Ok, I think someone needs a tutorial in how caches work...
The most effective cache size for an application depends on a lot of factors: implementation (LRU, associative, adaptive), dataset, relative latencies, etc. But based on those if you get a 90% hit rate at N MB, and a 92% hit rate a 2N MB, making it bigger is usually a waste of money. For example...
Mechanical HDDs usually have a RAM cache of 8-32MB depending on HDD size. That's almost 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the XT's SSD. Is that RAM cache useless?
Most operating systems use extra RAM as a buffer cache - that's a few GB for possibly TBs of disk - is that useless?
Your web browser uses a couple GB on your disk to cache the entire Internet - is that useless?
A modern CPU usually has tiny (32-128K) L1 cache, a small (256K-1MB) L2 cache, and sometimes a somewhat larger (~8MB?) L3 cache. Are those useless? The L1 cache is really small, is that more useless than the L3 cache? In fact, for CPUs the diminishing return if the cache is fully associative is about 64K - if it's direct or 2-way associative it may be more like 256K-1MB, but beyond that it's not worth the additional cost.
Oh, and as far as my guess at 2/3 the performance of the OCZ for 1/3 the cost... RTFA:) This was comparing the OCZ hybrid with 60GB SSD used as cache for a 5400RPM HDD vs. the XT which uses 4GB SSD as cache for a 7200RPM HDD. There was no comparison to a direct SSD, and the OCZ hybrid is going to have the same performance issue "on the first run".
I just built a new machine, did a clean install of Windows 7 64-bit with a few apps/drivers (just the ones that came with my motherboard, mouse/keyboard, BD drive, graphics card).
My (240GB SSD) HDD now has about 40GB used. I haven't even installed Office on it (I think that's 5GB+ alone these days!?), let alone a Linux instance under VMWare. Or a whole bunch of random apps/utils I used. Or a few games...
Modern software has grown (ridiculously) to fill modern storage.
Oh, and it hasn't taken quite as long to make a hybrid drive as you think - you can get a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT drive with 4GB SSD cache for $100. Same storage as the OCZ PCIe card, and given how good cache hit rates are in practice (ie. your point), probably 2/3 the performance at less than 1/3 the cost.
Oh, and the Intel Z68 chipset (on the motherboard I just bought) supports using any 20+GB SSD drive as a cache for your HDD. Haven't tried it, but it's supposed to be similar in performance to something like the Momentus...
Well, I just bought a Vertex 2 (SATA 2 rates are plenty for me and I couldn't pass up a crazy deal - 240GB SSD for just over $300!) so I hope it's reliable;)
Only been a week but so far but (in a desktop) it's SO worth it in boot time alone (and the fact that it's totally silent doesn't hurt).
This demo is rendering to an HTML5 *canvas* as a virtualized framebuffer in an interpreted language with no hardware support whatsoever. Are you *seriously* trying to use this as a complaint against Javascript? I remember back when "demo" just meant "write a cool app to show off"...
Of course it's not the way someone would build a real app in Javascript, but it's an excellent demo to help people understand what the platform can do and how it might be improved. And for those of us who understand all of the tools that went into it, it's just pretty damn cool.
A couple weeks ago a story was posted about a demo that booted a real 2.6 Linux kernel image with ramdisk entirely in Javascript: JSLinux.
That takes a whole 6 seconds to boot to a bash prompt *in Javascript* on my machine. SO SLOOOW, Javascript sucks!!!;)
Oh and BTW all iPhone 4s are completely identical in terms of what bands they support. It's a single model worldwide. The only difference is the US ones are network-locked to ATT (which has nothing to do with frequency support).
Not "all iPhone 4s" - the iPhone 4 released for Verizon is CDMA (actually uses a Qualcomm dual GSM/CDMA chip, but only CDMA is enabled). The original iPhone 4 is GSM-only. Though the switch to the Qualcomm chip does mean it's possible/likely that Apple will support both GCM and CDMA with one device with the "iPhone 5"...
Of the majors, that leaves you with AT&T or T-Mobile. There are a lot of smaller GSM carriers, but many of them are regional and/or will end up roaming in areas they don't have coverage, so I'm not sure if it's worth looking to hard at them.
The real reason why open source often lags isn't patents or licensing.
It is experience, organization, money. manpower. resources, markets and marketing,
IMO figuring out what the *market* wants is the biggest issue. In general, corporate software developers build what their customers want, and open source developers build what they want. And why wouldn't this be the case? I'd hate to work for free on a project I didn't like or want to use. But that doesn't always translate to something suited to the average mainstream user...
It's not fuck off money when HTC will now be paying $5 (as HUGE amount for volume consumer electronics) for every Android device they sell in the future...
As has much of the history of radar/EM broadcasting, aviation, metallurgy, and who knows, probably the wheel:) Nothing like a good war to cause a leap in technology...
Yeah, his name was "Johnny Edge". Crazy story, but in the end he walked out without being scanned, arrested, or fined. Clearly the TSA dicks can threaten you with whatever they want (a mall cop can threaten you with whatever he wants, too) - but apparently in the end they realized he was free to walk away...
The difference is that (it sounds like) you worked your ass off to make a living and get to where you are without going to college, whereas these 20 year olds are being convinced to drop out by dumping a big fat pile of cash at their feet. Regardless of the end result, this is a total publicity stunt...
Of course, I watch movies at home too, and of course I occasionally use "discs". I was sort of kidding in my original comment.
Actually, I wasn't being sarcastic (I know, new concept on slashdot;) - I work in the streaming media industry, and am curious as to how people get their content... unfortunately for digital media the studios currently have complete control over pricing of streaming media, VOD or EST (electronic sell through, ie. purchases), which is why it's still hard to compete with actual physical DVDs from Netflix or Redbox on price.
As far as the various ways to see movies - honestly, no matter what the studios say I think downloading/bittorrent is a tiny minority. And no matter what Internet pundits or Apple says, watching movies on your PC is also a minority. The fortunes in this market will be made by the companies that can most effectively get the most commonly consumed media (recent DVD/VOD releases and first run TV shows) to the masses (middle class non- or semi-technological families) in their living room (sorry, but no matter what slashdot users think, in Middle America PC, table, phone, etc streaming will never be more than a fraction of the good old sit your ass down and watch a movie on your television majority).
I'm not anywhere near the caliber of UI expertise as Norman or Nielsen. B
Don't sell yourself short, half of Nielsen's claim to fame is being opinionated more than "right"...
I especially love his quote "the developer community's apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public."
This could almost be translated to "we have told you over and over how we think you should design a UI, and yet you STILL try to innovate!"
Like many other things, the market will eventually separate the interfaces people like to use from those they don't. Apple's meteoric growth vs. Microsoft has clearly shown this. And I'm kind of hoping Microsoft of all companies leads the way for the next round of innovations with Kinect (which in fact is pretty amazing technology, right now only limited by the lack of ideas for creative applications of it).
They don't have to proactively find bogus reviews, they just need to respond to users flagging reviews as bogus. It's not a new concept, and many websites already do it. Yelp actually does try to filter bogus reviews automatically already - but they don't currently take user feedback in the process (which would probably help their algorithm...)
And in this specific case (which is all I was talking about anyway) it is totally obvious from the comments that they have never actually been to this dentist. All I said was that I hope the dentist realizes he made a bad decision, fixes it, and Yelp then removes the bogus reviews. No idea how that became the springboard for your rant;)
will the makers WANT to write such firmware on a per model basis? that's the real question... they'd much rather sell you a new tv then write software for a sale that already closed at best buy 6 months ago.
No, in fact, they definitely don't want to keep updating and maintaining software/firmware for their older models - as you said, there is almost no profit in it for them.
I think the motivations to do so will be competition (I'm not likely to buy another Sony TV if Sony abandons it after a year but Samsung updates theirs for 3-4 years), recurring revenue (selling/distributing new apps on old devices), and contracts (Netflix, Pandora, etc. get guarantees that the firmware updates will be published at least X times a year for Y years in exchange for using their service as an advertising/marketing point). But given the number of devices all of these CE companies release each year, that's a huge investment in maintenance/support...
Not sure exactly what you mean by "commodity", but Roku seems pretty close now... (ie, it's cheap, and will soon have a huge amount of competition from similarly cheap boxes from companies like WD, Iomega, Asus, etc)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I think someone needs a tutorial in how caches work...
The most effective cache size for an application depends on a lot of factors: implementation (LRU, associative, adaptive), dataset, relative latencies, etc. But based on those if you get a 90% hit rate at N MB, and a 92% hit rate a 2N MB, making it bigger is usually a waste of money. For example...
Mechanical HDDs usually have a RAM cache of 8-32MB depending on HDD size. That's almost 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the XT's SSD. Is that RAM cache useless?
Most operating systems use extra RAM as a buffer cache - that's a few GB for possibly TBs of disk - is that useless?
Your web browser uses a couple GB on your disk to cache the entire Internet - is that useless?
A modern CPU usually has tiny (32-128K) L1 cache, a small (256K-1MB) L2 cache, and sometimes a somewhat larger (~8MB?) L3 cache. Are those useless? The L1 cache is really small, is that more useless than the L3 cache? In fact, for CPUs the diminishing return if the cache is fully associative is about 64K - if it's direct or 2-way associative it may be more like 256K-1MB, but beyond that it's not worth the additional cost.
Oh, and as far as my guess at 2/3 the performance of the OCZ for 1/3 the cost... RTFA :) This was comparing the OCZ hybrid with 60GB SSD used as cache for a 5400RPM HDD vs. the XT which uses 4GB SSD as cache for a 7200RPM HDD. There was no comparison to a direct SSD, and the OCZ hybrid is going to have the same performance issue "on the first run".
Wow, congrats, good things really do come in threes... 30% raise, a 3 way, and now your penis is 3" long!
I just built a new machine, did a clean install of Windows 7 64-bit with a few apps/drivers (just the ones that came with my motherboard, mouse/keyboard, BD drive, graphics card).
My (240GB SSD) HDD now has about 40GB used. I haven't even installed Office on it (I think that's 5GB+ alone these days!?), let alone a Linux instance under VMWare. Or a whole bunch of random apps/utils I used. Or a few games...
Modern software has grown (ridiculously) to fill modern storage.
Oh, and it hasn't taken quite as long to make a hybrid drive as you think - you can get a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT drive with 4GB SSD cache for $100. Same storage as the OCZ PCIe card, and given how good cache hit rates are in practice (ie. your point), probably 2/3 the performance at less than 1/3 the cost.
Oh, and the Intel Z68 chipset (on the motherboard I just bought) supports using any 20+GB SSD drive as a cache for your HDD. Haven't tried it, but it's supposed to be similar in performance to something like the Momentus...
Well, I just bought a Vertex 2 (SATA 2 rates are plenty for me and I couldn't pass up a crazy deal - 240GB SSD for just over $300!) so I hope it's reliable ;)
Only been a week but so far but (in a desktop) it's SO worth it in boot time alone (and the fact that it's totally silent doesn't hurt).
This demo is rendering to an HTML5 *canvas* as a virtualized framebuffer in an interpreted language with no hardware support whatsoever. Are you *seriously* trying to use this as a complaint against Javascript? I remember back when "demo" just meant "write a cool app to show off"...
Of course it's not the way someone would build a real app in Javascript, but it's an excellent demo to help people understand what the platform can do and how it might be improved. And for those of us who understand all of the tools that went into it, it's just pretty damn cool.
A couple weeks ago a story was posted about a demo that booted a real 2.6 Linux kernel image with ramdisk entirely in Javascript: JSLinux.
That takes a whole 6 seconds to boot to a bash prompt *in Javascript* on my machine. SO SLOOOW, Javascript sucks!!! ;)
Yeah, that's a bit of a jump from the 4MB it required in 1994 :)
Oh and BTW all iPhone 4s are completely identical in terms of what bands they support. It's a single model worldwide. The only difference is the US ones are network-locked to ATT (which has nothing to do with frequency support).
Not "all iPhone 4s" - the iPhone 4 released for Verizon is CDMA (actually uses a Qualcomm dual GSM/CDMA chip, but only CDMA is enabled). The original iPhone 4 is GSM-only. Though the switch to the Qualcomm chip does mean it's possible/likely that Apple will support both GCM and CDMA with one device with the "iPhone 5"...
...then you can throw out Verizon, they are CDMA.
Of the majors, that leaves you with AT&T or T-Mobile. There are a lot of smaller GSM carriers, but many of them are regional and/or will end up roaming in areas they don't have coverage, so I'm not sure if it's worth looking to hard at them.
The real reason why open source often lags isn't patents or licensing.
It is experience, organization, money. manpower. resources, markets and marketing,
IMO figuring out what the *market* wants is the biggest issue. In general, corporate software developers build what their customers want, and open source developers build what they want. And why wouldn't this be the case? I'd hate to work for free on a project I didn't like or want to use. But that doesn't always translate to something suited to the average mainstream user...
It's not fuck off money when HTC will now be paying $5 (as HUGE amount for volume consumer electronics) for every Android device they sell in the future...
The only caveat is that you can't ever leave.
Ah, must be "DMV".
As has much of the history of radar/EM broadcasting, aviation, metallurgy, and who knows, probably the wheel :) Nothing like a good war to cause a leap in technology...
Damn, now they are going to have to re-render it.
Yeah, except throughout the history of the supercomputer the primary use has been calculating nuclear bomb yields...
Yeah, his name was "Johnny Edge". Crazy story, but in the end he walked out without being scanned, arrested, or fined. Clearly the TSA dicks can threaten you with whatever they want (a mall cop can threaten you with whatever he wants, too) - but apparently in the end they realized he was free to walk away...
The difference is that (it sounds like) you worked your ass off to make a living and get to where you are without going to college, whereas these 20 year olds are being convinced to drop out by dumping a big fat pile of cash at their feet. Regardless of the end result, this is a total publicity stunt...
That issue has been covered many times... they are not forcing you to get on the plane, you are always free to walk away.
Of course, I watch movies at home too, and of course I occasionally use "discs". I was sort of kidding in my original comment.
Actually, I wasn't being sarcastic (I know, new concept on slashdot ;) - I work in the streaming media industry, and am curious as to how people get their content... unfortunately for digital media the studios currently have complete control over pricing of streaming media, VOD or EST (electronic sell through, ie. purchases), which is why it's still hard to compete with actual physical DVDs from Netflix or Redbox on price.
As far as the various ways to see movies - honestly, no matter what the studios say I think downloading/bittorrent is a tiny minority. And no matter what Internet pundits or Apple says, watching movies on your PC is also a minority. The fortunes in this market will be made by the companies that can most effectively get the most commonly consumed media (recent DVD/VOD releases and first run TV shows) to the masses (middle class non- or semi-technological families) in their living room (sorry, but no matter what slashdot users think, in Middle America PC, table, phone, etc streaming will never be more than a fraction of the good old sit your ass down and watch a movie on your television majority).
Ah, ok - well then I stand by my point ;)
http://iomega.com/iomegatv-media-center/ ...and I could probably add about 10 more links to similar products. I suppose a few of these aren't shipping yet, but many of these feature premium streaming services on their own or through a partnership with Boxee, so Roku will be joining them in the commodity streaming player wars in a matter of months...
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/WDTV/
http://usa.asus.com/Multimedia/Digital_Media_Player/OPlay_HD2/
http://delive.netgear.com/
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=318
I'm not anywhere near the caliber of UI expertise as Norman or Nielsen. B
Don't sell yourself short, half of Nielsen's claim to fame is being opinionated more than "right"...
I especially love his quote "the developer community's apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public."
This could almost be translated to "we have told you over and over how we think you should design a UI, and yet you STILL try to innovate!"
Like many other things, the market will eventually separate the interfaces people like to use from those they don't. Apple's meteoric growth vs. Microsoft has clearly shown this. And I'm kind of hoping Microsoft of all companies leads the way for the next round of innovations with Kinect (which in fact is pretty amazing technology, right now only limited by the lack of ideas for creative applications of it).
They don't have to proactively find bogus reviews, they just need to respond to users flagging reviews as bogus. It's not a new concept, and many websites already do it. Yelp actually does try to filter bogus reviews automatically already - but they don't currently take user feedback in the process (which would probably help their algorithm...)
And in this specific case (which is all I was talking about anyway) it is totally obvious from the comments that they have never actually been to this dentist. All I said was that I hope the dentist realizes he made a bad decision, fixes it, and Yelp then removes the bogus reviews. No idea how that became the springboard for your rant ;)
will the makers WANT to write such firmware on a per model basis? that's the real question... they'd much rather sell you a new tv then write software for a sale that already closed at best buy 6 months ago.
No, in fact, they definitely don't want to keep updating and maintaining software/firmware for their older models - as you said, there is almost no profit in it for them.
I think the motivations to do so will be competition (I'm not likely to buy another Sony TV if Sony abandons it after a year but Samsung updates theirs for 3-4 years), recurring revenue (selling/distributing new apps on old devices), and contracts (Netflix, Pandora, etc. get guarantees that the firmware updates will be published at least X times a year for Y years in exchange for using their service as an advertising/marketing point). But given the number of devices all of these CE companies release each year, that's a huge investment in maintenance/support...
Actually, almost all network-connected TVs and BD players sold today run Linux.
Not sure exactly what you mean by "commodity", but Roku seems pretty close now... (ie, it's cheap, and will soon have a huge amount of competition from similarly cheap boxes from companies like WD, Iomega, Asus, etc)
Just curious... do you watch any new release (to home market) movies? If so, how do you watch them? (VOD service, bittorrent download, etc)
If you don't care to watch new releases - well, nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't mean others don't either..