Every bit is connected with wires.
on
E-Paper Moves Closer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"That doesn't meant that you need to have a wire from the CPU to every bit of memory..."
Yes, the CPU uses binary addressing to communicate with the memory module, so few wires are needed. But, inside the memory module, every bit is connected with wires. And those wires don't have to be flexible.
You are right about the fan.
The basic point I think is valid is that a cell that can be made black or white with the application of a voltage is interesting and important, but is only a small part of the complexity necessary. Designing flexible wires to every pixel, and flexible transistors to control every pixel, if needed, is the bulk of the complexity.
Every pixel must be separately addressable.
on
E-Paper Moves Closer
·
· Score: 2
But SVDave, if you throw out the Digital to Analog converter, you must provide some way of hooking every row and every column with a separate wire. Every pixel must be separately addressable. Also, to meet the design goal, this wiring must be thin, flexible, cheap, and reliable.
Also, the hardware driver could not use a fan, as does the Matrox G-450. Yes, such a hardware driver could be simpler in some ways, but the problems are still mind-boggling. At least they boggle my mind.
Another comment: Democracy depends on citizens being able to discover if the elected officials are doing a good job. When agencies of the government are allowed to be secretive, we have no way of holding them accountable. We have no way of knowing whether we should vote for an elected official, because we have no way of knowing what he or she did when working in secrecy.
I don't know if the NSA is doing a good job. You don't know that, either. And, neither of us have any way of collecting accurate information, so that we could form an opinion.
U.S. government agencies have, in the past, admitted to arranging the killing of foreign leaders. If that is their history, certainly morality won't stop them from committing any crime, or publishing any lie.
Very, very difficult problem: Designing cheap...
on
E-Paper Moves Closer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"You can actually think about there being a book now because you can actually put some electronics on the back of this thing and it becomes a display..."
The speaker is quickly skipping over a very, very difficult problem: Designing cheap, flexible, fast, digital electronics that can address every one of those pixels so that they can be turned off and on.
Just getting the speed and resolution necessary costs $110 for a Matrox G-450 video card, which is not flexible and doesn't include digital output. The final signal to a monitor is analog.
Perhaps your forget that the NSA and CIA are agencies designed to keep their activities hidden. Lying is not only acceptable to them, it is encouraged. Do you think that they disclose everything to the elected officials? I think they don't.
I think the elected officials are very busy, and don't have the time to comprehend what the NSA is doing.
Also, this is my guess: I guess that there is not one elected official who understands the technology the NSA uses. If you know of a technically knowledgeable congressman or senator, please tell me who that is. These are the same people who gave us the DMCA!
There is a cycle: 1) The U.S. government influences other governments in hidden ways, including arranging the killing of foreign leaders. 2) Some members of the countries with whom the U.S. has interfered want to retaliate violently to the violence of the U.S. 3) The U.S. uses the violent retaliation as a justification for more hidden activity.
Be careful about anything said about the NSA. The NSA is one of the departments of hidden activity of the U.S. government.
The NSA has an essentially unlimited amount of money. Citizens of the U.S. are not allowed to know the amount.
Would the NSA spend millions of dollars to engineer an elaborate lie? Yes, it might. We have no way of knowing whether it did.
Hidden activities are anti-democratic. If citizens aren't allowed to know what the government does, how can citizens help govern?
Are your tax dollars being spent wisely? You are not allowed to know.
This trojan is worse than lame. It is disgusting. To be infected, you have to spend hours finding someone who will give you an infected binary. Then, if I understand the article correctly, you have to remember to run the binary as root.
If you really feel you need a Linux infection, and can't find an untrusted source for a binary, I have provided a much easier one below:
This is a UNIX email virus. It works on the honor system: If you're running a variant of
Unix, please forward this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at
random. Thank you for your cooperation.
You have to remember to disable your firewall. And you have to remember to disable any tool which checks file sizes and CRCs; such a tool is part of the Linux-Mandrake default install.
If you want a really respectable virus or Trojan, you will have to run Windows.
We expect a teacher of English to be able to communicate in English. Isn't it reasonable to expect a teacher of comedy to communicate in comedy?
The real point is that I've found that people who teach comedy are often faking it, big time. They don't KNOW the facts, but that doesn't stop them.
"Do we ask a dead person about death? Must we speak with a medieval knight to learn about the Crusades? Or a drunk about intoxication?"
If we could ask a dead person about death, we would be crazy if we didn't do it. If we could get 70 millimeter footage of a real medieval night, it would be extraordinarily valuable.
You picked a bad example when you speak about intoxication. Alcoholics are the best source of information about alcoholics. Alcoholism is a culture of its own.
People who post on Slashdot are rarely stupid. They may be mentally disturbed. The may be misinformed. But they are rarely stupid.
We don't get paid to write these comments, so not as much work is put into providing references. In response to my complaint, Adaptec changed the language on their web site, so that the web site did not make claims that SCSI was faster. There is a huge hardware book with a black cover sold in big technical bookstores that explains that most SCSI drives are slower than the equivalent IDE. I don't remember the name. I have experimented with SCSI myself, with an Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI adapter (not the latest). I did not see a performance increase under use that I would consider normal for my customers and myself.
My understanding is that the latest IDE is also able to cache commands.
"SCSI yeilds a signifigant performance increase (particularly since the cost of high speed CPUs and memory have dropped so drastically, thus making the hard drive all the more of a performance bottleneck.)
Note that this sentence is illogical. If the CPU is fast, what is saved by having a lighter CPU load using SCSI?
It is unfortunate that when there is a disagreement or misunderstanding, Slashdot readers often make hostile remarks, such as you did above in calling me "stupid".
Most users would not see a difference it they had SCSI. Most users don't try to run two processes that both do hard drive access at the same time. So, my comment is very helpful, because it saves readers from buying SCSI and wasting money.
People who have very heavy usage know who they are and are unlikely to be led astray by my comments.
I've had major troubles with Compaq. They make modifications to the Windows OS. The mods sometimes have bugs. It is very difficult to get Compaq tech support to admit that the bugs are there. Once they admit to the bugs, it is very difficult to get a fix.
It doesn't take many bad experiences on the part of customers to put a company in a situation where it has to end its life with a merger. Customer bad experiences are slow suicide for a company.
Cringely's theory (and mine) is that HP CEO Carly Fiorina (Carleton S.
Fiorina) realizes she is near to being fired, and she is using a merger to buy
time.
Both HP and Compaq have made some monumentally stupid decisions. For example, Compaq bought Tandem, bud didn't use Tandem's sales force, even though the Tandem product required a huge amount of special service.
The biggest problem in technology is managers who don't understand what they
are managing. There is a theory that a manager of a technology company does not need to have
a thorough technical understanding. Decisions made based on that theory have
destroyed many companies. But the problem is very poorly reported, because the
reporters don't have technical understanding either.
My understanding is that Carly Fiorina is responsible for the terrible
financial state of Lucent Technologies, her former company.
And, if he had been honest, he would have said, "I don't know a thing about it."
No one would accept that a professor who didn't know how to program should teach programming. Why would anyone accept a professor teaching comedy who was not a professional comedian?
Jay Leno (a comedian in the U.S.) makes $40,000 for perhaps 90 minutes of comedy. And Jay Leno is not very funny.
Obviously, if those studying the "science" of comedy knew anything about it, they would be out doing it, and not hanging around in a musty university drawing professor pay.
Re:Comment applies only to identical hard drives.
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
·
· Score: 1
I always disable FastFind.
In my experience, when customers switch to another window, usually the processes in the background are not doing disk access.
WinModems do use the CPU a lot. But most other programs in the background do not, I think.
Such rare events make no detectable difference.
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
·
· Score: 2
My understanding is that, yes, it could. However, such rare events make no detectable difference over several hours of use.
Both the cache in the hard drive and the cache in the operating system are very efficient. My understanding is that, in most cases, it is the memory cache associated with the operating system that would supply the data in cases where it was recognized that further data would probably be needed.
The software that runs both caches would recognize that more data was needed, and the OS cache would read the data from the hard drive cache as the data became available during the slow turning of the disk. The only case where a hard drive cache would provide burst information would be those where the software in the hard drive cache predicted the user's needs better than did the software in the OS cache. Since OS caches are so important to OS benchmark results, they are very well-designed. It is unlikely that a hard drive cache would guess better.
The main purpose of a hard drive cache is to read an entire track into memory.
Comment applies only to identical hard drives.
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
·
· Score: 2
My comment was based on a report I read and my own experimentation. It applies only to identical hard drives, of course.
The report said that many SCSI hard drives are IDE internally, and the IDE is translated to SCSI. So, in those cases, SCSI must be slower.
Several years ago, I criticised Adaptec for implying that SCSI was faster. Almost immediately they changed the language on their site. So they apparently agree.
Note that the theoretical transfer speed of ATA 100 is a lie. No devices currently available can sustain speeds like that.
Conceivably there are SCSI devices that are not available in IDE versions that are faster. However, my understanding is that any speed increase in a single-user system is due only to the hardware being faster.
The storage write and retrieval speed of modern computers is limited by the fact that hard drives are mechanical devices that turn very slowly in comparison to the speed of the CPU.
Note that my comment only applies to a SINGLE-USER system. Such systems only have one process active at a time, in almost all cases. This is because the user turns his or her attention from one process to another, and the other processes are essentially idle. If there were more than one process running on a single-user computer, and both processes were competing heavily for hard drive access, SCSI might be faster.
The conclusion is that SCSI is useful only for busy servers.
Slashdot Mirror
"That doesn't meant that you need to have a wire from the CPU to every bit of memory..."
Yes, the CPU uses binary addressing to communicate with the memory module, so few wires are needed. But, inside the memory module, every bit is connected with wires. And those wires don't have to be flexible.
You are right about the fan.
The basic point I think is valid is that a cell that can be made black or white with the application of a voltage is interesting and important, but is only a small part of the complexity necessary. Designing flexible wires to every pixel, and flexible transistors to control every pixel, if needed, is the bulk of the complexity.
But SVDave, if you throw out the Digital to Analog converter, you must provide some way of hooking every row and every column with a separate wire. Every pixel must be separately addressable. Also, to meet the design goal, this wiring must be thin, flexible, cheap, and reliable.
Also, the hardware driver could not use a fan, as does the Matrox G-450. Yes, such a hardware driver could be simpler in some ways, but the problems are still mind-boggling. At least they boggle my mind.
Another comment: Democracy depends on citizens being able to discover if the elected officials are doing a good job. When agencies of the government are allowed to be secretive, we have no way of holding them accountable. We have no way of knowing whether we should vote for an elected official, because we have no way of knowing what he or she did when working in secrecy.
I don't know if the NSA is doing a good job. You don't know that, either. And, neither of us have any way of collecting accurate information, so that we could form an opinion.
U.S. government agencies have, in the past, admitted to arranging the killing of foreign leaders. If that is their history, certainly morality won't stop them from committing any crime, or publishing any lie.
"You can actually think about there being a book now because you can actually put some electronics on the back of this thing and it becomes a display..."
The speaker is quickly skipping over a very, very difficult problem: Designing cheap, flexible, fast, digital electronics that can address every one of those pixels so that they can be turned off and on.
Just getting the speed and resolution necessary costs $110 for a Matrox G-450 video card, which is not flexible and doesn't include digital output. The final signal to a monitor is analog.
Perhaps your forget that the NSA and CIA are agencies designed to keep their activities hidden. Lying is not only acceptable to them, it is encouraged. Do you think that they disclose everything to the elected officials? I think they don't.
I think the elected officials are very busy, and don't have the time to comprehend what the NSA is doing.
Also, this is my guess: I guess that there is not one elected official who understands the technology the NSA uses. If you know of a technically knowledgeable congressman or senator, please tell me who that is. These are the same people who gave us the DMCA!
There is a cycle: 1) The U.S. government influences other governments in hidden ways, including arranging the killing of foreign leaders. 2) Some members of the countries with whom the U.S. has interfered want to retaliate violently to the violence of the U.S. 3) The U.S. uses the violent retaliation as a justification for more hidden activity.
Secrecy is incompatible with democracy.
Be careful about anything said about the NSA. The NSA is one of the departments of hidden activity of the U.S. government.
The NSA has an essentially unlimited amount of money. Citizens of the U.S. are not allowed to know the amount.
Would the NSA spend millions of dollars to engineer an elaborate lie? Yes, it might. We have no way of knowing whether it did.
Hidden activities are anti-democratic. If citizens aren't allowed to know what the government does, how can citizens help govern? Are your tax dollars being spent wisely? You are not allowed to know.
The link should be Kawa.
____________
Something should be done about this:
Post Comment
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted
This trojan is worse than lame. It is disgusting. To be infected, you have to spend hours finding someone who will give you an infected binary. Then, if I understand the article correctly, you have to remember to run the binary as root.
If you really feel you need a Linux infection, and can't find an untrusted source for a binary, I have provided a much easier one below:
This is a UNIX email virus. It works on the honor system: If you're running a variant of Unix, please forward this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random. Thank you for your cooperation.
I can answer that. The newbie made a CD copy at work. Then he made copies for all his friends.
These Linux viruses are lame!!!
You have to remember to disable your firewall. And you have to remember to disable any tool which checks file sizes and CRCs; such a tool is part of the Linux-Mandrake default install.
If you want a really respectable virus or Trojan, you will have to run Windows.
We expect a teacher of English to be able to communicate in English. Isn't it reasonable to expect a teacher of comedy to communicate in comedy?
The real point is that I've found that people who teach comedy are often faking it, big time. They don't KNOW the facts, but that doesn't stop them.
"Do we ask a dead person about death? Must we speak with a medieval knight to learn about the Crusades? Or a drunk about intoxication?"
If we could ask a dead person about death, we would be crazy if we didn't do it. If we could get 70 millimeter footage of a real medieval night, it would be extraordinarily valuable.
You picked a bad example when you speak about intoxication. Alcoholics are the best source of information about alcoholics. Alcoholism is a culture of its own.
People who post on Slashdot are rarely stupid. They may be mentally disturbed. The may be misinformed. But they are rarely stupid.
We don't get paid to write these comments, so not as much work is put into providing references. In response to my complaint, Adaptec changed the language on their web site, so that the web site did not make claims that SCSI was faster. There is a huge hardware book with a black cover sold in big technical bookstores that explains that most SCSI drives are slower than the equivalent IDE. I don't remember the name. I have experimented with SCSI myself, with an Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI adapter (not the latest). I did not see a performance increase under use that I would consider normal for my customers and myself.
My understanding is that the latest IDE is also able to cache commands.
"SCSI yeilds a signifigant performance increase (particularly since the cost of high speed CPUs and memory have dropped so drastically, thus making the hard drive all the more of a performance bottleneck.)
Note that this sentence is illogical. If the CPU is fast, what is saved by having a lighter CPU load using SCSI?
It is unfortunate that when there is a disagreement or misunderstanding, Slashdot readers often make hostile remarks, such as you did above in calling me "stupid".
Most users would not see a difference it they had SCSI. Most users don't try to run two processes that both do hard drive access at the same time. So, my comment is very helpful, because it saves readers from buying SCSI and wasting money.
People who have very heavy usage know who they are and are unlikely to be led astray by my comments.
I've had major troubles with Compaq. They make modifications to the Windows OS. The mods sometimes have bugs. It is very difficult to get Compaq tech support to admit that the bugs are there. Once they admit to the bugs, it is very difficult to get a fix.
It doesn't take many bad experiences on the part of customers to put a company in a situation where it has to end its life with a merger. Customer bad experiences are slow suicide for a company.
Very interesting.
____________
Post Comment
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted
Be sure to see Robert X. Cringely's column Resetting the Shot Clock: Why Hewlett Packard Buying Compaq is a Very Bad Idea, But Will Happen Anyway
Cringely's theory (and mine) is that HP CEO Carly Fiorina (Carleton S. Fiorina) realizes she is near to being fired, and she is using a merger to buy time.
Both HP and Compaq have made some monumentally stupid decisions. For example, Compaq bought Tandem, bud didn't use Tandem's sales force, even though the Tandem product required a huge amount of special service.
The biggest problem in technology is managers who don't understand what they are managing. There is a theory that a manager of a technology company does not need to have a thorough technical understanding. Decisions made based on that theory have destroyed many companies. But the problem is very poorly reported, because the reporters don't have technical understanding either.
My understanding is that Carly Fiorina is responsible for the terrible financial state of Lucent Technologies, her former company.
Did you feel that she taught you something about how to be funny?
I'm glad that we have police forces to protect us from those vicious electrons, that so frequently get out of control and become destructive.
And, if he had been honest, he would have said, "I don't know a thing about it."
No one would accept that a professor who didn't know how to program should teach programming. Why would anyone accept a professor teaching comedy who was not a professional comedian?
Jay Leno (a comedian in the U.S.) makes $40,000 for perhaps 90 minutes of comedy. And Jay Leno is not very funny.
Obviously, if those studying the "science" of comedy knew anything about it, they would be out doing it, and not hanging around in a musty university drawing professor pay.
I always disable FastFind.
In my experience, when customers switch to another window, usually the processes in the background are not doing disk access.
WinModems do use the CPU a lot. But most other programs in the background do not, I think.
My understanding is that, yes, it could. However, such rare events make no detectable difference over several hours of use.
Both the cache in the hard drive and the cache in the operating system are very efficient. My understanding is that, in most cases, it is the memory cache associated with the operating system that would supply the data in cases where it was recognized that further data would probably be needed.
The software that runs both caches would recognize that more data was needed, and the OS cache would read the data from the hard drive cache as the data became available during the slow turning of the disk. The only case where a hard drive cache would provide burst information would be those where the software in the hard drive cache predicted the user's needs better than did the software in the OS cache. Since OS caches are so important to OS benchmark results, they are very well-designed. It is unlikely that a hard drive cache would guess better.
The main purpose of a hard drive cache is to read an entire track into memory.
My comment was based on a report I read and my own experimentation. It applies only to identical hard drives, of course.
The report said that many SCSI hard drives are IDE internally, and the IDE is translated to SCSI. So, in those cases, SCSI must be slower.
Several years ago, I criticised Adaptec for implying that SCSI was faster. Almost immediately they changed the language on their site. So they apparently agree.
Note that the theoretical transfer speed of ATA 100 is a lie. No devices currently available can sustain speeds like that.
Conceivably there are SCSI devices that are not available in IDE versions that are faster. However, my understanding is that any speed increase in a single-user system is due only to the hardware being faster.
The storage write and retrieval speed of modern computers is limited by the fact that hard drives are mechanical devices that turn very slowly in comparison to the speed of the CPU.
Note that my comment only applies to a SINGLE-USER system. Such systems only have one process active at a time, in almost all cases. This is because the user turns his or her attention from one process to another, and the other processes are essentially idle. If there were more than one process running on a single-user computer, and both processes were competing heavily for hard drive access, SCSI might be faster.
The conclusion is that SCSI is useful only for busy servers.
Actually, SCSI is slower than the current IDE unless used in a multiuser system.
My experience with Firewire is that it works. No excuses. No problems with confusing the operating system, unlike some situations with USB.