX. Still to this day, it can do things that other OS simply can't do. But those things are irrelevant because nobody else liked them. I could be irrelevant by staying there. Or Novell, or PDP11/70 or HP3000 or.... each having something I thought was special (but learned to live without or with a lesser version)
My point is, the world changes, adapt and move on. I've worked with Slackware, Debian, Redhat, SuSE, Ubuntu.... and even Gentoo. You know what they all have in common? They are Linux, and I can configure them to get the job done. Some are easier than others to configure, but I can configure them all in the end. A linux admin who says "I only work with ______" is just an Old Greybeard Sys Admin becoming irrelevant and soon to be tossed on the trash heap of history. Just like COBOL programmers.;)
They are releasing this stuff OpenSource, because the ecosystem is filled with similar tools that work just as well, and Microsoft needs to be relevant. Would you use these tools if they weren't free or open source? Of course not. It is out of necessity.
Microsoft is becoming less relevant each passing day. With Chromebooks, iPads, Android, iOS and whatever else is "next", there are more viable choices now than ever before.
I have excellent Karma. I once did an experiment on Karma by deliberately being aggressive / asshole / crabby posts. I didn't change what I said, I just changed how I said it. I drove my Karma all the way down to Bad. Took me a couple days to do it. However repairing my Karma took months of hard and steady work. And as you can see, it is still pretty decent.
You can post controversial views on Slashdot, but you have to use lots of sugar to make the medicine go down.
I am kosher, so I don't eat pig to start. I don't tell people that they shouldn't eat pig. And if I did eat pig, I would likely not eat this pig.
The problem for me is that the "Unknown" value of the particular gene is "unknown". We know the value in removing it, but not cost involved. There are always tradeoffs, and the unknown tradeoff for me wouldn't be worth it.
Special snowflakes are the people demanding government protect them from all the imaginary boogiemen they can dream up. I am asking nobody to protect me from anything other than governments making things illegal, simply because people like you can only make binary choices.
Your liberty doesn't extend to flying quadrocopters wherever the fuck you feel like it.
My liberty has nothing to do with flying or not flying quadcopters at all. That is the problem you're not realizing in your haste to critique Libertarians. You're logic is simple binary and thus incapable of judgement. Or as the good saying goes, only the Sith deal in absolutes.
No, the idea of liberty is fraught with messy dangerous things. If you want to live in a nice peaceful totalitarian state, where everything is mandated, regulated and bubble wraped for your protection, then fine, move to North Korea, where the state protects its people from the evils of Liberty. Because that is what you have advocated.
But lets take a look at what is REALLY happening. It is now, against the law to fly a drone within 30 Miles of DC. That means that I cannot fly my drone, over my backyard (acreage) because you're too fucking scared. Now, I am a criminal for not doing anything other than minding my own business, harming, threatening, or otherwise anyone else.
The real spoiled children are the ones crying for big government to protect them from scary imaginary boogiemen.
So yeah, be riduculously afraid of my quadcopter on my property, and make me a criminal simply because you're too fucking stupid to have any judgements and thus deal in the absolute binary world you're comfortable in.
And that is how a state becomes a tyranny. Forsaking liberty for security.
The US has decided teachers are overpaid unionized swine, and have created a new paradigm of minimum wage private corporate schools to pauperize them
I work in education. The "US" hasn't decided anything. Schools hiring teachers are limited to paying UNION wages for far too many subpar teachers, who whine and complain about having to take continuing education without being paid a stipend. The biggest problem IMHO to the problem with Teachers is that there is NO competition for good teachers. Teachers live where they can get a job, and there is very little (if any) incentive to have teachers improve their skill sets.
And due to the complete lack of competition, and the inability for any district to hire "the best, at whatever cost" they are left wanting bodies to fill positions.
And to be very clear, every school district has some really fine and outstanding teachers, most good teachers. What I am talking about are the hanger ons that would otherwise be unemployable without a teacher's credential, who are there to fill seats in chairs in front of students. The problem is, you cannot dodge all the raindrops, and there are enough of them to matter.
And to my point about teachers who won't take basic skills classes (where they need them) to learn how to properly use Technology in the classroom, without getting paid stipend, it really does matter. I simply look at it this way, teachers who don't want to learn, for learning sake aren't good teachers. Period. And this is proven by a recent training a colleague of mine did, training 2nd Grade kids, and Teachers/staff the exact same "introduction to Chromebooks", and the 2nd Graders fared much better than the adults. They paid attention, didn't talk, and learned how to log in (barely able to write) to Google/Chrome with much more ease. So even being paid to learn 2nd Graders were able to out compete the teachers.
When teachers don't want to (or can't) learn, it is a sign they shouldn't be teaching. Best teachers I know, all of them have a singular quality, thirst for knowledge and a passion for learning. Far too many teachers basically said "I don't want to learn anymore, I'm done" and that translates directly into the passion they have in the classroom.
The point is moo.
until the price of SSDs at large volumes go down.
That is what I am suggesting. However, I also believe that we are 2-3 years (short term) away from that. Once you see multiple venders each making 16 TB SSD (first this year), and knowing that HDD aren't likely to reach that size anytime soon, then you'll realize that HDDs are on the cusp of disappearing altogether. This will be especially true if the MTBF of SSDs increase well beyond spinning drives, simply because they do not "wear out" and start failing after 42 months of non-stop use.
It isn't just about initial cost. It is the full Total Cost of Ownership that matters. Spinning drives take more power to spin, cool and otherwise keep running, SSD use much less. I can hardly find a use case scenario except as Tape Drive replacement for HDD (archival) (cold on the shelf backup).
bitter much? Divorce much? Too bitter to get married and thus never divorced?
I can think a a large number of cases where you just sound bitter, and not offer anyone anything of real value, which is probably why you are bitter in the first place.
Damn.
This year is going to be interesting. When you finally have a 16 TB SSD drive released, which is higher capacity and faster than any HDD. Once those are released, the end is just a matter of production ramping up. The other thing most people don't realize is that and SSD has 100,000 IOPS, where a Spindle drive is somehwere under 1000 IOPS, even for the best/fastest drive. Those IOPS count. 100 times faster is a big deal. One second becomes 100 seconds (not exactly, but illustrative). Then you have to get the data off the drive, and SATA is just not going to cut it with SSDs, which means that there is going to be a huge push for increasing Bus speeds to move the data to the CPU. The problem with Standard HDDs is that they are really 20 year old designs that have been milked along long time. SSDs are game changer, yet most people are still just looking at capacity/cost, and not any of the other benefits that SSDs offer.
My point is, SSDs are worth it in just about every case scenario that requires access to data and getting that data to the CPU. The bottleneck is the HDD, not capacity.
HDD and SSD drives have different performance characteristics, however the differences in failure rates isn't really all that well known. Yes, if you add drives, you're adding to the number of possible failures, but you're also mitigating the chances of a single point of failure ruining an already bad day. That is why you have Backups and Redundant copies and disaster recovery plans. The more valuable the data, the more money you'll spend securing that data.
You can RAID for protection, you can RAID for increased capacity, and you can RAID for both. The type of drive and failure rates mean very little when you're at that level of Enterprise, except for replacement planning. Personally, I hold onto a 2 - 3 year replacement cycle for all "critical" data drives. 4-6 years on non-critical data drives. No drives older than six years, simply because of increasing failure rates.
And since we're talking failure rates, I suppose you have seen BackBlaze reports on drive failure rates which pretty much mirror my expectations before seeing them. 3 - 4 year spindle drive lifetime before failures start impacting long term data protection. But lets just take your use case (data protection, then speed), carrying 20TB of data will likely use a nice RAID (Enterprise like SAN/NAS) using 4 TB drives (common), you'd need at least 48 drives in RAID hold one 20TB file of research data. Minimum. And if you're doing it right, you'd have two NAS of equal, spanning two different locations in mirror (Disaster Recovery) (Mind you, I'm really ballparking it here). So now you have 96 drives with an average failure rate of 3%, means you'll have three drives fail, this year. That is three times your data is in danger until the drive(s) is/are replaced and it syncs back up (no small feat). At 42 months, the failure rates increase substantially.
All of that is to say, that failure is preventable. I don't treat a single drive failure as a threat per se, unless I am running very thin (no Hot Spare, no Cold Spare, simple RAID). So when you're talking about failures of either SSD or HDD, I don't see the difference, other than as a math problem to solve. People using 4 x 8TB drives in RAID 5 to hold 20TB of data are asking for trouble. First off, they probably don't value the data in terms of Real Dollars (1 Million, 5 million, 10 Million), and are being stingy to save a few pennies, risking millions in effort. It works, until it doesn't, then it wasn't worth anything.
So, when I talk about the value of the data, the time accessing it, the protections to prevent disaster and having proper backup/redundancy/recovery it isn't a simple "4 x 8 TB drives should be enough" calculation. Of course, if you don't have the budget for SSDs or proper NAS/SAN systems to protect your data, then when it fails don't blame THIS IT GUY, go chase the bean counters who don't give a shit.
The TL;DR version, "Good IT is expensive, bad IT is costly"
RAM Cached storage is not the same as RAM, though they use the same medium. RAM Cache storage would be great for holding things like NTFS/FAT table information, so that it didn't need to be read every time a hard drive was accessed. It is a cached (non-working) copy of a Hard Drive.
Therefore the price/performance of spinning disk is FAR more attractive than SSD.
HDD rarely outperform SSD. I think you're talking about price/capacity of HDD vs SSD. And if my suspicions are correct, this will really start to change in the next couple years (2-3). If my suspicions are correct, you'll see > 16 TB SSD drives that are cost / TB comparable to slower spindle drives within that time frame.
As the SSD densities increase, and the price continues to drop, as the technology continues to improve, the signs are all there, HDD are at the end of their line. My guess, in 5 years, HDD sales will be tanked.
Not in all cases, or even many. What do I care if the access time is 0.5 seconds longer for my 20+TB file of my research data?
You may not need instant access to that much data. But then again, if your 1/2/sec longer is multiplied thousands of times a day, five days a week, 4.25 weeks a month ... That is almost 3 hours each month of wasted time, and almost a full week a year of wasted time. My guess, is that you're actually not waiting 1/2 second per, times 1000 a day, it is more likely that you're wasting 3-5 seconds per, several thousand times a day, but since you aren't measuring, you will never know.
However, based on my Anecdotal evidence (personal experience), there is even a greater cost to your short sightedness that you may be ignoring (or ignorant of). Speed is more than just time, sometimes the difference between whether or not you actually do something. And not doing something, because it takes a long long time, is lost opportunity, and opportunities lost can never be recaptured.
And until you actually experience the speed difference, you're not really able to appreciate what it really means. Booting in 10 seconds vs 2 minutes might not seem impressive, until you actually see it.
HDDs still kick butt in scenarios where high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds.
There is more to SSD than ripping speed, though that is a huge consideration. Denser, slower drives are still useful, but only to a point where the amount of data needing transference, then you start to run into other bottlenecks. Spinning drives are dying, because there hasn't been much improvement over the last 10-15 years (still SATA?) on the one thing that will change in the next couple years, namely bus speeds and getting data from point A to point B, and as dense as HDD are promising to be, it may be better to simply speed up the bus to take advantage of the IOPS available.
The way I have been looking at it for the last several years is fairly unique (IMHO). I see data in terms of distance / speed from core processor, not in density or anything else. Critical data needs to be closer (speed/distance) to the CPU and that is where SSD kick spindle HDDs in the ass. If the CPU is constantly waiting for data, you're wasting cycles.
CPU > L1 Cache > L2 Cache > L3 Cache > RAM > RAM Cached Storage > Local Storage (SSD/HDD) > Network Storage (SSD/HDD) > Cloud Storage > Archival Storage
Keeping the pipelines full of relevant data is key. The faster you can move data to the key point in the pipelines, and that is something HDDs just cannot keep up with any longer, and why people are moving to SSD even though they are less dense. There is a payoff in efficiencies at each level.
Is it okay to use the exact same terminology to discuss such radically different situations?
Yes, if the terminology is insufficient to make a distinction. And terminology will change when such a distinction is 1) needed and 2) accepted by common (relative) understanding. IMHO, calling a mutation of BTC to BTC(XT) is not really a altcoin difference. If the change in coin is permanent (non-reversible) the conversion is essentially an Alt-Coin.
And sometimes, the terminology becomes muddled, like the "hackers" and "crackers" became synonymous in spite of the understanding in the geek crowd. Now, the term "hacker" is considered a bad thing in common language, and almost nobody uses "cracker".
My question is, what happens to BTC(XT) coins when they are no longer usable because nobody went down that path. Do they revert to BTC (strip off the extra Blocks)?
It's also why Linux hasn't become a realistic contender of Windows on the PC desktop.
Chromebooks are a contender, and a variant of Linux. Android is as well. As well as all the other embedded applications that are becoming more mainstream.
By "on the desktop" you're self limiting how you look at Linux. The traditional desktop is withering. The need for Windows PCs is pretty much limited to Office workers, and specialty apps, and even those are changing towards back end databases and web front ends running on Linux servers.
My guess, Linux is running on half the things you do everyday, if not more. The "desktop" is Microsoft and Apples domain, but it is a shrinking market.
Still $50 million is traded daily in Bitcoin.
This is were the real issue with BTC is, IMHO. For a currency to work, certain percentage of it must be used as "currency", not as some long term investment (stock/bond/asset). It won't take off unless it becomes a "common currency" that everyone carries around.
The second greatest problem with BTC, is that there is no proper institution that can hold the value of your coins, without the need to hold onto those specific coins. No, the laundering ./ anonymizing services do not count. I'm talking insured banking type institutions. Which may also be part of the reason for #1.
Suffice it to say, BTC may never, if it ever gets, "Mainstream"
Corporations are constructs of the state. The exist only because the power supports their existence. All power is derived by those exerting it. Not all power is good, not all power is bad.
However, without a defined and meaningful limitation of power, tyranny will always creep into power.
Socialism is a power structure that depends on the state to support it. Taxation required and the forced confiscation of earnings of the workers needed to keep it functioning is the same power tyrants use. There is no difference. Socialism is a form of Statism. Your view that Socialism has no attachment to a state is simply incorrect, as it requires a state to tax the workers (forcibly take) in order to give to those that it chooses to support. Unless you can name a Socialist system that doesn't contain confiscatory taxation policy, your point is simply wrong.
People opposing Liberty are almost (if not) always statists, because they fear it.
Just so you know, I don't believe the government has any right to the earnings of the workers, especially via taxation. The fact that we have become accustomed to it speaks loudly to how far we've fallen in the last 120 years. My view is that ALL taxes are regressive, and I have tons of examples as evidence. Simply put, the rich and powerful will always be able to avoid taxes where the middle class cannot. Ultimately, the rich can move, pay people to avoid taxes, and otherwise simply not consume their wealth in support of the State.
I also don't believe in equality of outcome. Not everyone has equal ability. Giving trophies to everyone just devalues the trophies. There is only one Wimbledon Trophy, only one Heisman. It is what makes those valuable. It is also not possible for everyone to win one. Equal outcome is tyranny. Giving a Heisman to everyone negates its value.
I do believe in equal opportunity. Everyone should have a chance to win the Heisman, or Wimbledon, but those that work hard, have excellent athletic abilities and the willpower to achieve should be rewarded. Taxes are not a reward for success, it is a way for socialists to punish those that they think achieved unfairly. And if you listen closely, you can hear it in every taxation discussion "Unfair" "Fair Share" "Evil one percent".
I just don't buy into that form of jealousy.
You saying you'd eat Monsanto Corn with bio-engineered pesticides built in because you don't really know if it will kill you so you'll assume it won't? And you are saying that the bees disappearing is a complete coincidence to the introduction of mass deployed crops that have said pesticides built in? Because Monsanto said it was safe?
Just wondering where you draw the line, if at all?
Those shouting "Anarchy" in the face of Libertarians are simpleton binary choices. And because they cannot fathom liberty, they are on the side of the Statists (Socialists, Fascists, Nazis ...). Understanding that statism tends towards tyranny, I've chosen to side with liberty. Being free is messy. Fascists always run on a platform of order (at least the trains run on time).
Me, I would rather play in the mud than be afraid of tyrannical order.
Nobody really wants to discuss the real issue, out of political correctness and fear of becoming a "hater".
We have counter productive statements, nullifying each other, coming as a directive.
1) If you see something, say something
2) Don't be a racist,.
These two things are incompatible with each other, as we found out in San Bernadino, where a neighbor had suspicions but didn't want to be a racist (#2) so they didn't report them (#1) . So, the question is, which is worse, the killing of 14 people or being a racist? Finely nuanced positions are useless. Directions need to be clear and simple for all the simple people out there.
I see Old Greybeard Sys Admin who can't evolve with the times. The old "Get off my lawn" and "Walked up hill in the snow ... both directions" type. People ranting about this or that changing and how it SUCKS DONKEY BALLS is nothing more than this.
I swore when I was younger (in the 90s) I wouldn't become one of those old fart Greybeards I was making fun of. Now that my beard is greying more each passing day, I still refuse to become irrelevant by grasping to my dying death the very things I grew up with, simply because of an opinion.
I mean, I love OS/2 and REXX. Still to this day, it can do things that other OS simply can't do. But those things are irrelevant because nobody else liked them. I could be irrelevant by staying there. Or Novell, or PDP11/70 or HP3000 or .... each having something I thought was special (but learned to live without or with a lesser version)
My point is, the world changes, adapt and move on. I've worked with Slackware, Debian, Redhat, SuSE, Ubuntu .... and even Gentoo. You know what they all have in common? They are Linux, and I can configure them to get the job done. Some are easier than others to configure, but I can configure them all in the end. A linux admin who says "I only work with ______" is just an Old Greybeard Sys Admin becoming irrelevant and soon to be tossed on the trash heap of history. Just like COBOL programmers. ;)
They are releasing this stuff OpenSource, because the ecosystem is filled with similar tools that work just as well, and Microsoft needs to be relevant. Would you use these tools if they weren't free or open source? Of course not. It is out of necessity.
Microsoft is becoming less relevant each passing day. With Chromebooks, iPads, Android, iOS and whatever else is "next", there are more viable choices now than ever before.
I have excellent Karma. I once did an experiment on Karma by deliberately being aggressive / asshole / crabby posts. I didn't change what I said, I just changed how I said it. I drove my Karma all the way down to Bad. Took me a couple days to do it. However repairing my Karma took months of hard and steady work. And as you can see, it is still pretty decent.
You can post controversial views on Slashdot, but you have to use lots of sugar to make the medicine go down.
I am kosher, so I don't eat pig to start. I don't tell people that they shouldn't eat pig. And if I did eat pig, I would likely not eat this pig.
The problem for me is that the "Unknown" value of the particular gene is "unknown". We know the value in removing it, but not cost involved. There are always tradeoffs, and the unknown tradeoff for me wouldn't be worth it.
She is the same senator that suggested that if we ban guns, the bad guys will put theirs down, because that is human nature.
She is the same senator that said that High Power Rifles make it "Legal to hunt humans"
But since she has a (D) after her name, she is better than any (R), (L) or (I) in the state of California (or so I am told)