or are they relying on public ignorance to keep them justified?
You must be new here (that is, to the US....)
And no, I'm not trying to be funny. If you've been following the current election cycle, especially this past week, you should be well aware that this is a perfectly viable strategy.
Well, no. What I'm saying is that the standard deviation of the failure rate could be a lot smaller than it would be for a normal disk. We still know very little about their modes and patterns of failure.
Again, it's probably nothing to worry about, but I'm not entirely convinced that RAIDing SSDs is the best way to achieve redundancy, considering that a lot of assumptions are made when stating the benefits of a RAID setup that don't apply to SSDs.
For instance, what is the likelihood of a SSD going entirely tits-up? Are those odds less than the odds of the RAID controller itself going berserk?
I imagine that SSD failures will be characterized by a gradual increase in the number of bad blocks on the device, rather than a single catastrophic failure as we typically see in hard disks. Perhaps we'll see SSDs with built-in redundancy, or simply a more advanced form of RAID that can cope with and compensate for these sorts of failures.
Still.... you never know. You may very well encounter a certain batch of SSDs that self-destruct on their 10,001th write. Until we have a good grasp on how these things operate on a large scale in the real world, it's too early to be making any assumptions (and way too early to be using them in mission-critical applications)
What if the drives realiably fail within a given period of time?
If the device craps out after a very specific amount of time or read/write cycles, it will be a *huge* problem for RAID arrays, which assume that failures are randomly distributed.
If you have a 4-disk RAID array, and all four disks fail within a day of each other, you're screwed.
I'm not saying this is likely (far from it), though I would imagine that SSDs have different rates and patterns of failure than hard drives. It'll take a few years before we know for sure how they need to be handled to achieve a sufficient level of redundancy.
No, but considering that virtually every other corporate racket has its hands in the current government, it wouldn't be remotely surprising.
I'm a firm believer that one shouldn't ascribe incompetence to malice. However, in this case, I can't believe that they're that incompetent. The rest of the world has made the digital transition fairly smoothly. The US, on the other hand, came in late to the game, adopted a closed standard different from everybody else, and then managed to screw it up even more badly in the implementation.
The iPod was the first Hard-Drive-based player with a reasonably good UI.
At first, they were only moderately popular (and only among mac users at that). However, once Apple started cutting prices, it was game over for any other product on the market.
The marketing campaigns didn't hurt. However, during the iPod's "explosive growth" phase, it was simultaneously the best and the cheapest (per gigabyte) MP3 player out there.
It also didn't help that it took other manufacturers 2-3 years to finally "get the hint" (Sony still hasn't....)
Yeah. Seriously. I live 40 miles from New York City, and can barely get the four major broadcast networks (Back when it was around, UPN used to come in fine, which was a sort of cruel irony)
I just got back from spending a few months just outside of Dundee in Scotland (read: middle of nowhere, especially by American standards). We could pick up a couple dozen OTA channels, with considerably better quality than I get with digital cable. It just works.
The US digital adoption is clearly being manipulated by the cable companies, who just want to protect their obsolete monopolies....
Virtually every public utility oversells its capacity, and there is certainly not the understanding that you can leave the water running 24/7. The power grid cannot handle every household to max out its usage, and there's a liminited of phone circuits and cellular frequencies.
It would be a huge waste of resources to guarantee a dedicated 30mbps of bandwidth to every cable customer. "Carrier-grade" connections cost a lot more for a reason.
Bandwidth is a limited resource. Get over it. As long as the bandwidth caps and pricing schemes are reasonable, there's no reason why caps are a horrible idea. Being able to max out your connection for something like 1/3 of the time should keep the carriers and consumers satisfied.
Sure, Adium is easily one of the best-designed apps on the planet (in terms of being visually appealing, functional, and customizable in all the right places), but I never saw Pidgin as being particularly bad.
Yeah, it's a bit clunky on Windows, though other good alternatives exist on that platform, and it's still easily one of the best GTK+ apps on Win32. Pidgin does need to move to a native toolkit for its windows version, though what's there now isn't all that bad.
Problem is, most people buy Halo, and nothing else. The XBox's game library is absolutely miserable, and always has been.
We haven't had a console that had a good launch library that also maintained a good library for the duration of its lifespan since the N64. The PS2 eventually got a lot of good titles, but that took a few years. The XBox never really got that many titles that were worth having...
We've been doing it on aircraft for some time. I believe that reliability figures actually improved in that case, because it's far easier to make an electrical system redundant.
Still, yeah. It makes me a bit uneasy, and seems generally unnecessary.
Rumors have been circulating about a TDI TT that may be imported as a last-minute sort of thing.
But still, you're absolutely right. A TDI/DSG A4 would be absolutely brilliant.
VW/Audi's 2.0T engine is actually quite good, and appears at the top of all sorts of "best engines" lists. The city mileage could stand to be a bit better, but the 34MPG that it gets on the highway is fantastic, especially when you consider that it's a ridiculously powerful engine. My parents drive a 2.0T A4 Quattro, and it's unequivocally one of the best cars I've ever driven. The performance when driving on snow is absolutely uncanny.
Of course, it's also a rather expensive car. Used models are quite a good buy, but that of course leaves quite a few years before us normal folks can get our hands on an Audi TDI, should they ever actually import one.
I'd also imagine that VW would use their 2.0L TDI engine in any potential Audi TDI, rather than the older 1.8L model that doesn't meet current US emissions standards for new vehicles.
And "making a come back" you mean "Americans pulled their head out of their asses and noticed other technology". Diesel never went away.
Actually, due to emissions standards, there were a few years during which no consumer-level diesel vehicles were sold. So in that regard, it did indeed "go away." There were also numerous lingering issues due to inconsistent emissions standards between states.
VW and Mercedes are officially "re-entering" the US markets with their diesels this year, now that their engines consistently satisfy particulate emissions standards in all 50 states.
I'm not necessarily talking about top-speed. I've never been particularly impressed with a hybrid's ability to accelerate, and the handling of a Prius leaves a bit to be desired. The Jetta Diesel I test-drove was responsive, and fun to drive (this is entirely subjective).
None of this necessarily amounts to dangerous or illegal driving.
VW's current TDI models also pack a ridiculous amount of torque for cars of their size, which is great if you're hauling heavy loads, have a car full of passengers, or are pulling a trailer. This makes a huge difference on hills. It's powerful and efficient.
Going by the EPA's current nationwide estimate of $3.74/gallon Unleaded, and $4.21/gallon Diesel, a 25/36 MPG Honda Civic will cost you $3.22 to drive 25 miles.
The EPA numbers, however, are a huge point of contention, as previous-generation diesels achieved on average 18% better fuel efficiency in real-world tests than the EPA's synthetic test. Even the EPA admit that their test tends to overestimate the real-world efficiency of hybrids, and underestimate the efficiency of diesels.
An independent agency (ok, they were paid by VW) tested the 2009 TDI to get 38/44 MPG (city/highway) as opposed to the EPA's 29/40 rating. With those numbers in mind, one could expect 25 miles to cost $2.57. Real-world reports put this as a fairly accurate estimate, with others claiming to be able to do 50+mpg on highways.
Prius is still cheaper at $2.03/25mi, although there seem to be wildly divergent reports of what sort of efficiency those vehicles get in the real world (the trip computer is widely recognized to overestimate)
Well, VW has double-clutched diesels in the American market right now. (For those who aren't familiar, the double-clutch design essentially allows a car to be driven as an automatic while preserving the superior characteristics of a manual, also allowing for millisecond shift-times.)
Diesel fuel economy is arguably good enough that it don't need any sort of hybrid system. They're also decently fun to drive, which you certainly can't say about the current crop of hybrids.
Unfortunately, VW probably has the double-clutch design patented to hell and back, and has no hybrid technology of its own. Seeing the two together therefore seems fairly unlikely. On the other hand, a diesel Golf/Rabbit should be making its way to American markets in a year or two.
They're both pretty nice compact cars that get fantastic mileage (~34mpg) without any fancy hybrid stuff.
For a good bit less than a Prius (which you couldn't even buy at the moment if you wanted to), you can get a car that gets better mileage, drives better, and is likely to be considerably more reliable.
On the other end of things, diesels are beginning to make a very big comeback, as virtually all of the traditional downsides to diesel engines have been taken care of. The fact that they get 40+ MPG makes them pretty attractive.
Also, now that the natural gas industry has woken up to the fact that there is a metric shit-ton of money waiting to be made by packaging and selling their product as automotive fuel, I imagine that we'll be seeing quite a few CNV vehicles in the upcoming years.
There's also the funding issue. Largely due to being (mostly) redundant to the LHC, Fermilab's big accelerator, the Tevatron is shutting down next year.
Slashdot Mirror
or are they relying on public ignorance to keep them justified?
You must be new here (that is, to the US....)
And no, I'm not trying to be funny. If you've been following the current election cycle, especially this past week, you should be well aware that this is a perfectly viable strategy.
If you're doing almost exactly one release per year, it's actually not at all bad as a naming convention.
Well, no. What I'm saying is that the standard deviation of the failure rate could be a lot smaller than it would be for a normal disk. We still know very little about their modes and patterns of failure.
Again, it's probably nothing to worry about, but I'm not entirely convinced that RAIDing SSDs is the best way to achieve redundancy, considering that a lot of assumptions are made when stating the benefits of a RAID setup that don't apply to SSDs.
For instance, what is the likelihood of a SSD going entirely tits-up? Are those odds less than the odds of the RAID controller itself going berserk?
I imagine that SSD failures will be characterized by a gradual increase in the number of bad blocks on the device, rather than a single catastrophic failure as we typically see in hard disks. Perhaps we'll see SSDs with built-in redundancy, or simply a more advanced form of RAID that can cope with and compensate for these sorts of failures.
Still.... you never know. You may very well encounter a certain batch of SSDs that self-destruct on their 10,001th write. Until we have a good grasp on how these things operate on a large scale in the real world, it's too early to be making any assumptions (and way too early to be using them in mission-critical applications)
It just shows that you don't understand the issue.
Ah.... What a typical Unix-Geek response.
What if the drives realiably fail within a given period of time?
If the device craps out after a very specific amount of time or read/write cycles, it will be a *huge* problem for RAID arrays, which assume that failures are randomly distributed.
If you have a 4-disk RAID array, and all four disks fail within a day of each other, you're screwed.
I'm not saying this is likely (far from it), though I would imagine that SSDs have different rates and patterns of failure than hard drives. It'll take a few years before we know for sure how they need to be handled to achieve a sufficient level of redundancy.
Those're STDs.
It burns when I read/write
Dude... You might want to get that checked.
Most humans were only designed to do one or the other....
No, but considering that virtually every other corporate racket has its hands in the current government, it wouldn't be remotely surprising.
I'm a firm believer that one shouldn't ascribe incompetence to malice. However, in this case, I can't believe that they're that incompetent. The rest of the world has made the digital transition fairly smoothly. The US, on the other hand, came in late to the game, adopted a closed standard different from everybody else, and then managed to screw it up even more badly in the implementation.
I wouldn't say that.
The iPod was the first Hard-Drive-based player with a reasonably good UI.
At first, they were only moderately popular (and only among mac users at that). However, once Apple started cutting prices, it was game over for any other product on the market.
The marketing campaigns didn't hurt. However, during the iPod's "explosive growth" phase, it was simultaneously the best and the cheapest (per gigabyte) MP3 player out there.
It also didn't help that it took other manufacturers 2-3 years to finally "get the hint" (Sony still hasn't....)
What about the Sahara?
Reclaim it, plant a forest, and it becomes a huge carbon sink, and possible farmland.
Yeah. Seriously. I live 40 miles from New York City, and can barely get the four major broadcast networks (Back when it was around, UPN used to come in fine, which was a sort of cruel irony)
I just got back from spending a few months just outside of Dundee in Scotland (read: middle of nowhere, especially by American standards). We could pick up a couple dozen OTA channels, with considerably better quality than I get with digital cable. It just works.
The US digital adoption is clearly being manipulated by the cable companies, who just want to protect their obsolete monopolies....
Virtually every public utility oversells its capacity, and there is certainly not the understanding that you can leave the water running 24/7. The power grid cannot handle every household to max out its usage, and there's a liminited of phone circuits and cellular frequencies.
It would be a huge waste of resources to guarantee a dedicated 30mbps of bandwidth to every cable customer. "Carrier-grade" connections cost a lot more for a reason.
Bandwidth is a limited resource. Get over it. As long as the bandwidth caps and pricing schemes are reasonable, there's no reason why caps are a horrible idea. Being able to max out your connection for something like 1/3 of the time should keep the carriers and consumers satisfied.
Well then... given it's tax dollars, they probably implemented the wifi link via text messages :-)
I was personally hoping they were going to implement it via RFC 1149 (IP Over Avian Carrier)
I honestly don't mind Pidgin's UI.
Sure, Adium is easily one of the best-designed apps on the planet (in terms of being visually appealing, functional, and customizable in all the right places), but I never saw Pidgin as being particularly bad.
Yeah, it's a bit clunky on Windows, though other good alternatives exist on that platform, and it's still easily one of the best GTK+ apps on Win32. Pidgin does need to move to a native toolkit for its windows version, though what's there now isn't all that bad.
Funny you should mention that.
A /. article a few months ago found that sending a text message is about 4 times as expensive (per kilobyte) as retrieving data from the Hubble.
Problem is, most people buy Halo, and nothing else. The XBox's game library is absolutely miserable, and always has been.
We haven't had a console that had a good launch library that also maintained a good library for the duration of its lifespan since the N64. The PS2 eventually got a lot of good titles, but that took a few years. The XBox never really got that many titles that were worth having...
The vehicles aren't the problem.... it's refueling them that's that hard part.
Well, VW claimed that the Jetta TDI got 50-60 MPG. Realistically, it gets 40-50. According to the EPA, it gets 30-40.
Read into that as you may.
We've been doing it on aircraft for some time. I believe that reliability figures actually improved in that case, because it's far easier to make an electrical system redundant.
Still, yeah. It makes me a bit uneasy, and seems generally unnecessary.
Rumors have been circulating about a TDI TT that may be imported as a last-minute sort of thing.
But still, you're absolutely right. A TDI/DSG A4 would be absolutely brilliant.
VW/Audi's 2.0T engine is actually quite good, and appears at the top of all sorts of "best engines" lists. The city mileage could stand to be a bit better, but the 34MPG that it gets on the highway is fantastic, especially when you consider that it's a ridiculously powerful engine. My parents drive a 2.0T A4 Quattro, and it's unequivocally one of the best cars I've ever driven. The performance when driving on snow is absolutely uncanny.
Of course, it's also a rather expensive car. Used models are quite a good buy, but that of course leaves quite a few years before us normal folks can get our hands on an Audi TDI, should they ever actually import one.
I'd also imagine that VW would use their 2.0L TDI engine in any potential Audi TDI, rather than the older 1.8L model that doesn't meet current US emissions standards for new vehicles.
And "making a come back" you mean "Americans pulled their head out of their asses and noticed other technology". Diesel never went away.
Actually, due to emissions standards, there were a few years during which no consumer-level diesel vehicles were sold. So in that regard, it did indeed "go away." There were also numerous lingering issues due to inconsistent emissions standards between states.
VW and Mercedes are officially "re-entering" the US markets with their diesels this year, now that their engines consistently satisfy particulate emissions standards in all 50 states.
I'm not necessarily talking about top-speed. I've never been particularly impressed with a hybrid's ability to accelerate, and the handling of a Prius leaves a bit to be desired. The Jetta Diesel I test-drove was responsive, and fun to drive (this is entirely subjective).
None of this necessarily amounts to dangerous or illegal driving.
VW's current TDI models also pack a ridiculous amount of torque for cars of their size, which is great if you're hauling heavy loads, have a car full of passengers, or are pulling a trailer. This makes a huge difference on hills. It's powerful and efficient.
Going by the EPA's current nationwide estimate of $3.74/gallon Unleaded, and $4.21/gallon Diesel, a 25/36 MPG Honda Civic will cost you $3.22 to drive 25 miles.
The EPA numbers, however, are a huge point of contention, as previous-generation diesels achieved on average 18% better fuel efficiency in real-world tests than the EPA's synthetic test. Even the EPA admit that their test tends to overestimate the real-world efficiency of hybrids, and underestimate the efficiency of diesels.
An independent agency (ok, they were paid by VW) tested the 2009 TDI to get 38/44 MPG (city/highway) as opposed to the EPA's 29/40 rating. With those numbers in mind, one could expect 25 miles to cost $2.57. Real-world reports put this as a fairly accurate estimate, with others claiming to be able to do 50+mpg on highways.
Prius is still cheaper at $2.03/25mi, although there seem to be wildly divergent reports of what sort of efficiency those vehicles get in the real world (the trip computer is widely recognized to overestimate)
Well, VW has double-clutched diesels in the American market right now. (For those who aren't familiar, the double-clutch design essentially allows a car to be driven as an automatic while preserving the superior characteristics of a manual, also allowing for millisecond shift-times.)
Diesel fuel economy is arguably good enough that it don't need any sort of hybrid system. They're also decently fun to drive, which you certainly can't say about the current crop of hybrids.
Unfortunately, VW probably has the double-clutch design patented to hell and back, and has no hybrid technology of its own. Seeing the two together therefore seems fairly unlikely. On the other hand, a diesel Golf/Rabbit should be making its way to American markets in a year or two.
Why not just buy a Civic or a Fit?
They're both pretty nice compact cars that get fantastic mileage (~34mpg) without any fancy hybrid stuff.
For a good bit less than a Prius (which you couldn't even buy at the moment if you wanted to), you can get a car that gets better mileage, drives better, and is likely to be considerably more reliable.
On the other end of things, diesels are beginning to make a very big comeback, as virtually all of the traditional downsides to diesel engines have been taken care of. The fact that they get 40+ MPG makes them pretty attractive.
Also, now that the natural gas industry has woken up to the fact that there is a metric shit-ton of money waiting to be made by packaging and selling their product as automotive fuel, I imagine that we'll be seeing quite a few CNV vehicles in the upcoming years.
There's also the funding issue. Largely due to being (mostly) redundant to the LHC, Fermilab's big accelerator, the Tevatron is shutting down next year.