Everyone's stance on stem cell research should be queried by the DMV and added to your driver's license, just like organ donation. Then when you need a medical procedure that has benefited from stem cell research, you get the version of the procedure that's in line with your beliefs.
No, there won't be an arms race. HDD technology is pretty much at its limit. Spinning drive technology may allow for one or two more capacity doublings over the next decade (though I'm skeptical given how long we've been stuck in the 1-2 Terabyte range), but performance is pretty much maxed out and presents a substantial bottleneck for modern systems (think random reads/writes). Meanwhile, you can already purchase standard 2.5" half terabyte SSDs for less than $1500 (http://www.pricewatch.com/gallery/hard_removable_drives/ssd_512gb) and high end SSDs will be at a terabyte this year from multiple manufacturers.
I expect it will be less than 5 years before you can walk into Best Buy and plop down a couple hundred bucks for a multi-terabyte SSD for all your movies and media.
I don't even think HDDs have the features to replace tape for backup as they're too complex and fragile. Tape is appealing because it's inherently portable media, the media itself is very simple to store, reasonably rugged and will likely always offer a capacity premium over HDD.
Thank you. I see no significant difference between the two. Frankly, Vista was just a little ahead of its time. 7 is successful because:
1) Most of heavy lifting and architectural changes to the driver subsystem were done for Vista, so device manufacturers had many years to get their damn drivers working, rather than the relatively short time they had to get drivers out for Vista.
2) They've had some extra time to iterate over UAC and other UI tweaks several times until they were less annoying. I turned UAC off in Vista and I've turned it off in 7 (albeit without the need for registry tweaking this time around).
3) RAM is super cheap now, and a much larger percentage of the market has systems with >1GB of RAM and Aero-capable GPUs. Result: better user experience all around.
4) Due to the above reasons, the reception was bound to be much better this time even if they had done nothing but put lipstick on Vista and called it 7 -- oh wait, that's essentially what they did.
You give criminals too much credit. The human element is the thing that always seems to get criminals. The fact that they've put all this hard work and effort into building this massive botnet means it's not easy to just walk away at the first sign of potential trouble. It's easy to get sloppy when you've never been caught in months or years of operation and the only thing between you and control of millions of computers is a seemingly innocuous connection to a host.
Yes they did. Against all common sense, NewEgg had been insisting the CPUs were "demo" units until today and hardware enthusiast sites like HardOCP were calling them out. Intel came out yesterday and basically said, if the web photos are legit as represented, then the CPUs are most certainly fakes. I suspect NewEgg was waiting until they could confidently pin the blame on a 3rd-party distributor before letting the truth out.
Actually, two things that most people don't even realize is that:
1. The 20Gb of writes per day for 5 years spec was the design goal. The Intel drives are believed to be almost an order of magnitude better than that (look it up at Anandtech). 2. When SSDs fail, they're designed to fail on the next write, so the worst thing that's likely to happen is that when it fails, you can read all of your data to a new drive. That's a completely different scenario from HDD failure, where you lose everything.
My first thought was that there might be an emulator out there for that IBM hardware that would allow them to forgo the re-write. That way they get the reliability benefits of modern commodity hardware without all the heavy code lifting -- then again, maybe the code itself is part of the reliability problem...
My blackberry Bold supports multitasking. What to know what else? I have to manually prune the running app list almost every day when the phone inexplicably becomes unusable due to various 3rd-party app memory leaks. Then again the screen is too small to have a taskbar that shows at-a-glance what's actually running in the background taking up memory or CPU, so I have to click a button and open a menu and scroll around hunting for apps to kill one at a time until the phone becomes responsive again. We all know Apple could do the multitasking thing, but based on my experience with Blackberry, I have no doubt why they didn't want to gift this 'functionality' to users.
You have an annoying ringtone. Oh and by the way, stop basing your performance expectations on javascript benchmarks and actually go out and use your browser to browse real websites. Call me back when you discover one that doesn't load in the same "ballpark" as Opera and Chrome.
As I sit here happily running 32-bit firefox in Windows 7 64-bit, I'm having trouble understanding what photo editing has to do with the need for a 64-bit web browser.
I guess I'm just reminded that the brain is a complex and highly compartmentalized organ and that an individual can be truly exceptional in one area as easily as having a deficit in another.
Not sure why PhDs so often seem to be singled out as having serious deficiencies in street-smarts or day-to-day functioning, but I suspect it has something to do with specialization. Perhaps the individual becomes so singularly focused on certain abilities/topics (either due to sheer interest or as a result of deficiency avoidance) that brain centers associated with them become better developed to the detriment of others.
It's quite clear in my father, who happens to be a PhD.
come out of the woodwork. MS has a market cap of $246 billion as of Oct. 30. The biggest company in the world, Exxon Mobile, has a market cap of $344 billion.
So "the company became bureaucratic and lumbering", not because it was big and lumbering, but because Ballmer is not Bill Gates? I don't buy it.
It's not flawed so much as inevitable. A portion of the market will jump at the first example of a promising technology that ships. Being the first mover in a particular space holds special significance and advantages for companies competing for market share. The thinking goes that quality can be worked on iteratively through generations of product and there will never be a time when you reach perfect quality anyway.
Moral of the story: If you don't want to beta test products for corporations, then don't buy first generation technology.
And before you argue that G2s *are* second generation drives, I would not categorize them as such. They're die-shrunk G1 drives with some bug fixes and performance tweaks. Corporations and the media are quick to claim that any improvement to a first generation technology *is* the next generation as it sells copies, clicks and product.
As a general rule, I wait at least 6 months after Anandtech and others review a product before making a new technology purchase. By then, you can usually figure out something about longer-term reliability from online discussions/reviews. As a result, I rarely have a whole lot of trouble with technology products I buy, beyond downloading the latest drivers/updates or whatnot. Sure, it means I don't have the latest bleeding edge stuff, but I also don't have to deal with the trouble that comes with paying for the opportunity to beta test.
Because SSD represents such a paradigm shift, I've chosen to hold off for at least another 6-12 months on SSDs partly to allow prices to drop and partly to account for the obvious growing pains that manufacturers have experienced over the past couple years.
how we go from the below scientific journal abstract to the Slashdot headline: "NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB"?
We have investigated the magnetic properties of the Ni-MgO system with an Ni concentration of 0.5 at.%. In as-grown crystals, Ni ions occupy substitutional Mg sites. Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet. By using a controlled annealing treatment in a reducing atmosphere, we were able to induce clustering and form pure Ni precipitates in the nanometer size range. The size distribution of precipitates or nanodots is varied by changing annealing time and temperature. Magnetic properties of specimens ranging from perfect paramagnetic to ferromagnetic characteristics have been studied systematically to establish structure-property correlations. The spontaneous magnetization data for the samples, where Ni was precipitated randomly in MgO host, fits well to Bloch's T3/2-law and has been explained within the framework of spin wave theory predictions.
Seriously, do you see anything about a chip in there? Anyone? Bueller?
Yeah, I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there... I think there are subtle but important differences between the old mainframe approach from the 70s, the kind of hosted computing we had in the 90s and the latest cloud computing stuff.
What I think differentiates cloud computing from earlier iterations of client-server architecture is the ability for a single device to transparently access virtually unlimited (or at least orders of magnitude greater) computing resources with little additional redesign effort. The notion of one-to-one mappings between hardware and software instances is beginning to blur.
Lest I be accused of perpetuating the cloud computing "myth", let me give you some concrete examples.
When you hosted a website at a colo in the 90s, it's true you were borrowing computing resources from somewhere else. However this amounted to getting remote access to a server or cluster of servers. If you wanted to scale that, you had to pay for access to more servers, you had to wait until your colo could stand up enough servers to meet your demand and then you had to configure each server. With cloud offerings like Amazon's EC2 and S3, you are no longer limited by the physical reality of devices. When you sign up for S3, you get access to a geographically diverse, redundant virtual storage partition that is only limited by your imagination, bandwidth capacity, local file system architecture and of course your wallet. EC2 is likewise a virtually limitless blank slate from a computing perspective, allowing you to replicate and grow a web server cluster by 1000x or more in a matter of minutes to perhaps deal with increased traffic flow.
Now, these are but two rather limited examples of what the industry means by cloud computing. I don't think it's so trivial a distinction that you can say it's the same old thing as always.
Um, I'd be surprised if most people visiting SF had heard of this case. There are plenty of other reasons why nobody wants to visit SF anymore, and most derive from the rampant homelessness problems, crumbling infrastructure and systematic discrimination against people with cars.
> Actually yes. MythTV kicks the utter crap out of any other PVR ever made.
Um, perhaps if your sole criteria for success is ability to skip commercials? Aside from that, even wrapped in a Mythbuntu 9.0.4 LiveCD install, it's an unpolished, hardware compatibility and maintenance nightmare that has an installation routine well outside of the reach of the average consumer. I had to write a dozen scripts to get the thing to do what Windows Media Center did perfectly from the get-go -- all ina bid to get automatic commercial skipping... barely worth it IMO.
I still get the feeling that my "leading edge" AT&T Blackberry Bold, with its "fast" Intel XScale 624 MHz processor may be the bottleneck on wireless connections. I'm not sure if it's the high latency of the mobile network, distance-to-tower-related performance degradation, varying network conditions or simple lack of processor horsepower, but I find that it's typically not able to come anywhere close to the theoretical bandwidth limits imposed by the 3.6Mbps 3G network.
I suspect resources would be better spent reducing latency, improving existing tower coverage and adding towers rather than moving to a new bandwidth standard that's guaranteed to result in even lower utilization by the vast majority of existing devices on AT&T's network.
Oh and couldn't finish without one off-topic troll: Am I the only one who finds it literally astounding that I can't complete a conversation on my fancy new 3G Blackberry without at least one drop on the most well traveled commuter highway (101) right in the heart of Silicon Valley?
Unfortunately, it seems as though Steven Wolfram's screencast that's been up for the past few days used rather cherry-picked examples, as the underlying datasets do not seem to be as comprehensive as one might have been led to believe. Beyond the fairly basic things you might find in the CIA fact book or other source of basic data, it just doesn't yet have the breadth of underlying data that would make it an indispensable tool. For example, after playing around with W|A finance queries, I was left completely unimpressed with the paltry datasets and feel that any market/stock questions I have would be better served by hitting up finance.yahoo.com. They have some basic data about professional sports teams, but NHL hockey is nowhere to found, and you can't find anything in the way of current player stats for any sport, let alone historical data. Birthdays of notable sports figures are there though...
Gotta admit, it's quite an ambitious undertaking, I just think they're somewhere between 3 and 5 orders of magnitude away from having enough data and detail to make it the kind of thing I would consider using regularly. Stay tuned, might be interesting in a year... or five.
As I appear into my crystal ball, I see that Firefox 3.5 is released and still achieves 93/100. Wow, I'm a psychic!
Ffx 3.1/3.5 has been sitting at 93/100 for over 6 months, and the devs have stated *numerous* times that achieving 100/100 on Acid3 is NOT a priority for the 3.5 release, largely because implementing SVG fonts (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490/) for the purpose of passing those last few Acid3 tests is a much lower priority than other things they're working on (like javascript JIT). Why your summary of the 3.5b4 release focuses on something that literally hasn't changed in several beta releases is beyond me.
So, can we please move on now or are you going to switch to Safari because of that newfangled Youtube interface that implements SVG fonts? Oh sorry, I was looking into my crystal ball again and saw the web circa 2025.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone's stance on stem cell research should be queried by the DMV and added to your driver's license, just like organ donation. Then when you need a medical procedure that has benefited from stem cell research, you get the version of the procedure that's in line with your beliefs.
I know... but I can dream can't I?
No, there won't be an arms race. HDD technology is pretty much at its limit. Spinning drive technology may allow for one or two more capacity doublings over the next decade (though I'm skeptical given how long we've been stuck in the 1-2 Terabyte range), but performance is pretty much maxed out and presents a substantial bottleneck for modern systems (think random reads/writes). Meanwhile, you can already purchase standard 2.5" half terabyte SSDs for less than $1500 (http://www.pricewatch.com/gallery/hard_removable_drives/ssd_512gb) and high end SSDs will be at a terabyte this year from multiple manufacturers.
I expect it will be less than 5 years before you can walk into Best Buy and plop down a couple hundred bucks for a multi-terabyte SSD for all your movies and media.
I don't even think HDDs have the features to replace tape for backup as they're too complex and fragile. Tape is appealing because it's inherently portable media, the media itself is very simple to store, reasonably rugged and will likely always offer a capacity premium over HDD.
Thank you. I see no significant difference between the two. Frankly, Vista was just a little ahead of its time. 7 is successful because:
1) Most of heavy lifting and architectural changes to the driver subsystem were done for Vista, so device manufacturers had many years to get their damn drivers working, rather than the relatively short time they had to get drivers out for Vista.
2) They've had some extra time to iterate over UAC and other UI tweaks several times until they were less annoying. I turned UAC off in Vista and I've turned it off in 7 (albeit without the need for registry tweaking this time around).
3) RAM is super cheap now, and a much larger percentage of the market has systems with >1GB of RAM and Aero-capable GPUs. Result: better user experience all around.
4) Due to the above reasons, the reception was bound to be much better this time even if they had done nothing but put lipstick on Vista and called it 7 -- oh wait, that's essentially what they did.
You give criminals too much credit. The human element is the thing that always seems to get criminals. The fact that they've put all this hard work and effort into building this massive botnet means it's not easy to just walk away at the first sign of potential trouble. It's easy to get sloppy when you've never been caught in months or years of operation and the only thing between you and control of millions of computers is a seemingly innocuous connection to a host.
Yes they did. Against all common sense, NewEgg had been insisting the CPUs were "demo" units until today and hardware enthusiast sites like HardOCP were calling them out. Intel came out yesterday and basically said, if the web photos are legit as represented, then the CPUs are most certainly fakes. I suspect NewEgg was waiting until they could confidently pin the blame on a 3rd-party distributor before letting the truth out.
Shameful PR stunt if you ask me.
Actually, two things that most people don't even realize is that:
1. The 20Gb of writes per day for 5 years spec was the design goal. The Intel drives are believed to be almost an order of magnitude better than that (look it up at Anandtech).
2. When SSDs fail, they're designed to fail on the next write, so the worst thing that's likely to happen is that when it fails, you can read all of your data to a new drive. That's a completely different scenario from HDD failure, where you lose everything.
My first thought was that there might be an emulator out there for that IBM hardware that would allow them to forgo the re-write. That way they get the reliability benefits of modern commodity hardware without all the heavy code lifting -- then again, maybe the code itself is part of the reliability problem...
Does it support multitasking?
My blackberry Bold supports multitasking. What to know what else? I have to manually prune the running app list almost every day when the phone inexplicably becomes unusable due to various 3rd-party app memory leaks. Then again the screen is too small to have a taskbar that shows at-a-glance what's actually running in the background taking up memory or CPU, so I have to click a button and open a menu and scroll around hunting for apps to kill one at a time until the phone becomes responsive again. We all know Apple could do the multitasking thing, but based on my experience with Blackberry, I have no doubt why they didn't want to gift this 'functionality' to users.
An entire country of people who don't have an intuitive sense of the units they're using would be chaos.
Quick, time travel back to Canada circa 1973 and warn them of impending doom!
It's been done. Do a Google search for Welchia.
And as we know, no hacker has ever owned a system inside a company before.
Brring, brring...
You have an annoying ringtone. Oh and by the way, stop basing your performance expectations on javascript benchmarks and actually go out and use your browser to browse real websites. Call me back when you discover one that doesn't load in the same "ballpark" as Opera and Chrome.
As I sit here happily running 32-bit firefox in Windows 7 64-bit, I'm having trouble understanding what photo editing has to do with the need for a 64-bit web browser.
I guess I'm just reminded that the brain is a complex and highly compartmentalized organ and that an individual can be truly exceptional in one area as easily as having a deficit in another.
Not sure why PhDs so often seem to be singled out as having serious deficiencies in street-smarts or day-to-day functioning, but I suspect it has something to do with specialization. Perhaps the individual becomes so singularly focused on certain abilities/topics (either due to sheer interest or as a result of deficiency avoidance) that brain centers associated with them become better developed to the detriment of others.
It's quite clear in my father, who happens to be a PhD.
come out of the woodwork. MS has a market cap of $246 billion as of Oct. 30. The biggest company in the world, Exxon Mobile, has a market cap of $344 billion.
So "the company became bureaucratic and lumbering", not because it was big and lumbering, but because Ballmer is not Bill Gates? I don't buy it.
It's not flawed so much as inevitable. A portion of the market will jump at the first example of a promising technology that ships. Being the first mover in a particular space holds special significance and advantages for companies competing for market share. The thinking goes that quality can be worked on iteratively through generations of product and there will never be a time when you reach perfect quality anyway.
Moral of the story: If you don't want to beta test products for corporations, then don't buy first generation technology.
And before you argue that G2s *are* second generation drives, I would not categorize them as such. They're die-shrunk G1 drives with some bug fixes and performance tweaks. Corporations and the media are quick to claim that any improvement to a first generation technology *is* the next generation as it sells copies, clicks and product.
As a general rule, I wait at least 6 months after Anandtech and others review a product before making a new technology purchase. By then, you can usually figure out something about longer-term reliability from online discussions/reviews. As a result, I rarely have a whole lot of trouble with technology products I buy, beyond downloading the latest drivers/updates or whatnot. Sure, it means I don't have the latest bleeding edge stuff, but I also don't have to deal with the trouble that comes with paying for the opportunity to beta test.
Because SSD represents such a paradigm shift, I've chosen to hold off for at least another 6-12 months on SSDs partly to allow prices to drop and partly to account for the obvious growing pains that manufacturers have experienced over the past couple years.
how we go from the below scientific journal abstract to the Slashdot headline: "NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB"?
We have investigated the magnetic properties of the Ni-MgO system with an Ni concentration of 0.5 at.%. In as-grown crystals, Ni ions occupy substitutional Mg sites. Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet. By using a controlled annealing treatment in a reducing atmosphere, we were able to induce clustering and form pure Ni precipitates in the nanometer size range. The size distribution of precipitates or nanodots is varied by changing annealing time and temperature. Magnetic properties of specimens ranging from perfect paramagnetic to ferromagnetic characteristics have been studied systematically to establish structure-property correlations. The spontaneous magnetization data for the samples, where Ni was precipitated randomly in MgO host, fits well to Bloch's T3/2-law and has been explained within the framework of spin wave theory predictions.
Seriously, do you see anything about a chip in there? Anyone? Bueller?
Yeah, I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there... I think there are subtle but important differences between the old mainframe approach from the 70s, the kind of hosted computing we had in the 90s and the latest cloud computing stuff.
What I think differentiates cloud computing from earlier iterations of client-server architecture is the ability for a single device to transparently access virtually unlimited (or at least orders of magnitude greater) computing resources with little additional redesign effort. The notion of one-to-one mappings between hardware and software instances is beginning to blur.
Lest I be accused of perpetuating the cloud computing "myth", let me give you some concrete examples.
When you hosted a website at a colo in the 90s, it's true you were borrowing computing resources from somewhere else. However this amounted to getting remote access to a server or cluster of servers. If you wanted to scale that, you had to pay for access to more servers, you had to wait until your colo could stand up enough servers to meet your demand and then you had to configure each server. With cloud offerings like Amazon's EC2 and S3, you are no longer limited by the physical reality of devices. When you sign up for S3, you get access to a geographically diverse, redundant virtual storage partition that is only limited by your imagination, bandwidth capacity, local file system architecture and of course your wallet. EC2 is likewise a virtually limitless blank slate from a computing perspective, allowing you to replicate and grow a web server cluster by 1000x or more in a matter of minutes to perhaps deal with increased traffic flow.
Now, these are but two rather limited examples of what the industry means by cloud computing. I don't think it's so trivial a distinction that you can say it's the same old thing as always.
Um, I'd be surprised if most people visiting SF had heard of this case. There are plenty of other reasons why nobody wants to visit SF anymore, and most derive from the rampant homelessness problems, crumbling infrastructure and systematic discrimination against people with cars.
Are you from Quebec by any chance?
> Actually yes. MythTV kicks the utter crap out of any other PVR ever made.
Um, perhaps if your sole criteria for success is ability to skip commercials? Aside from that, even wrapped in a Mythbuntu 9.0.4 LiveCD install, it's an unpolished, hardware compatibility and maintenance nightmare that has an installation routine well outside of the reach of the average consumer. I had to write a dozen scripts to get the thing to do what Windows Media Center did perfectly from the get-go -- all ina bid to get automatic commercial skipping... barely worth it IMO.
I still get the feeling that my "leading edge" AT&T Blackberry Bold, with its "fast" Intel XScale 624 MHz processor may be the bottleneck on wireless connections. I'm not sure if it's the high latency of the mobile network, distance-to-tower-related performance degradation, varying network conditions or simple lack of processor horsepower, but I find that it's typically not able to come anywhere close to the theoretical bandwidth limits imposed by the 3.6Mbps 3G network.
I suspect resources would be better spent reducing latency, improving existing tower coverage and adding towers rather than moving to a new bandwidth standard that's guaranteed to result in even lower utilization by the vast majority of existing devices on AT&T's network.
Oh and couldn't finish without one off-topic troll: Am I the only one who finds it literally astounding that I can't complete a conversation on my fancy new 3G Blackberry without at least one drop on the most well traveled commuter highway (101) right in the heart of Silicon Valley?
You just have to type in http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/ to get to a usable input screen.
Unfortunately, it seems as though Steven Wolfram's screencast that's been up for the past few days used rather cherry-picked examples, as the underlying datasets do not seem to be as comprehensive as one might have been led to believe. Beyond the fairly basic things you might find in the CIA fact book or other source of basic data, it just doesn't yet have the breadth of underlying data that would make it an indispensable tool. For example, after playing around with W|A finance queries, I was left completely unimpressed with the paltry datasets and feel that any market/stock questions I have would be better served by hitting up finance.yahoo.com. They have some basic data about professional sports teams, but NHL hockey is nowhere to found, and you can't find anything in the way of current player stats for any sport, let alone historical data. Birthdays of notable sports figures are there though...
Gotta admit, it's quite an ambitious undertaking, I just think they're somewhere between 3 and 5 orders of magnitude away from having enough data and detail to make it the kind of thing I would consider using regularly. Stay tuned, might be interesting in a year... or five.
Weird, I must have proofread it half a dozen times. I guess it sounded right in my head, so I didn't catch the obvious misspelling.
As I appear into my crystal ball, I see that Firefox 3.5 is released and still achieves 93/100. Wow, I'm a psychic!
Ffx 3.1/3.5 has been sitting at 93/100 for over 6 months, and the devs have stated *numerous* times that achieving 100/100 on Acid3 is NOT a priority for the 3.5 release, largely because implementing SVG fonts (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490/) for the purpose of passing those last few Acid3 tests is a much lower priority than other things they're working on (like javascript JIT). Why your summary of the 3.5b4 release focuses on something that literally hasn't changed in several beta releases is beyond me.
So, can we please move on now or are you going to switch to Safari because of that newfangled Youtube interface that implements SVG fonts? Oh sorry, I was looking into my crystal ball again and saw the web circa 2025.