Why should we be excited by a $30 1TGB drive today? 5 years ago I was paying $50 for 2TB drives.
That's my point. Development has slowed on higher capacity platter drives for a number of reasons... our demand as consumers might have slowed, but the "cloud" continues to grow and demand storage, but cloud providers are willing to spend too much for enterprise-grade storage they need. Technology is certainly a stumbling block, but they've been talking about these advances for many years. The main reason for the delays and jacked up pricing was plain and simple greed. The Thai floods were a godsend to the industry, which saw prices plummet below $0.025/GB - and suddenly, they were able to charge 3 times the price for all the drives they had stockpiled (not unlike the Sumitomo explosion back in '94 that drove RAM prices to 5 times their previous prices overnight - when the epoxy resin Sumitomo made was in plentiful stock supplies and never was short)
So platter drive makers have sat back and reaped profits, instead of staying ahead of the SSD price/performance/capacity changes. By 2020, those lines will have crossed. We now see "Enterprise" class SSDs, so capacities WILL continue to rise, even if most consumers only need a 1TB or 2TB drive on their PC. Server farms running only SSDs will be a thing in the future. They may even end up being more durable than platter drives by 2020, and that will make it an easy choice for cloud providers, even if it comes with a slight price premium.
SSDs have far more room for innovation than platter drive technology. There are lots of promising advances making their way to production. Even better... you don't have to shrink the chips and make them more dense - you just have to make the existing fab cheaper. In 6 years, those chips will cost a fraction of what they do today.
As for monitors, 1080p is the result of convergence between the television and the computer monitor. Like it or not, it has resulted in an unprecedented reduction in price. South Korean sellers have already pushed WQHD (2560x1440) monitors to the edge of mainstream, and we'll see 4K mainstreamed in another two years (once the HDMI update gets widely adopted). Video games have been the driving force for computer technologies, and 1080p was a sweet spot, with the latest generation consoles finally able to support it fully and computers managing with even low-end video cards these days.
I have some relatively ancient OCZ Vertex drives that are still running, 24/7 as OS drives for two of my servers (media and an ESXi box). Meanwhile, I have a large stack of platter drives that gave up the ghost with no warning whatsoever.
Reliability is as much a quality issue with SSDs as they are with platter drives, but there is less tolerance, more failure points with a platter drive, due to mechanical action.
By 2020, SSDs will have greater capacities than 20TB.
We are seeing the buggy whip manufacturers in full denial. 10TB drives should have been out a year ago, and consumer 6TB drives should be selling for under $100. The floods in Thailand gave platter drive makers an excuse to keep the prices (and profits) jacked up artificially while the insurance money replaced aging plants with the latest technology.
With a fraction of the energy usage, densities increasing, and hopefully a reversal in the recent trend towards less durability, SSDs will probably also overtake platter drives in price per terabyte within 5 years.
Not crazy about scoping, or should I say, lack of scoping of local variables in ActionScript. If I bracket a chunk of code, and define local variables, they should stop being defined when I exit the scope.
If I define a for statement in C, C++ or C#, I can go: for( int i=0; i10; i++) { something...; } and follow it up by another statement that looks the same.
In ActionScript, the second for loop gets a complaint that I am re-defining a variable.
Over the years of developing C/C++ applications, I had gotten into the pattern of using scoping, particularly in switch statements, to define local variables specific to that block of code.
Pretty much any site requiring a "file downloader" is simply evil and should be expunged by or at least blacklisted by browsers. That would help fight 80% of the delivery of malware that I've seen infecting friend's and family's computers.
It's high time we started calling out these "representatives of the people" who are really nothing of the sort. Republican or Democrat, nobody in Washington seems to be concerned for the welfare of the American PEOPLE. They only seem interested in doing whatever the lobbyists who line their pockets tell them to do.
After treatment, which included radiation (Chip sewn on the lower back part of my eyeball for a week) and lasers, along with the ongoing process of the optic nerve dying from the radiation exposure, I suspect my retina is quite different, and still changing, from 4 years ago when the tumor was treated.
Retinal patterns DO change some times. It's rare, but it happens.
...and he's also apparently arguing that, knowing Autonomy is cooking the books, and about to implode, HP thought it would be a great idea to buy them.
Whatever one can say about the competence of HP's board, nobody could seriously claim they'd buy a company if they knew that was going on.
It's a disease that needs to be stomped out, mercilessly. Allowing the NSA, DHS and CIA (hell, even the IRS, for that matter) to continue to operate as they are allowed to will swallow up the last vestiges of America and its dream.
The dystopia exists now but it's not too late to turn back.
I suspect there is a large number of science fiction fans that do not watch SyFy any more... they stream or watch the few shows they like from that network through on-demand and forego actually tuning into the network. I don't even know, off-hand, what the channel number is on my cable box.
They get good ratings for wrestling, but it has driven the fans away from the rest of the programming, which suffers because of it, and draws viewers that do not stick around for any other programming. The junk programming they have (Ghost Hunters type shows) is like going to a fine dining establishment to be served hamburger helper - it also drives away the base.
For every decent SyFy show on the air, there are three or four terrible ones. The Wil Wheaton Project is a great show, because he celebrates and respects the fandom, but when I watch it, I'm reminded of all the crap SyFy inflicts as well. At least it gives Wil some fodder to joke about.
This is why you put an executive in charge of a channel that actually likes the genre. Bonnie Hammer only saw SciFi Channel as a stepping stone to a more mainstream network (USA), and installed another idiot who didn't really care for the shows they were peddling when she left.
They should be funding movies based on classics, whenever possible, instead of the crappy creature-of-the-week and pseudo-reality crap they shovel out every week. These days, its possible to deliver quality science fiction programming without busting your budget, too - but somebody at the top has to be motivated to deliver this to the fans (the network's viewer base), rather than dump garbage none of the fan base wants to see in order to draw more "mainstream" viewers.
It must be nice to take a stranger's word and believe entirely in their side of a story.
This passenger intended to intimidate the gate agent for following the rules - that becomes obvious when you know he had to inform them of the tweet. It seems more likely that he was overbearing and pitching a bit of a fit, and the agent might have felt threatened.
There is a lot more to this story we will never know, but if you try and see it from the agent's perspective, you become aware of other possibilities - some of which are more likely. At this point, we only have the passenger's word that they threatened to call the police, and for that matter, the same can be said about removing the tweet.
Who's to say another agent suggested they call security over the guy ranting and throwing a tantrum over not being granted special privileges, and he realized what that meant, and suddenly decided to back down - until he could go to the press with his horror story after the fact (thus completing his threats and gaining his "revenge"); removing the tweet was just a temporary gesture to placate the agents that he had "calmed down" while he plotted to "expose the rude bitch" later. (Just a theory here)
So logically, the agent had to be informed that the passenger was making his angry tweet, which, as you imply, the passenger was actually using the tweet to blackmail the agent into bending the rules for him.
I think it is very key, and very telling that this is not addressed in the story. There is no way for Southwest employees at that gate to have known this guy tweeted anything, without the passenger informing of it, and once we get to that obvious fact, to what end was he doing this? The obvious reason is to intimidate the agent he felt was "rude" - which seems rather petulant.
Now it gets more interesting if you start to wonder if there was a reason why the agent threatened to call the police on this guy... was it an overreaction, or was this passenger just being such an incredibly overbearing, pompous ass in his blackmail attempt, that the agent felt threatened? It might be that they never requested him to remove the tweet, but were instead responding to his petulant tantrum.
I can easily see it playing out that he was informed he needed to calm down and back off or they would call security. We only have his word that they threatened to have him arrested, and that he had to remove the tweet... it seems more reasonable, knowing this passenger intended to intimidate the agents, that he was in a threatening posture, and realizing he was about to get a royal TSA probing, "calmed down" and offered to remove his tweet as a gesture - all the while plotting to tell the story we see presented here, in all of its one-sided glory.
I hate to side either way on this story, but I'm more inclined, given this key missing item of the story, to believe that the "more to this story" involved the passenger being a LOT more in the wrong than the gate agent.
Seriously, saying "fiber optic cables from thin air" is an idiotic statement. IR remotes have been doing this for decades, and using lasers to do so has also been done for ages.
...that's all I need, an avatar to browbeat me for an hour over my poor credit history that is partially due to my poorly-paid job working on a government contract.
HP has over 317,000 employees, thanks in large part to acquisitions - Microsoft is no different here.
Lots of redundancies can be eliminated (unfortunately for those employees) - and in some ways, this is a very bad thing. As monopolies grow, they are able to be more efficient and eliminate jobs. We don't stop and think about the fact that in a massive conglomerate corporation place once stood several competing corporations that meant competition (lower prices, better service to consumers) and more jobs - but of course, less return to investors and less pay to executives.
This is a troubling trend, as the American Dream is snuffed and the middle class finds itself dwindling deeper into poverty, while the richest seem to work tirelessly to increase that gap. I'm no socialist or communist, but it occurred to me the goal of these assholes wasn't to get richer - that's something that happens when you are that rich anyway - it is to make the rest of us poorer.
Take all landscape photos and crop 33% of the space on the left side and 33% on the right side. I see they already do this to widescreen videos taken on smart phones.
I just saved 66% of their bandwidth, and made the images more appealing to hipsters and guidos!
The monetary costs of "fighting piracy" is probably far greater than any actual losses. With international treaties, lobbying, investigation, prosecution, lawsuits, direct enforcement (police raids) as well as countless millions handed over to worthless organizations like the MPAA in this effort, the industry and society in general spends more to fight this phantom menace than is prudent.
Of course, common sense would tell us to stop being dumbasses, but there is an entire industry built around "copyright enforcement" and that scam involves too much money to give up anytime soon.
...is that instead of "saving" you on premiums, it will only be used as an excuse to tack on more to your premiums.
We already see this with credit ratings. Having trouble paying your bills, even though you pay your car insurance on time? Here's a nice 20% price hike to punish you.
This is the way this always works, particularly with an industry that you are legally mandated to do business with.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should we be excited by a $30 1TGB drive today? 5 years ago I was paying $50 for 2TB drives.
That's my point. Development has slowed on higher capacity platter drives for a number of reasons... our demand as consumers might have slowed, but the "cloud" continues to grow and demand storage, but cloud providers are willing to spend too much for enterprise-grade storage they need. Technology is certainly a stumbling block, but they've been talking about these advances for many years. The main reason for the delays and jacked up pricing was plain and simple greed. The Thai floods were a godsend to the industry, which saw prices plummet below $0.025/GB - and suddenly, they were able to charge 3 times the price for all the drives they had stockpiled (not unlike the Sumitomo explosion back in '94 that drove RAM prices to 5 times their previous prices overnight - when the epoxy resin Sumitomo made was in plentiful stock supplies and never was short)
So platter drive makers have sat back and reaped profits, instead of staying ahead of the SSD price/performance/capacity changes. By 2020, those lines will have crossed. We now see "Enterprise" class SSDs, so capacities WILL continue to rise, even if most consumers only need a 1TB or 2TB drive on their PC. Server farms running only SSDs will be a thing in the future. They may even end up being more durable than platter drives by 2020, and that will make it an easy choice for cloud providers, even if it comes with a slight price premium.
SSDs have far more room for innovation than platter drive technology. There are lots of promising advances making their way to production. Even better... you don't have to shrink the chips and make them more dense - you just have to make the existing fab cheaper. In 6 years, those chips will cost a fraction of what they do today.
As for monitors, 1080p is the result of convergence between the television and the computer monitor. Like it or not, it has resulted in an unprecedented reduction in price. South Korean sellers have already pushed WQHD (2560x1440) monitors to the edge of mainstream, and we'll see 4K mainstreamed in another two years (once the HDMI update gets widely adopted). Video games have been the driving force for computer technologies, and 1080p was a sweet spot, with the latest generation consoles finally able to support it fully and computers managing with even low-end video cards these days.
I have some relatively ancient OCZ Vertex drives that are still running, 24/7 as OS drives for two of my servers (media and an ESXi box). Meanwhile, I have a large stack of platter drives that gave up the ghost with no warning whatsoever.
Reliability is as much a quality issue with SSDs as they are with platter drives, but there is less tolerance, more failure points with a platter drive, due to mechanical action.
By 2020, SSDs will have greater capacities than 20TB.
We are seeing the buggy whip manufacturers in full denial. 10TB drives should have been out a year ago, and consumer 6TB drives should be selling for under $100. The floods in Thailand gave platter drive makers an excuse to keep the prices (and profits) jacked up artificially while the insurance money replaced aging plants with the latest technology.
With a fraction of the energy usage, densities increasing, and hopefully a reversal in the recent trend towards less durability, SSDs will probably also overtake platter drives in price per terabyte within 5 years.
Not crazy about scoping, or should I say, lack of scoping of local variables in ActionScript. If I bracket a chunk of code, and define local variables, they should stop being defined when I exit the scope.
If I define a for statement in C, C++ or C#, I can go: for( int i=0; i10; i++) { something...; } and follow it up by another statement that looks the same.
In ActionScript, the second for loop gets a complaint that I am re-defining a variable.
Over the years of developing C/C++ applications, I had gotten into the pattern of using scoping, particularly in switch statements, to define local variables specific to that block of code.
Now get off my lawn.
So get out, Monsanto, you dirty capitalist pigs!
Seriously, though, this means little. China will use their own knockoff version now and market it, as well.
I'm looking at you, CNET... you used to be cool.
Pretty much any site requiring a "file downloader" is simply evil and should be expunged by or at least blacklisted by browsers. That would help fight 80% of the delivery of malware that I've seen infecting friend's and family's computers.
It's high time we started calling out these "representatives of the people" who are really nothing of the sort. Republican or Democrat, nobody in Washington seems to be concerned for the welfare of the American PEOPLE. They only seem interested in doing whatever the lobbyists who line their pockets tell them to do.
I had a cancerous tumor on my retina.
After treatment, which included radiation (Chip sewn on the lower back part of my eyeball for a week) and lasers, along with the ongoing process of the optic nerve dying from the radiation exposure, I suspect my retina is quite different, and still changing, from 4 years ago when the tumor was treated.
Retinal patterns DO change some times. It's rare, but it happens.
I think it is intended to be "arose from"
...and he's also apparently arguing that, knowing Autonomy is cooking the books, and about to implode, HP thought it would be a great idea to buy them.
Whatever one can say about the competence of HP's board, nobody could seriously claim they'd buy a company if they knew that was going on.
I know they have some large cash reserves, but how long can you bleed $100 million every 4 months?
The Gameboy/DS line is the only thing keeping them afloat, but even that looks to be winding down, bowing to smart phones and tablets.
It's a disease that needs to be stomped out, mercilessly. Allowing the NSA, DHS and CIA (hell, even the IRS, for that matter) to continue to operate as they are allowed to will swallow up the last vestiges of America and its dream.
The dystopia exists now but it's not too late to turn back.
Exactly. I would do much the same as you.
I suspect there is a large number of science fiction fans that do not watch SyFy any more... they stream or watch the few shows they like from that network through on-demand and forego actually tuning into the network. I don't even know, off-hand, what the channel number is on my cable box.
They get good ratings for wrestling, but it has driven the fans away from the rest of the programming, which suffers because of it, and draws viewers that do not stick around for any other programming. The junk programming they have (Ghost Hunters type shows) is like going to a fine dining establishment to be served hamburger helper - it also drives away the base.
For every decent SyFy show on the air, there are three or four terrible ones. The Wil Wheaton Project is a great show, because he celebrates and respects the fandom, but when I watch it, I'm reminded of all the crap SyFy inflicts as well. At least it gives Wil some fodder to joke about.
This is why you put an executive in charge of a channel that actually likes the genre. Bonnie Hammer only saw SciFi Channel as a stepping stone to a more mainstream network (USA), and installed another idiot who didn't really care for the shows they were peddling when she left.
They should be funding movies based on classics, whenever possible, instead of the crappy creature-of-the-week and pseudo-reality crap they shovel out every week. These days, its possible to deliver quality science fiction programming without busting your budget, too - but somebody at the top has to be motivated to deliver this to the fans (the network's viewer base), rather than dump garbage none of the fan base wants to see in order to draw more "mainstream" viewers.
It must be nice to take a stranger's word and believe entirely in their side of a story.
This passenger intended to intimidate the gate agent for following the rules - that becomes obvious when you know he had to inform them of the tweet. It seems more likely that he was overbearing and pitching a bit of a fit, and the agent might have felt threatened.
There is a lot more to this story we will never know, but if you try and see it from the agent's perspective, you become aware of other possibilities - some of which are more likely. At this point, we only have the passenger's word that they threatened to call the police, and for that matter, the same can be said about removing the tweet.
Who's to say another agent suggested they call security over the guy ranting and throwing a tantrum over not being granted special privileges, and he realized what that meant, and suddenly decided to back down - until he could go to the press with his horror story after the fact (thus completing his threats and gaining his "revenge"); removing the tweet was just a temporary gesture to placate the agents that he had "calmed down" while he plotted to "expose the rude bitch" later. (Just a theory here)
Not really likely, right?
So logically, the agent had to be informed that the passenger was making his angry tweet, which, as you imply, the passenger was actually using the tweet to blackmail the agent into bending the rules for him.
I think it is very key, and very telling that this is not addressed in the story. There is no way for Southwest employees at that gate to have known this guy tweeted anything, without the passenger informing of it, and once we get to that obvious fact, to what end was he doing this? The obvious reason is to intimidate the agent he felt was "rude" - which seems rather petulant.
Now it gets more interesting if you start to wonder if there was a reason why the agent threatened to call the police on this guy... was it an overreaction, or was this passenger just being such an incredibly overbearing, pompous ass in his blackmail attempt, that the agent felt threatened? It might be that they never requested him to remove the tweet, but were instead responding to his petulant tantrum.
I can easily see it playing out that he was informed he needed to calm down and back off or they would call security. We only have his word that they threatened to have him arrested, and that he had to remove the tweet... it seems more reasonable, knowing this passenger intended to intimidate the agents, that he was in a threatening posture, and realizing he was about to get a royal TSA probing, "calmed down" and offered to remove his tweet as a gesture - all the while plotting to tell the story we see presented here, in all of its one-sided glory.
I hate to side either way on this story, but I'm more inclined, given this key missing item of the story, to believe that the "more to this story" involved the passenger being a LOT more in the wrong than the gate agent.
My phone does this, it's called "Speaker mode"
Seriously, saying "fiber optic cables from thin air" is an idiotic statement. IR remotes have been doing this for decades, and using lasers to do so has also been done for ages.
...that's all I need, an avatar to browbeat me for an hour over my poor credit history that is partially due to my poorly-paid job working on a government contract.
HP has over 317,000 employees, thanks in large part to acquisitions - Microsoft is no different here.
Lots of redundancies can be eliminated (unfortunately for those employees) - and in some ways, this is a very bad thing. As monopolies grow, they are able to be more efficient and eliminate jobs. We don't stop and think about the fact that in a massive conglomerate corporation place once stood several competing corporations that meant competition (lower prices, better service to consumers) and more jobs - but of course, less return to investors and less pay to executives.
This is a troubling trend, as the American Dream is snuffed and the middle class finds itself dwindling deeper into poverty, while the richest seem to work tirelessly to increase that gap. I'm no socialist or communist, but it occurred to me the goal of these assholes wasn't to get richer - that's something that happens when you are that rich anyway - it is to make the rest of us poorer.
Take all landscape photos and crop 33% of the space on the left side and 33% on the right side. I see they already do this to widescreen videos taken on smart phones.
I just saved 66% of their bandwidth, and made the images more appealing to hipsters and guidos!
The monetary costs of "fighting piracy" is probably far greater than any actual losses. With international treaties, lobbying, investigation, prosecution, lawsuits, direct enforcement (police raids) as well as countless millions handed over to worthless organizations like the MPAA in this effort, the industry and society in general spends more to fight this phantom menace than is prudent.
Of course, common sense would tell us to stop being dumbasses, but there is an entire industry built around "copyright enforcement" and that scam involves too much money to give up anytime soon.
...is that instead of "saving" you on premiums, it will only be used as an excuse to tack on more to your premiums.
We already see this with credit ratings. Having trouble paying your bills, even though you pay your car insurance on time? Here's a nice 20% price hike to punish you.
This is the way this always works, particularly with an industry that you are legally mandated to do business with.
Once every 56 years?
Too soon?