Perhaps, they could use a different design.
And instead of using a magnet like Apple does, they could use a solenoid electromagnet.
When power is supplied to the cord, and the computer is charging or powered on, the computer 'turns on' the electromagnet.
A sensor on the cord itself is designed to trigger a circuit to cut power to the electromagnetic, if tension on the cord is detected beyond a certain threshold.
The computer should also be given a 'pin' to send a signal to turn off the magnet if desired; for example, the computer is off and fully charged,
it would make sense to mechanically disconnect the power to the line in, and to mechanically disconnect the battery, in order to conserve electricity once it is off and fully charged.
Nonetheless... good luck with some of these banks in getting NSF funds due to fraud reversed. Large banks generally do whatever they can to keep their fee income
hm.. sounds like an opportunity to take the bank to court, on charges of unjust enrichment (in regards to the nsf fees), negligence (sending out pre-activated debit cards), breach of duty (in regards to securing the plaintiffs' account), and false advertising (in regards to advertising their debit cards as 'secure').
In addition, if the fraudster drained your account, and the bank enabled that... this may have prevented you from entering into a business relationship with someone else to buy goods at a certain price.
Not having the funds, you may have been unable to complete the transaction on time, or might have had to pay a higher price.
Bury the bank in paperwork and legal filings, and not only will they be refunding NFS fees, they should be paying you more, either when the gavel comes down against them, or they agree to settle on reasonable terms.
There's one thing the poster forgot to include in the equation... probability of bad publicity, and number of lost sales of future products due to bad publicity X average cost of each lost sale.
That would make sense.
But they are not going to expend the resources to capture it, if the cost of capturing it is equal to or greater than what they could sell the captured volume for.
Also, not only does there have to be profit, there has to be enough profit to justify the capital outlay, and therefore the risk.
It's probably not worth spending billions on infrastructure for a 1% profit that could easily turn into a 0% profit or loss if market conditions change
Are you forgetting that this entire situation is due to government meddling, as in government buying helium for one price, building a massive reserve, and then selling it for a much lower (ridiculously low) price, totally independent of any demand or worth of the product?
Possible Translation: these results were probably due to random chance, but we have backs to scratch for the dinosaurs at the publishing houses that produce ink and paper books, so we're rushing our research report to the presses, rather than conducting further study.
We know the public will surely gasp at the 6.2% slower reading rate we concocted, and cancel their plans to buy e-readers.
Thus netting our publishing house clients greater profit for our overpriced paper books.
I have the feeling that if you match the block size of files written to the block size of the SSD (optionally padding with zeros to fill it up) you could get quite a performance boost - and only when the drive starts to fill up start using the unused, zeroed out fragments from the blocks.
With SSDs it's erase block size that matters most. When a page of memory on a SSD device is being overwritten, the page has to be erased first, and then its contents rewritten.
Of course if your OS implements SCSI PUNCH or ATA TRIM, immediately when a block is freed, your SSD drive can have the memory erased ahead of time, and ready to use with minimal write latency.
Most SSDs use an erase block size of 128K.
So you would want your entire filesystem's allocation blocks 128K aligned.. in NTFS world, this would mean you need to align the disk partition, at least prior to Vista/Windows 2008.
I believe MacOS automatically aligns partitions. This issue alone could explain why things might get so bad with Windows, let alone the ridiculously small 4K block size, or fragmentation issues that plague NTFS filesystems.
And the ideal allocation cluster size is 128K (by default NTFS cluster size is 4K, which is not suitable. for best performance change in such a scenario it to 64K)
You can think of the performance issue that can occur as something like RAID stripe crossing.
If you have two 4K blocks side by side, and you need to overwrite just those two blocks.. if they are on different 128K erase blocks, your SSD will be having to write 256K of memory to change 8K of data.
If those 2 NTFS blocks are on the same SSD block, your ssd flushes and writes 128K of data, maybe.
This is before we start thinking about wear-levelling algorithms,
or the fact an efficient SSD will likely keep a pool of non-erased blocks, to satisfy write requests against.
So as long as there is memory left that was scheduled for erasure and flushed due to TRIM or flushed due to being overwritten, there would be no reason to require an extra in-line ERASE (increasing write latency).
So the pool of non-erased pages are important,
and the critical elements effecting write performance are (1) time to update header blocks to re-map disk blocks to unused flash pages, and (2) time to copy the erase block with changes to the newly mapped location.
And for not so sudden changes? You know the perfectly ordinary, gradual changes that come with age?
I am not agreeing that it should be banned/restricted.
I am saying, politicians are too dumb to think of other consequences like that, when the lobbying groups whose financial backers stand to lose from such device becoming commonplace.
Customer A has a view of a certain batch of cars he wants to buy, goes to Good Dealership (GS) and asks to help implement that view (acquire the cars from the list of the types he likes), based on his own analysis and expertise.
GS tells Customer B they are interested in structuring a purchase, Customer B picks the cars he would like to get rid of, based on his own analysis and expertise.
Customer A accepts this new list of cars.
Customer B is initially very happy, but soon the cars, for which no entity involved has any influence, start violating traffic laws, their economic value goes down, because they are superceded by a new model, just released from the manufacturer, which PWNS them in various challenges.
Customer A loses. Customer B wins.
GS having retained some of the cars for itself, loses, but recoups a portion, due to markup fees/commissions charged in brokering the sale.
I wonder how to enable that feature then... on all the Mac Minis and iMacs i've used, it's just a two finger swipe on the top of the mouse to the side for going back or forward.
And a one-finger swipe for scrolling.
I haven't seen any preference options to enable a 'three finger swipe' action
When I refer to flash quackery, I am not talking about legitimate web applications.
I am talking about web pages which are basically web pages for presenting mostly static information, and they seem to use flash just to use flash
And break the back button by introducing solely flash based navigational elements.
Obviously if you have a complex web application that has a very good reason for the back button not to go back to an identical page you navigated from, that's OK.
Actually, it's plenty for it to just go to the same major document you came from.
Or if there's some dynamic auto-refreshing content, it makes sense that would be updated and no longer the same.
That's not what I am talking about.
I am talking about corporate web sites that have say an "About Us link"... you click that, and it displays text in-line in the page.
If you push 'back' after doing that, it doesn't go back to the homepage you started at, it sends you back to Google search results (for example).
Another example of breaking the back button, is you click a site on search results... decide you don't like it and want to leave.. you press back, and it Redirects you straight to the home page.
You press back again.... well, it redirects you to the home page AGAIN!
Because the link listed on Google search results goes to a page that just automatically redirects you to the home page instantly.
So then you got to go dick around with your back button history list to bypass the brokenness...
Yeah, but oftentimes with the flash quackery, the back button doesn't work anyways.
Breaking the back button is one of the most serious design mistakes a webmaster can make.
Since, as we can see from just these observations about FF, the back button is one of the most frequently used functions by a large majority of surfers.
Yes, but this is easy. Governments can just pass no-tint laws and must-have-windows laws, and the identity of the people in the vehicle will be transparent.
As the big ISPs would say, this is punishing the 2% that use the resources available to them heavily.
Just because it's "Watching NetFlix during downtime" does not mean the cost to the university is zero, and doesn't mean the university should be paying for this.
If each student always logs in with a username and password, it should be possible to give then a small burst allowance.
For example: Average maximum speed down: 512K, 512K up. burstable to 1024K down, as long as the 95th percentile utilization for the past 7 days as measured once every 5 minutes, stays below 512K.
Limit bandwidth and use commercial software to cap per-student/per-workstation bandwidth to an amount equivalent to (at most) a fractional T1 (say 512K down 256K up), unless the student has any reason they need more bandwidth @ a workstation to pursue academic interests or personal needs, where they then agree to an additional TOU, and have a face to face discussion with a network administrator, to show they have a legitimate reason, and it's not just to share media files.
If they want to download/upload something very large, at a quick rate, they will have to explain what they want to download that requires extroardinary bandwidth, how it will benefit the student (or the university), how often they will perform downloads, etc.
If it's a one-time event they get some sort of temporary pass on the system (upgrade of their cap that automatically goes away in 24 hours).
If it's not, their usage monitored, and exception revoked if they are deemed to have abused it, but they still have to go to some website and put in a code every 24 hours to "refresh" their exception.
Then set a 'maximum level' as well even in that case (without a documented academic reason for more usage allowance, that specifies when and how the higher usage is needed).
And require any student to have P2P software running on their computer while connected to the campus network fill out a form, first, and an affidavit promising not to intentionally participate in or facilitate any illegal activity.
There are legitimate usages of P2P networks (for example, downloading software distributions).
Downloading a Linux ISO should be able to be done occasionally (by the limited number of people who are interested).
It's in university's best interests anyways, to control their networks, since it keeps the bandwidth available on their WAN to be used for legitimate academic purposes.
Prevents wastage of money.
And they don't really have to be the bad guys "searching for copyright offenders and suspending them" that way.
Limiting bandwidth (using technology) is a fairly passive way of preventing using the internet to download/upload copyright DVDs.
They might have to rethink this if WAN bandwidth ever gets a lot cheaper though
This is an oversimplification, and might be the very error they made.
You are assuming the quality of the signal processed is a simple number.. I assume you are thinking RMS amplitude of the received signal.
But a X unit drop in amplitude from Y amplitude, is not the same drop in signal usefulness as a X unit drop in amplitude at Z amplitude, if Y not equal to Z.
There are two numbers sensors should measure, to be able to determine usable signal quality... the strength of the signal, and the amount of noise (including the receiver's noise threshold and internal noise).
Power of a signal and readability are not the same thing.
The device IS fit for the purpose;
it works fine as long as there is sufficient signal strength.
The areas where there are sufficient signal strength does not necessarily match the network provider's map... but it doesn't match that for any type of phone.
It's not just the iphone that experiences call drops if the signal is too weak, and you hold the phone a certain way, in a certain direction, below/above a certain height, or behind certain obstacles.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, they could use a different design. And instead of using a magnet like Apple does, they could use a solenoid electromagnet.
When power is supplied to the cord, and the computer is charging or powered on, the computer 'turns on' the electromagnet.
A sensor on the cord itself is designed to trigger a circuit to cut power to the electromagnetic, if tension on the cord is detected beyond a certain threshold.
The computer should also be given a 'pin' to send a signal to turn off the magnet if desired; for example, the computer is off and fully charged, it would make sense to mechanically disconnect the power to the line in, and to mechanically disconnect the battery, in order to conserve electricity once it is off and fully charged.
Nonetheless... good luck with some of these banks in getting NSF funds due to fraud reversed. Large banks generally do whatever they can to keep their fee income
hm.. sounds like an opportunity to take the bank to court, on charges of unjust enrichment (in regards to the nsf fees), negligence (sending out pre-activated debit cards), breach of duty (in regards to securing the plaintiffs' account), and false advertising (in regards to advertising their debit cards as 'secure').
In addition, if the fraudster drained your account, and the bank enabled that... this may have prevented you from entering into a business relationship with someone else to buy goods at a certain price.
Not having the funds, you may have been unable to complete the transaction on time, or might have had to pay a higher price.
Bury the bank in paperwork and legal filings, and not only will they be refunding NFS fees, they should be paying you more, either when the gavel comes down against them, or they agree to settle on reasonable terms.
They were pressured, not forced.
There's one thing the poster forgot to include in the equation... probability of bad publicity, and number of lost sales of future products due to bad publicity X average cost of each lost sale.
That would make sense. But they are not going to expend the resources to capture it, if the cost of capturing it is equal to or greater than what they could sell the captured volume for.
Also, not only does there have to be profit, there has to be enough profit to justify the capital outlay, and therefore the risk.
It's probably not worth spending billions on infrastructure for a 1% profit that could easily turn into a 0% profit or loss if market conditions change
Are you forgetting that this entire situation is due to government meddling, as in government buying helium for one price, building a massive reserve, and then selling it for a much lower (ridiculously low) price, totally independent of any demand or worth of the product?
Oh right... P.S. not the researchers, but the media that are likely to cover this and neglect to mention that the results were not significant.
Possible Translation: these results were probably due to random chance, but we have backs to scratch for the dinosaurs at the publishing houses that produce ink and paper books, so we're rushing our research report to the presses, rather than conducting further study.
We know the public will surely gasp at the 6.2% slower reading rate we concocted, and cancel their plans to buy e-readers.
Thus netting our publishing house clients greater profit for our overpriced paper books.
UPDATE VIDEO_COMMENTS set commentext='i am a fucking tool\n' where commentext like '>script%'
I have the feeling that if you match the block size of files written to the block size of the SSD (optionally padding with zeros to fill it up) you could get quite a performance boost - and only when the drive starts to fill up start using the unused, zeroed out fragments from the blocks.
With SSDs it's erase block size that matters most. When a page of memory on a SSD device is being overwritten, the page has to be erased first, and then its contents rewritten.
Of course if your OS implements SCSI PUNCH or ATA TRIM, immediately when a block is freed, your SSD drive can have the memory erased ahead of time, and ready to use with minimal write latency.
Most SSDs use an erase block size of 128K. So you would want your entire filesystem's allocation blocks 128K aligned.. in NTFS world, this would mean you need to align the disk partition, at least prior to Vista/Windows 2008.
I believe MacOS automatically aligns partitions. This issue alone could explain why things might get so bad with Windows, let alone the ridiculously small 4K block size, or fragmentation issues that plague NTFS filesystems.
And the ideal allocation cluster size is 128K (by default NTFS cluster size is 4K, which is not suitable. for best performance change in such a scenario it to 64K)
You can think of the performance issue that can occur as something like RAID stripe crossing.
If you have two 4K blocks side by side, and you need to overwrite just those two blocks.. if they are on different 128K erase blocks, your SSD will be having to write 256K of memory to change 8K of data.
If those 2 NTFS blocks are on the same SSD block, your ssd flushes and writes 128K of data, maybe.
This is before we start thinking about wear-levelling algorithms,
or the fact an efficient SSD will likely keep a pool of non-erased blocks, to satisfy write requests against.
So as long as there is memory left that was scheduled for erasure and flushed due to TRIM or flushed due to being overwritten, there would be no reason to require an extra in-line ERASE (increasing write latency).
So the pool of non-erased pages are important, and the critical elements effecting write performance are (1) time to update header blocks to re-map disk blocks to unused flash pages, and (2) time to copy the erase block with changes to the newly mapped location.
And for not so sudden changes? You know the perfectly ordinary, gradual changes that come with age?
I am not agreeing that it should be banned/restricted.
I am saying, politicians are too dumb to think of other consequences like that, when the lobbying groups whose financial backers stand to lose from such device becoming commonplace.
Customer A has a view of a certain batch of cars he wants to buy, goes to Good Dealership (GS) and asks to help implement that view (acquire the cars from the list of the types he likes), based on his own analysis and expertise.
GS tells Customer B they are interested in structuring a purchase, Customer B picks the cars he would like to get rid of, based on his own analysis and expertise.
Customer A accepts this new list of cars.
Customer B is initially very happy, but soon the cars, for which no entity involved has any influence, start violating traffic laws, their economic value goes down, because they are superceded by a new model, just released from the manufacturer, which PWNS them in various challenges.
Customer A loses. Customer B wins.
GS having retained some of the cars for itself, loses, but recoups a portion, due to markup fees/commissions charged in brokering the sale.
Well, they could remove the ability to opt out of DEP for an application, then the apps would have to adapt or stop working.
It's backwards compatibility features that are being used, and conspire with current developers to hose new Windows security measures.
The problem with that idea, is without the visit to the optometrist, serious problems may go undiscovered.
Sudden changes to your vision may be a sign of serious condition, and a visit to a medical professional is in order.
So I could see access to a device like this being restricted, regulated, or limited (to licensed professionals) on that basis.
I wonder how to enable that feature then... on all the Mac Minis and iMacs i've used, it's just a two finger swipe on the top of the mouse to the side for going back or forward.
And a one-finger swipe for scrolling.
I haven't seen any preference options to enable a 'three finger swipe' action
When I refer to flash quackery, I am not talking about legitimate web applications.
I am talking about web pages which are basically web pages for presenting mostly static information, and they seem to use flash just to use flash
And break the back button by introducing solely flash based navigational elements.
Obviously if you have a complex web application that has a very good reason for the back button not to go back to an identical page you navigated from, that's OK.
Actually, it's plenty for it to just go to the same major document you came from.
Or if there's some dynamic auto-refreshing content, it makes sense that would be updated and no longer the same.
That's not what I am talking about.
I am talking about corporate web sites that have say an "About Us link"... you click that, and it displays text in-line in the page.
If you push 'back' after doing that, it doesn't go back to the homepage you started at, it sends you back to Google search results (for example).
Another example of breaking the back button, is you click a site on search results... decide you don't like it and want to leave.. you press back, and it Redirects you straight to the home page.
You press back again.... well, it redirects you to the home page AGAIN!
Because the link listed on Google search results goes to a page that just automatically redirects you to the home page instantly.
So then you got to go dick around with your back button history list to bypass the brokenness...
3 button optical mice where the center button is a scroll wheel are still very common.
Actually, I rarely see anyone with a mouse that has more than 3 buttons. I don't think most computer users have what you are referring to. /p
You mean two finger swipe?
It doesn't distinguish between two and three fingers....
Yeah, but oftentimes with the flash quackery, the back button doesn't work anyways.
Breaking the back button is one of the most serious design mistakes a webmaster can make. Since, as we can see from just these observations about FF, the back button is one of the most frequently used functions by a large majority of surfers.
Yes, but this is easy. Governments can just pass no-tint laws and must-have-windows laws, and the identity of the people in the vehicle will be transparent.
As the big ISPs would say, this is punishing the 2% that use the resources available to them heavily.
Just because it's "Watching NetFlix during downtime" does not mean the cost to the university is zero, and doesn't mean the university should be paying for this.
If each student always logs in with a username and password, it should be possible to give then a small burst allowance.
For example: Average maximum speed down: 512K, 512K up. burstable to 1024K down, as long as the 95th percentile utilization for the past 7 days as measured once every 5 minutes, stays below 512K.
Limit bandwidth and use commercial software to cap per-student/per-workstation bandwidth to an amount equivalent to (at most) a fractional T1 (say 512K down 256K up), unless the student has any reason they need more bandwidth @ a workstation to pursue academic interests or personal needs, where they then agree to an additional TOU, and have a face to face discussion with a network administrator, to show they have a legitimate reason, and it's not just to share media files.
If they want to download/upload something very large, at a quick rate, they will have to explain what they want to download that requires extroardinary bandwidth, how it will benefit the student (or the university), how often they will perform downloads, etc.
If it's a one-time event they get some sort of temporary pass on the system (upgrade of their cap that automatically goes away in 24 hours).
If it's not, their usage monitored, and exception revoked if they are deemed to have abused it, but they still have to go to some website and put in a code every 24 hours to "refresh" their exception.
Then set a 'maximum level' as well even in that case (without a documented academic reason for more usage allowance, that specifies when and how the higher usage is needed).
And require any student to have P2P software running on their computer while connected to the campus network fill out a form, first, and an affidavit promising not to intentionally participate in or facilitate any illegal activity.
There are legitimate usages of P2P networks (for example, downloading software distributions). Downloading a Linux ISO should be able to be done occasionally (by the limited number of people who are interested).
It's in university's best interests anyways, to control their networks, since it keeps the bandwidth available on their WAN to be used for legitimate academic purposes.
Prevents wastage of money.
And they don't really have to be the bad guys "searching for copyright offenders and suspending them" that way.
Limiting bandwidth (using technology) is a fairly passive way of preventing using the internet to download/upload copyright DVDs.
They might have to rethink this if WAN bandwidth ever gets a lot cheaper though
This is an oversimplification, and might be the very error they made.
You are assuming the quality of the signal processed is a simple number.. I assume you are thinking RMS amplitude of the received signal. But a X unit drop in amplitude from Y amplitude, is not the same drop in signal usefulness as a X unit drop in amplitude at Z amplitude, if Y not equal to Z.
The computation you should be looking at is Signal to noise ratio.
There are two numbers sensors should measure, to be able to determine usable signal quality... the strength of the signal, and the amount of noise (including the receiver's noise threshold and internal noise).
Power of a signal and readability are not the same thing.
In the US, in most states.
The device IS fit for the purpose; it works fine as long as there is sufficient signal strength.
The areas where there are sufficient signal strength does not necessarily match the network provider's map... but it doesn't match that for any type of phone.
It's not just the iphone that experiences call drops if the signal is too weak, and you hold the phone a certain way, in a certain direction, below/above a certain height, or behind certain obstacles.
Yes... however if you are already at 2 bars or 1 bar when placing a call, that 1 or 2 bars could make a difference.
Especially when the display erroneously showed you at nearly full signal strength before.