You save the cost of the flash ram controller and reduce the part count. Probably not by much but but depending on the read speed of the flash a read could be faster since it would just be a DMA on the address buss. Mainly just to shave pennies for things like netbooks.
Also Gestapo? Gee not a bit dramatic are we? What MORON expects to publish classified material and not be visited by the Feds? Classified video from an military air strike no less? Where they arrested? Where they put in prison? Where they tortured?
Their rights where in no way violated. The Police can hold you for questioning for 24 hours without charging you. And you nave no rights to not be questioned. Please just what fantasy land do people live in when they think they have the right to publish classified military data and not even be questioned?
No I had an Amiga and I loved it. Actually several and loved to code for it. The C64 was a totally different line. I would love to see what would have been the ultimate 8bit computer. The one I described would combine the fastest of the CPU in the 650x line "16-bit mutant" and one of the fastest Z80s ever made. The Amiga was spiritually closer to the Atari line than the C-64.
But software is intangible. You could patent some item that the program makes say if you used it to run a CNC machine but you can not patent the program. That is what software is. A tangible embodiment of an idea. That is why in the EU they don't have software patents and why we should not in the US. The very fact that software is completely intangible means that it must be protected with copyright and not by patent.
Well yes they are very successful but I think you may be forgetting Voyager which was unbelievably successful and Pioneer 11 and 12 which are still ticking over as they coast out of the Solar System. Not to mention Viking, and Hubble. All of these projects have been extremely successful projects.
Couldn't you have the DMA controller handle the write from the ram buffer to the flash? Yes I know that it probably would never be the fastest solution but It might be the cheapest and PCs right now seem to be fast enough for most folks.
The only problem I see could eating up too address buss bandwidth servicing the slower Flash. Even that may not really be an issue except that CPUs are not intergreating DRAM controllers on the core so they may not know how to talk directly to Flash. Things are no as simple as they where.
"Here's an idea. When I'm trying to feed my family, I don't have to worry about money because the stuff can't be owned." That is not the point and frankly just silly. I like FOSS and have written some. I make my living from Closed Source software and I have a hardware patent. I see a place for both. But what we are talking about here is patents. The idea that you can patent software just insane. You can patent a book? Or a Song? Or a set of house plans? Or a set of Homebuilt aircraft plans? Or a movie? Or a story? No all of those are protected by copyright law as should software. It is just that simple. It should be impossible for me to sit down and right a piece of software that I can get sued for. The only illegal that should be possible is if you life code from a program in violation of their license. There is a place for FOSS, Closed Source, Patents, and Copyrights. There is no place for Software Patents. What is really annoying is that my own company has filed for and gotten two just to protect the company from other people trying to patent these features we created! Get ride of them all and the DMCA including ours. If no one has them we don't need them.
They could have put an emulator on and do all this. I kind of wish someone would create a mythical NextGen C64. Kind of what Commodore might have made if they had made a better C128. Imagine a 65816 CPU and an HD64180 to replace the z80 .
I think people are not getting what I intend. You would still access the flash as a drive at the application level through a device driver. It would just be on the address buss and not on some external buss. You would still have ram based buffers and caching but would just use the CPU to deal with the flash instead of going through the IO controller to the SATA controller to the Flash controller and back again.
Well the flash controller has to do that now. As a cost savings you could move that functionality to the PCs chipset or right into the CPU. I think that is what they do now on smartphones and such. Would it be ideal from a performance point of view? Maybe not. But from a cost point of view? Maybe.
Bah Microsoft is evil, as is Apple, and even Google sometimes. I will let the fact that Google is stopping there censoring of Chinese search results speak for it's self. The difference is that Microsoft is Super BIG and Evil. Google and Apple are just big and evil. The other difference is at least we are Microsoft and Apple's customers. We are Google's product.
The problem with mapping mass storage to memory at the application level becomes one of locking and threads. You will have a very difficult time with any threaded applications if you just do a map to memory. Locking goes from being a real pain to a total freaking nightmare. In effect traditional disk io acts like a message passing system which is much simpler to deal with when doing threaded applications. The real issue I think was a failure to communicate between you and m.dillion. m.dillion was thinking of the programing model where you can actually open a file and it looks like a big honking block of memory. That model is really handy in a single threaded application but really starts to become a big mess when you are doing more than one thread.
Yes burnt and burning are terms wildly used in the nuclear industry and in science. Sort of like this place https://lasers.llnl.gov/ is called the National Ignition Facility. So not it is not dumbing down science it is showing the flexibiltiy in the language. Sort of like how a satellite and or rocket is often called a bird. They sure are not avian but it is a common term.
Oh yes and off course all those NASA employees at the Johnson Space Flight center, Geologists with PHDs that work for the oil companies in Houston, EEs at Texas Instrments and Dell, Aerospace Engineers at Lockheed in Fort Worth, and the folks at SpaceX are all a bunch of beer drinking Bubbas.
Yea and the folks on Slashdot are open minded and don't fall for propaganda like all those simple minded sheep they so like to mock....
Actually yes. As you put it e=mc2 when you extract energy from any system some mass must be lost. Just as when you put energy into any system some mass must be gained. It is just that the mass very small for most amounts of energy extracted or stored. So yes even when you charge a battery it's mass must increase.
Thanks I have not been keeping up. I was also trying to keep it simple. FAR 91 and VFR are jibberish to most people.
I know about the FCC regs but yea I don't think they are ever followed. I wonder if it a bigger issue at say 3000 ft or 25000ft? At higher altitude you can see more towers but they are farther away so most of them you probably can not hit. At lower altitude you can see and hit more towers and that may cause more issues. I fear I don't know much about the issues with cell towers or even if they really are issues anymore.
He who pays the bills gets the say. You can pay in cash or labor in FOSS. Just as you don't have to listen to a vote of your entire town on what you will eat for dinner. The major contributors are not the slaves of the users. What is very democratic is if you don't like it you can fork the project and or go to another. The only limits are set by your abilities and desire. All in all a very free system I think.
He is correct but that is not what I was thinking. The OS would know that it is flash and protect it from general access. The applications would still access it through a device driver but instead of going through an IO chip and the sata bus the OS would handle the IO on the memory bus. The way things happen now is that when you do a disk read the data is copied from the drive across the bus and into the controller chip. The controller chip then does a direct memory access to a block of memory that you have told it to use as a buffer. This is a simple explanation of how it works BTW. If you just mapped the flash to part of the address space the programs would never know the difference. What would change is that when you did a read the data would be copied from the slower flash to the ram buffer all across the memory bus. Now what I don't know is if that would cause issues with having the two different speeds of memory or not. It could be that it is faster to not do all of the IO on the Address bus. Of course you could have a dedicated DMA chip for memory to memory copies so it could be possible to unload the CPU from that task. Of course when you are talking about things like netbooks the savings in cost may make any performance issues moot. But I am not a hardware guy just a programmer.
Zero day means you get zero warning. Also true viruses are actually rare. It have become a generic term. If you have to open and run the program then it is not a virus. That is a Trojan. If the program can infect other programs or data files like say a jpeg then it is a virus. BTW it should be impossible for a datafile to be a vector but it is. I blame C strings and c IO for that. How it happened is simple and really is nobodies fault. When I first started programing nobody worried about datafiles. You didn't even think that somebody would try and use your program to attack a system by creating a broken datafile. The very idea that you picture viewing program could be a security issue was just not on the radar. To use an original metaphor must of us where learned to program like we lived in Mayberry then we where dropped into the Bronx. There is a lot of that Mayberry code still out there in the nooks and crannies. Honestly I put trojans down to user IQ errors for the most part. Some do use say a browser exploit to trick you.
Of course the scary thing is now that we have 64 bit processors it could be possible to just map the flash right to the address space. I could see a netbook with a flash drive right on the motherboard.
What you will probably see soon is a new mini-pci standard. The current mini-pci standard has a USB port as part of the standard. Once they start putting USB 3.0 on there it will be trivial to put a USB 3.0 Flash drive chip on a card. You may even see a card that is both an SSD and WiFi which would be great for netbook makers.
Yes I know. When I write HTML I have to keep several browsers around just to test with. But the web developers are not the ones that are picking the browsers and almost none of them will not make their site work with IE so to the end user they are all the same. But yea it sucks.
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You save the cost of the flash ram controller and reduce the part count. Probably not by much but but depending on the read speed of the flash a read could be faster since it would just be a DMA on the address buss.
Mainly just to shave pennies for things like netbooks.
Also Gestapo? Gee not a bit dramatic are we?
What MORON expects to publish classified material and not be visited by the Feds?
Classified video from an military air strike no less?
Where they arrested? Where they put in prison? Where they tortured?
Their rights where in no way violated. The Police can hold you for questioning for 24 hours without charging you. And you nave no rights to not be questioned.
Please just what fantasy land do people live in when they think they have the right to publish classified military data and not even be questioned?
No I had an Amiga and I loved it.
Actually several and loved to code for it.
The C64 was a totally different line. I would love to see what would have been the ultimate 8bit computer. The one I described would combine the fastest of the CPU in the 650x line "16-bit mutant" and one of the fastest Z80s ever made.
The Amiga was spiritually closer to the Atari line than the C-64.
But software is intangible. You could patent some item that the program makes say if you used it to run a CNC machine but you can not patent the program.
That is what software is. A tangible embodiment of an idea. That is why in the EU they don't have software patents and why we should not in the US.
The very fact that software is completely intangible means that it must be protected with copyright and not by patent.
Well yes they are very successful but I think you may be forgetting Voyager which was unbelievably successful and Pioneer 11 and 12 which are still ticking over as they coast out of the Solar System.
Not to mention Viking, and Hubble.
All of these projects have been extremely successful projects.
Couldn't you have the DMA controller handle the write from the ram buffer to the flash?
Yes I know that it probably would never be the fastest solution but It might be the cheapest and PCs right now seem to be fast enough for most folks.
The only problem I see could eating up too address buss bandwidth servicing the slower Flash. Even that may not really be an issue except that CPUs are not intergreating DRAM controllers on the core so they may not know how to talk directly to Flash.
Things are no as simple as they where.
"Here's an idea. When I'm trying to feed my family, I don't have to worry about money because the stuff can't be owned."
That is not the point and frankly just silly.
I like FOSS and have written some. I make my living from Closed Source software and I have a hardware patent. I see a place for both.
But what we are talking about here is patents. The idea that you can patent software just insane.
You can patent a book? Or a Song? Or a set of house plans? Or a set of Homebuilt aircraft plans? Or a movie? Or a story?
No all of those are protected by copyright law as should software. It is just that simple.
It should be impossible for me to sit down and right a piece of software that I can get sued for. The only illegal that should be possible is if you life code from a program in violation of their license.
There is a place for FOSS, Closed Source, Patents, and Copyrights. There is no place for Software Patents. What is really annoying is that my own company has filed for and gotten two just to protect the company from other people trying to patent these features we created!
Get ride of them all and the DMCA including ours. If no one has them we don't need them.
They could have put an emulator on and do all this.
I kind of wish someone would create a mythical NextGen C64. Kind of what Commodore might have made if they had made a better C128.
Imagine a 65816 CPU and an HD64180 to replace the z80 .
I think people are not getting what I intend. You would still access the flash as a drive at the application level through a device driver. It would just be on the address buss and not on some external buss. You would still have ram based buffers and caching but would just use the CPU to deal with the flash instead of going through the IO controller to the SATA controller to the Flash controller and back again.
Well the flash controller has to do that now. As a cost savings you could move that functionality to the PCs chipset or right into the CPU.
I think that is what they do now on smartphones and such.
Would it be ideal from a performance point of view? Maybe not.
But from a cost point of view? Maybe.
Bah Microsoft is evil, as is Apple, and even Google sometimes. I will let the fact that Google is stopping there censoring of Chinese search results speak for it's self.
The difference is that Microsoft is Super BIG and Evil. Google and Apple are just big and evil.
The other difference is at least we are Microsoft and Apple's customers. We are Google's product.
The problem with mapping mass storage to memory at the application level becomes one of locking and threads.
You will have a very difficult time with any threaded applications if you just do a map to memory. Locking goes from being a real pain to a total freaking nightmare.
In effect traditional disk io acts like a message passing system which is much simpler to deal with when doing threaded applications.
The real issue I think was a failure to communicate between you and m.dillion.
m.dillion was thinking of the programing model where you can actually open a file and it looks like a big honking block of memory. That model is really handy in a single threaded application but really starts to become a big mess when you are doing more than one thread.
Yes burnt and burning are terms wildly used in the nuclear industry and in science.
Sort of like this place https://lasers.llnl.gov/ is called the National Ignition Facility.
So not it is not dumbing down science it is showing the flexibiltiy in the language. Sort of like how a satellite and or rocket is often called a bird. They sure are not avian but it is a common term.
Oh yes and off course all those NASA employees at the Johnson Space Flight center, Geologists with PHDs that work for the oil companies in Houston, EEs at Texas Instrments and Dell, Aerospace Engineers at Lockheed in Fort Worth, and the folks at SpaceX are all a bunch of beer drinking Bubbas.
Yea and the folks on Slashdot are open minded and don't fall for propaganda like all those simple minded sheep they so like to mock....
Actually yes.
As you put it e=mc2 when you extract energy from any system some mass must be lost.
Just as when you put energy into any system some mass must be gained.
It is just that the mass very small for most amounts of energy extracted or stored.
So yes even when you charge a battery it's mass must increase.
Fine turn off your PC and stop wasting power posting on slashdot.
Thanks I have not been keeping up.
I was also trying to keep it simple. FAR 91 and VFR are jibberish to most people.
I know about the FCC regs but yea I don't think they are ever followed.
I wonder if it a bigger issue at say 3000 ft or 25000ft? At higher altitude you can see more towers but they are farther away so most of them you probably can not hit.
At lower altitude you can see and hit more towers and that may cause more issues. I fear I don't know much about the issues with cell towers or even if they really are issues anymore.
He who pays the bills gets the say. You can pay in cash or labor in FOSS.
Just as you don't have to listen to a vote of your entire town on what you will eat for dinner. The major contributors are not the slaves of the users.
What is very democratic is if you don't like it you can fork the project and or go to another.
The only limits are set by your abilities and desire. All in all a very free system I think.
Sounds like that needs to change doesn't it.
He is correct but that is not what I was thinking.
The OS would know that it is flash and protect it from general access. The applications would still access it through a device driver but instead of going through an IO chip and the sata bus the OS would handle the IO on the memory bus.
The way things happen now is that when you do a disk read the data is copied from the drive across the bus and into the controller chip. The controller chip then does a direct memory access to a block of memory that you have told it to use as a buffer. This is a simple explanation of how it works BTW.
If you just mapped the flash to part of the address space the programs would never know the difference.
What would change is that when you did a read the data would be copied from the slower flash to the ram buffer all across the memory bus.
Now what I don't know is if that would cause issues with having the two different speeds of memory or not. It could be that it is faster to not do all of the IO on the Address bus. Of course you could have a dedicated DMA chip for memory to memory copies so it could be possible to unload the CPU from that task.
Of course when you are talking about things like netbooks the savings in cost may make any performance issues moot.
But I am not a hardware guy just a programmer.
Zero day means you get zero warning.
Also true viruses are actually rare. It have become a generic term. If you have to open and run the program then it is not a virus. That is a Trojan.
If the program can infect other programs or data files like say a jpeg then it is a virus. BTW it should be impossible for a datafile to be a vector but it is. I blame C strings and c IO for that. How it happened is simple and really is nobodies fault.
When I first started programing nobody worried about datafiles. You didn't even think that somebody would try and use your program to attack a system by creating a broken datafile. The very idea that you picture viewing program could be a security issue was just not on the radar.
To use an original metaphor must of us where learned to program like we lived in Mayberry then we where dropped into the Bronx. There is a lot of that Mayberry code still out there in the nooks and crannies.
Honestly I put trojans down to user IQ errors for the most part. Some do use say a browser exploit to trick you.
Of course the scary thing is now that we have 64 bit processors it could be possible to just map the flash right to the address space. I could see a netbook with a flash drive right on the motherboard.
What you will probably see soon is a new mini-pci standard. The current mini-pci standard has a USB port as part of the standard. Once they start putting USB 3.0 on there it will be trivial to put a USB 3.0 Flash drive chip on a card. You may even see a card that is both an SSD and WiFi which would be great for netbook makers.
Yes I know. When I write HTML I have to keep several browsers around just to test with.
But the web developers are not the ones that are picking the browsers and almost none of them will not make their site work with IE so to the end user they are all the same.
But yea it sucks.