Manufacturers of SSD's are claiming in excess of 2,000,000 hours for MTBF.
High end SAS drives claim 1,200,000 hours for MTBF.
Western Digital claims 600,000 hours for MTBF.
There have been studies from Google and Carnegie Mellon both that suggest that hard drive makers greatly exaggerate, and that drives fail as much as 15X more often than the manufacturers suggest.
SSD makers and spinning disk makers are not the same industry.
One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers.
Well. These drives (FC, SCSI, SAS) are 10% of the market, very lucrative, and quite important for data center operations, server rooms, and so forth.
Projected lifetime for modern SSD drives is now getting to the point where they are more likely to be discarded due to technological obsolescence than they are to significantly deteriorate, BTW.
The projected intersection curve is further than six years out for SATA SSD price parity. That's an eternity in technological time, which is to say, there is no predicting it.
Price per unit of storage is by far not the only deciding factor, even in the consumer market. Flash can scale up performance much more quickly than spinning media. You can expect flash performance to more than double annually from here on out, I would say. You would of course be right to be wondering how the SATA and SAS busses will keep up.
Look at FusionIO (http://www.fusionio.com) to see how flash will accelerate in performance. These devices have 160 internal channels in order to make the bytes flow at the rate they do. You can think of it as a sort of 160-wide RAID-0 striping mechanism.
$2400 for one card is of course way out of consumer space. However, point: 1) the cost of the flash in the system will drop to a fraction of its current price within two years, and 2) the ASICs on board this device will be "paid for" within the same period, allowing them to charge only a small fraction of their current price.
Expect other similar products to develop soon.
When FusionIO proves out the market for these devices--and mark my words, they will--competitors will follow in their footsteps, like bees drawn to honey.
You're obviously one of those "grass is brown everywhere" folks. You're beyond hope, and actually don't deserve the job you think you can't get, I'm sorry to say. The last thing on earth I want to work with is some undermotivated mouse who doesn't get any good work done because he knows he can't. No thanks!
Well if you think that way, you'll end up that way.
I work for one of those companies. We have turnover, just like any other company. It just happens to be that employees will periodically get the "grass is greener" syndrome. Point being, is that all these companies are always hiring at some constant rate.
Trust me - if the email admins noticed you, Joe Low-Level Employee, shuffling encrypted emails back and forth, you'd be frog-marched out of the corp faster than you can say "WTF?"
Have you considered, perhaps you're being a tad hysterical here?
I work at one of those "ultra-anal" defense contractors... a biggun... and know our IT processes quite well, including the realities.
They don't "frog march" people out the door for those sorts of things. Actually, the IT security guys are lucky if they can get engineering to pay attention to them at all.
The problem I have with where you are coming from is that there is no rendition of the story that, given in a modern context, wouldn't result in the psychotic ward. The details don't matter. It's an example of a story where any rational modern party would dismiss it, caveat the normal exception that perfectly rational people will often excuse their religious beliefs from their otherwise normal rational way of carrying themselves.
And you are right on my interpretation. My interpretation of the story is that, supposing the event were real at all and not fictionalized, someone clearly chased the pigs off a cliff. Pigs don't run off of cliffs, generally speaking.
The rational thing to do is conclude they were chased. I cannot be talked into believing the story. That's irrational.
If you're not requesting that we believe it is true, you'd rather us judge how the modern world would react to the account? "Officer, first I talked to the pigs, and convinced them to jump off the cliff by themselves." Mmmmm, hmmmmm. "Time for a little Vitamin H, son. Haldol, the docs call it." An antipsychotic.
You know... it's true. That's how even you'd react if someone claimed such a thing.
Comical, watching the religious types referring to the other party as a "cult" or otherwise not satisfying whatever strange religious standard they present. As if one brand of irrationality is better than another.
Being a Christian (and pretty well educated about the origin of the LDS) I very much commend them for the work they do, but pity them for the screwed up nature of their beliefs.
Kindof like the pot calling the kettle black, dontcha think?
I mean really. A man chases a bunch of pigs off a cliff and says "they're demons." Today, we lock him up in a psychiatric ward. But you, you call 'im god. Weird, eh.
I'm not trying to flame or troll.
Why is it that about 95% of the time, statements like this are just outright lies?
I ought to refine on my prior remark. As one other poster pointed out, you can CREATE a GPL work and do whatever you wish with it. However if you are creating a GPL derivative, you cannot encumber the derivative the way you are thinking.
You're right about that. I was really speaking of GPL derivatives. The original author can license, cross license, dually license, or whatever he wishes (including creating a GPL mutation).
Of course, the boards of these companies would be quickly replaced if they ever did something for the good of humanity rather than for the good of their shareholders. In fact, it would probably be an illegal violation of their fiduciary duty.
An interesting and insightful point, that.
Lurking here is a cogent argument in favor of taxing corporations per se more than individuals (a moral argument, really--not an economic one).
So to restate my argument, these companies are lying when they claim that high prices for their successful drugs fund the R&D spending on all the other unsuccessful drugs
They are, at all times, charging whatever the market will bear for their prices, regardless of what they say.
As I was discussing in another part of this thread, the difficulty is in the mixed public funding of what ought to be a public good (because of the public funding), but then redirection into private goods.
The reason that one cannot solve that problem all magic wand like is that in the event that the guvmint starts approving its own meds, the fox is guarding the henhouse, and all sorts of interesting problems arise from THAT, too.
There has been an increasing trend of public universities allowing more and more patentification for revenue generation of late. This too, is dismaying.
You link the elimination of patents with government funded (and therefore presumably unencumbered) drug development. No such link is necessary or naturally implied.
One can do both.
This would all be well and good, but the real problem is in drug validation. Governments, when they guard themselves fox n' henhouse like, have a tendency to exempt themselves from litigation.
So beware the expedited litigation-free clinical drug approval mechanism that may result from your idea.
I'm with you, though, that it somehow seems wrong that public research dollars are being turned into private goods. In a perfect world, they ought to be public goods.
You have your retirement plan all worked out, then, yes? You've just found a way to invest your dollars better than many mutual fund managers, or so I would infer. Presumably, using this technique, you should be able to consistently garner for yourself 15%+ annual returns, without risk. Why not borrow several hundred thousand at a lower rate, and sink it into big pharma?
But before you make a move, you may wish to consider the concept of selection bias at length. Perhaps a selection of the world's 500 biggest/most probable companies fails to account for the fact that there are far more than 500 companies in the world, and the rankings move around?
Just a thought.
Anyway, happy investing. We will look forward to the book you write in your auto biography, eh?
There's nothing wrong with that idea, and I agree. What I'm saying, though, is the market is not wrong, either. The market reflects the collective valuation pretty well, but unfortunately also reflects the profound short sitedness of the many buyers. I.e., many of us will buy our boners now, and fail to invest in our flu vaccines.
If you think about it, though, this is why we have "government"... and yes we are talking about a social system... and we put this system into place precisely because we know that we don't individually know how to delay instant gratification and want others to help do it for us.
I'd say that wrong/right aren't the right measures of merit. "Effective, but imperfect" would describe the free market. The issue with any proposed social system is that for it to beat the free market, it would have to benefit from such consistently good management, that I doubt that such good management can exist in real life.. for long.
Free markets are interesting things: they cull the bad performers automatically, and reward the good ones.
And consider those 500 people a year. Who's to say they justify the resources? I know that seems cruel, but in the end all death is cruel, and we all face it.
I like to think about these things like this:
You know how there's always someone bemoaning the fact that sports stars make more money than teachers, and want to blame some mysterious invisible system for this?
Well that system is/us/. We don't value teachers more than sports stars. We concentrate our resources on the sports stars. Shorted sited, stupid, true.
Now tell me I shouldn't be happy buying Viagra in my old age.
Surely you don't mean it. I'm happy being happy, you know.
Go watch "Johnny Mnemonic" sometime. Pharmaceuticals companies exist to make money, the same as every other company. Even if they did find a cure for Cancer or AIDS do you honestly believe they'd market it?
I don't know. Supposing you were a Pharmaceutical company employee, how would you react to your bosses "not marketing" and AIDS cure? Should we assume that your assertion is understood through the process of projection? I.e., you see yourself as evil, know what you would do, and assume that everyone else is like you?
You should nip this sort of silly conspiracy thinking in the bud, dshadwolf. It lessens you.
But (and I'm relying on memory, not actual facts or anything) drug companies have historically been really, really profitable. And consistently profitable...
And in other news, JPLemme founds his own trading firm and scores many financial successes. Or at least, one would suppose, you have your retirement plan all figured out?
There must also by definition be a consumer market that will purchase the drug if it ends up viable. Thus the incentive for drug research exists *independently* of patent protection...
Not really. There are certain classes of products for which the development of the product itself is prohibitively expensive, but for which the production cost once developed is marginally little. For that class of products, the developer is penalized, because they now don't have their initial investment, and all the other competitors can thereby profit better than they can.
"Drug companies are incentivized into developing the most profitable drugs."
Well. So. This is true.
But what you haven't considered is that this reflects the amount of elective resources society desires to provide them with. I.e., this profit on their side, reflects consumer-side importance on the other.
This is disregarding the patent system, mind. Which I agree, is broken.
But to say that the drugs that people want to buy are the wrong ones... are you sure you wanted to say that?
Slashdot Mirror
Manufacturers of SSD's are claiming in excess of 2,000,000 hours for MTBF.
High end SAS drives claim 1,200,000 hours for MTBF.
Western Digital claims 600,000 hours for MTBF.
There have been studies from Google and Carnegie Mellon both that suggest that hard drive makers greatly exaggerate, and that drives fail as much as 15X more often than the manufacturers suggest.
SSD makers and spinning disk makers are not the same industry.
One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers.
C//
More than six years away, following from current price points and reduction trends, which is to say "there is no predicting".
C//
Well. These drives (FC, SCSI, SAS) are 10% of the market, very lucrative, and quite important for data center operations, server rooms, and so forth.
Projected lifetime for modern SSD drives is now getting to the point where they are more likely to be discarded due to technological obsolescence than they are to significantly deteriorate, BTW.
The projected intersection curve is further than six years out for SATA SSD price parity. That's an eternity in technological time, which is to say, there is no predicting it.
Price per unit of storage is by far not the only deciding factor, even in the consumer market. Flash can scale up performance much more quickly than spinning media. You can expect flash performance to more than double annually from here on out, I would say. You would of course be right to be wondering how the SATA and SAS busses will keep up.
Look at FusionIO (http://www.fusionio.com) to see how flash will accelerate in performance. These devices have 160 internal channels in order to make the bytes flow at the rate they do. You can think of it as a sort of 160-wide RAID-0 striping mechanism.
$2400 for one card is of course way out of consumer space. However, point: 1) the cost of the flash in the system will drop to a fraction of its current price within two years, and 2) the ASICs on board this device will be "paid for" within the same period, allowing them to charge only a small fraction of their current price.
Expect other similar products to develop soon.
When FusionIO proves out the market for these devices--and mark my words, they will--competitors will follow in their footsteps, like bees drawn to honey.
C//
You're obviously one of those "grass is brown everywhere" folks. You're beyond hope, and actually don't deserve the job you think you can't get, I'm sorry to say. The last thing on earth I want to work with is some undermotivated mouse who doesn't get any good work done because he knows he can't. No thanks!
C//
Well if you think that way, you'll end up that way.
I work for one of those companies. We have turnover, just like any other company. It just happens to be that employees will periodically get the "grass is greener" syndrome. Point being, is that all these companies are always hiring at some constant rate.
C//
What makes you think the next place will be any better?
There are *gasp* actually companies that are employee-oriented.
Really.
You can find them in the list of "top companies to work for" regularly published by this publication and that.
C//
Trust me - if the email admins noticed you, Joe Low-Level Employee, shuffling encrypted emails back and forth, you'd be frog-marched out of the corp faster than you can say "WTF?"
Have you considered, perhaps you're being a tad hysterical here?
I work at one of those "ultra-anal" defense contractors... a biggun... and know our IT processes quite well, including the realities.
They don't "frog march" people out the door for those sorts of things. Actually, the IT security guys are lucky if they can get engineering to pay attention to them at all.
Except in SCIFs, then it's a different matter.
C//
The problem I have with where you are coming from is that there is no rendition of the story that, given in a modern context, wouldn't result in the psychotic ward. The details don't matter. It's an example of a story where any rational modern party would dismiss it, caveat the normal exception that perfectly rational people will often excuse their religious beliefs from their otherwise normal rational way of carrying themselves.
And you are right on my interpretation. My interpretation of the story is that, supposing the event were real at all and not fictionalized, someone clearly chased the pigs off a cliff. Pigs don't run off of cliffs, generally speaking.
The rational thing to do is conclude they were chased. I cannot be talked into believing the story. That's irrational.
C//
What you wrote is of no bearing. And you know it.
C//
Oh, please. I did no such thing.
If you're not requesting that we believe it is true, you'd rather us judge how the modern world would react to the account? "Officer, first I talked to the pigs, and convinced them to jump off the cliff by themselves." Mmmmm, hmmmmm. "Time for a little Vitamin H, son. Haldol, the docs call it." An antipsychotic.
You know... it's true. That's how even you'd react if someone claimed such a thing.
Comical, watching the religious types referring to the other party as a "cult" or otherwise not satisfying whatever strange religious standard they present. As if one brand of irrationality is better than another.
*snort*
C//
You are requesting that we take an account as is, by first presupposing it as true, in order to judge it. The idea is preposterous. REQUEST DENIED.
C//
Being a Christian (and pretty well educated about the origin of the LDS) I very much commend them for the work they do, but pity them for the screwed up nature of their beliefs.
Kindof like the pot calling the kettle black, dontcha think?
I mean really. A man chases a bunch of pigs off a cliff and says "they're demons." Today, we lock him up in a psychiatric ward. But you, you call 'im god. Weird, eh.
I'm not trying to flame or troll.
Why is it that about 95% of the time, statements like this are just outright lies?
C//
I ought to refine on my prior remark. As one other poster pointed out, you can CREATE a GPL work and do whatever you wish with it. However if you are creating a GPL derivative, you cannot encumber the derivative the way you are thinking.
You're right about that. I was really speaking of GPL derivatives. The original author can license, cross license, dually license, or whatever he wishes (including creating a GPL mutation).
C//
Of course, the boards of these companies would be quickly replaced if they ever did something for the good of humanity rather than for the good of their shareholders. In fact, it would probably be an illegal violation of their fiduciary duty.
An interesting and insightful point, that.
Lurking here is a cogent argument in favor of taxing corporations per se more than individuals (a moral argument, really--not an economic one).
So to restate my argument, these companies are lying when they claim that high prices for their successful drugs fund the R&D spending on all the other unsuccessful drugs
They are, at all times, charging whatever the market will bear for their prices, regardless of what they say.
As I was discussing in another part of this thread, the difficulty is in the mixed public funding of what ought to be a public good (because of the public funding), but then redirection into private goods.
The reason that one cannot solve that problem all magic wand like is that in the event that the guvmint starts approving its own meds, the fox is guarding the henhouse, and all sorts of interesting problems arise from THAT, too.
There has been an increasing trend of public universities allowing more and more patentification for revenue generation of late. This too, is dismaying.
C//
You link the elimination of patents with government funded (and therefore presumably unencumbered) drug development. No such link is necessary or naturally implied.
One can do both.
This would all be well and good, but the real problem is in drug validation. Governments, when they guard themselves fox n' henhouse like, have a tendency to exempt themselves from litigation.
So beware the expedited litigation-free clinical drug approval mechanism that may result from your idea.
I'm with you, though, that it somehow seems wrong that public research dollars are being turned into private goods. In a perfect world, they ought to be public goods.
I just don't see anything obviously better.
C//
You have your retirement plan all worked out, then, yes? You've just found a way to invest your dollars better than many mutual fund managers, or so I would infer. Presumably, using this technique, you should be able to consistently garner for yourself 15%+ annual returns, without risk. Why not borrow several hundred thousand at a lower rate, and sink it into big pharma?
But before you make a move, you may wish to consider the concept of selection bias at length. Perhaps a selection of the world's 500 biggest/most probable companies fails to account for the fact that there are far more than 500 companies in the world, and the rankings move around?
Just a thought.
Anyway, happy investing. We will look forward to the book you write in your auto biography, eh?
C//
There's nothing wrong with that idea, and I agree. What I'm saying, though, is the market is not wrong, either. The market reflects the collective valuation pretty well, but unfortunately also reflects the profound short sitedness of the many buyers. I.e., many of us will buy our boners now, and fail to invest in our flu vaccines.
... and yes we are talking about a social system... and we put this system into place precisely because we know that we don't individually know how to delay instant gratification and want others to help do it for us.
If you think about it, though, this is why we have "government"
Both forces are at work, and that's fine.
C//
You are of course assuming the VP in charge is an evil person like you, yes?
C//
I'd say that wrong/right aren't the right measures of merit. "Effective, but imperfect" would describe the free market. The issue with any proposed social system is that for it to beat the free market, it would have to benefit from such consistently good management, that I doubt that such good management can exist in real life.. for long.
/us/. We don't value teachers more than sports stars. We concentrate our resources on the sports stars. Shorted sited, stupid, true.
Free markets are interesting things: they cull the bad performers automatically, and reward the good ones.
And consider those 500 people a year. Who's to say they justify the resources? I know that seems cruel, but in the end all death is cruel, and we all face it.
I like to think about these things like this:
You know how there's always someone bemoaning the fact that sports stars make more money than teachers, and want to blame some mysterious invisible system for this?
Well that system is
Now tell me I shouldn't be happy buying Viagra in my old age.
Surely you don't mean it. I'm happy being happy, you know.
C//
Go watch "Johnny Mnemonic" sometime. Pharmaceuticals companies exist to make money, the same as every other company. Even if they did find a cure for Cancer or AIDS do you honestly believe they'd market it?
I don't know. Supposing you were a Pharmaceutical company employee, how would you react to your bosses "not marketing" and AIDS cure? Should we assume that your assertion is understood through the process of projection? I.e., you see yourself as evil, know what you would do, and assume that everyone else is like you?
You should nip this sort of silly conspiracy thinking in the bud, dshadwolf. It lessens you.
C//
But (and I'm relying on memory, not actual facts or anything) drug companies have historically been really, really profitable. And consistently profitable...
And in other news, JPLemme founds his own trading firm and scores many financial successes. Or at least, one would suppose, you have your retirement plan all figured out?
You should know better than this.
C//
There must also by definition be a consumer market that will purchase the drug if it ends up viable. Thus the incentive for drug research exists *independently* of patent protection...
Not really. There are certain classes of products for which the development of the product itself is prohibitively expensive, but for which the production cost once developed is marginally little. For that class of products, the developer is penalized, because they now don't have their initial investment, and all the other competitors can thereby profit better than they can.
C//
"Drug companies are incentivized into developing the most profitable drugs."
Well. So. This is true.
But what you haven't considered is that this reflects the amount of elective resources society desires to provide them with. I.e., this profit on their side, reflects consumer-side importance on the other.
This is disregarding the patent system, mind. Which I agree, is broken.
But to say that the drugs that people want to buy are the wrong ones... are you sure you wanted to say that?
C//
I don't see it. What consideration has the end user given to the grantor? I think none.