I'd agree it used to be, but since F8 and CentOS 5.1 I'm using it across most my machines. With setroubleshoot the logging is very clear and many alerts will even tell you exactly what to run to fix the problem. The more complicated stuff isn't worse than following the FAQ link and then sending the actual audit alert through audit2allow and some other commands to update the policy to allow whatever it was complaining about.
Personally I think it's painless enough now that I can use it to coddle my inner paranoid.
I'd have less reason to put off doing the things I need to do
That would assume that just because the RIAA and MPAA disappeared there would not be any entertainment produced. A more likely possibility would be that instead there was even more entertainment produced.
You don't like the RIAA? Just stop listening to music!
Just stop listening to RIAA music. There's plenty of non-RIAA music, and social music services like last.fm or pandora to help you find music you like, as opposed to music the RIAA wants you to buy.
existing iSCSI over 1GB tcpip is a lot less than 1/4 of 4GB
I'd have to wonder what kind of config you're running then. I've gotten 90MB per second over $15 RTL8169 cards and a $70 D-Link gigabit switch. Between consumer grade pc's running ietd on linux to a linux iscsi initiator. I have no doubt that 10GB ethernet will wipe the floor with FC.
Remember the planning phase when the iSCSI sales rep promised better performance per $ than SAN?
Remember the planning phase when the SAN vendor promised cheaper storage than disks in every server? I saw an article the other day about a SAN consultant who had helped companies cut storage costs by $75000 per terabyte. That's impressive for something that costs around $200...
Your database servers may have some requirements (particularly if, as is so often the case, the application developers are using the database the wrong way), but the vast majority of servers can share SAN and NAS connection without a problem, even on 1Gb networks.
So get the expensive option for your databases and let them carry the whole cost for the expensive infrastructure. Maybe it turns out you'd be better off distributing the databases and putting them on cheaper hardware too. Consolidation and expensive hardware isn't an end to itself (well, except for the ones actually selling the expensive hardware).
to do so would destroy ISO's credibility in the wider world
And to not do so would destroy ISO's credibility in the wider world, as well.
Many ISO standards have had flaws before; now adding corruption and outright blatant incompetence at their primary purpose to the list of sins will impact ISO relevance. Perhaps that was partially Microsofts intention; the end result is more likely to be a migration to a standards building process with more integrity.
This will work
No it wont. This isn't 1990 where people communicate through mass media or read books and encyclopedias to get information. Anyone using the internet to look up ISO will come across references to the corruption in question.
even those that support them typically now are digital devices with an analogue to digital convertor for legacy support.
DVI-D only devices aren't that common, most have DVI-I. DVI-I is essentially digital inputs plus VGA pins, so you just need a cheapo adapter.
VGA-only things, on the other hand, are fairly common and it will take a fair while until they're gone, so all things considering, I'd say it's a fair compromise for the moment.
Actually, I'd say toying with the formula is exactly what's needed. The 8.9" screen is nice, but mainly because the old version left a lot of space unused. A 7" screen version with a 7.1" rest-of-the-computer would also be nice. A Psion series 3/5 size would be even nicer.
There are a whole host of sizes that can and will be, or become, usable, cheap and practical in the next few years. The concept to realize is that this is not a desktop replacement, this is a versatile data entry/display/net access device. As long as they're kept _cheap_ you can even sell various models to the same customer; I'd like the 9" version for office use, but a smaller (large pocket sized), more durable version (and more power efficient, preferably with standard size batteries) would be useful out in the woods or on vacation.
why people make acquisitions purely due to design and dimension of a laptop
I certainly do it. I find current laptops largely useless; they could lower the price to close to zero and I still wouldn't find it a decent desktop replacement. Nor do I consider anything with a 15 inch screen particularly portable.
For me, standard laptops are simply a bad compromise. Bad enough that I'd rather lug around whatever data I need to on an USB drive between decent performance desktops.
Sure there's a category of UMPC's I find useful, but they're in the $2000 range. That's not a price I'm prepared to pay for what is essentially a portable USB data reader/writer.
Enter the EEE. It's small enough to fit (just barely) within acceptable dimensions (the Psion series 3 was the last similar thing I found acceptable). Its cheap enough so that I can even buy one now and then another when the 9" screen comes out (alternately, if a 7 inch total size version comes out). Performance is good enough for a portable device (it's _not_ a desktop replacement, nor does it try and fail to be one), keyboard is qwerty. It's a data reader and data entry device with network access. Exactly what I need out of a portable.
And then it even runs Linux. I mean, that's almost too much of the good stuff.
The continued taboo of suicide essentially comes down to the refusal of people to face their own mortality. They fear death and the loss of existence and meaning so much they cannot abide others voluntarily choosing to end their existence.
In its abstracted essence, dispassionately viewed, suicide is merely a life span adjustment. No more or less valid than any other such adjustment, smoking, taking a dangerous job, engaging in dangerous sports, etc. Any such activity carries a penalty on the length of life, suicide is merely a slightly more real-time rescheduling the termination point.
Troubles are temporary? Life is temporary, existence an infinitesimal aberration in the fabric of endless nothing.
People look for difficult and dangerous ways to accomplish it?
The most difficult and dangerous way to accomplish it is to stay alive.
just about every corporation out there today (and yesterday) had participated in monopolistic behavior at some point.
Fine. I have no objection at all to banning them from public sales. Most of them have competitors, perhaps smaller, perhaps much smaller, who have been content to play by the rules, so this would be another good way to encourage a competetive free market.
After all, screening employees criminal records isn't that rare today so I can hardly see why we couldn't require even higher standards from corporate entities. Breaking competition law and damaging the free market should not be a profitable venture.
I'm willing to pay a premium to have technology advance faster.
Sure. The thing is indications are that patents make technology advance slower instead. Monopolies do not tend to encourage efficiency; Microsoft with all its resources can barely keep pace with an underfinanced rag-tag bunch of geeks.
There are various other models for diverting funds to have technology advance faster without the damaging aspects of monopoly rights; they were never intended to accomplish faster technological advances, they were originally intended as a way to enrich the friends of the crown at the expense of the populace. As such, they are serving their original purpose well.
Ideas are a dime a dozen; attaching monopoly rights to them simply makes the market less efficient and ends up with transaction costs that dwarf the inherent value of the improvement.
in cases where the patent is non-trivial
There are no non-trivial patents. All innovation is evolutionary steps from previous work. For anyone sufficiently skilled in the appropriate art, all solutions are obvious.
The only way you can delude yourself into being amazed at a new step is by not knowing the intermediary steps. And that, in itself, precludes you from being sufficiently skilled.
The days are over when you could lock an inventor in a basement for 20 years and he'd come out with something revolutionary. Today, if you lock an inventor in a basement the only thing you'll get is something nineteen years out of date. Mass communication and mass evolutionary development beats a single genious every time.
As far as I can tell, Red Hat has a very good reputation and is widely appreciated. They hire a lot of important coders, they contribute much and they release most of their software under GPL. Sure you have the distro of the day crowd, but they'll always be installing new distributions.
If they didn't plan properly then that's their fault when i do start to use all the bandwidth all the time.
Personally I've been upgraded two times without even asking for it. From 2.5 to 8 to 24mbit. While it's 'nice', it's by no means necessary, and I can certainly wait for background downloading of whatever data I want. So I place the blame solidly on the ISP; if you don't want the usage levels, then cap the bitrate. I want a fixed price, but I could certainly live with a 4-8mbit connection.
But if the DSL and Cable guys are whining now, just wait 'til we get the gigawhine about to erupt in the wireless/3G space. That's being sold apparently barely even expecting customers to surf the web or read mail.
Measured by performance, yes. But then, I haven't based CPU purchases on performance since I was a teenager and computers had single-digit MHz's. Over time you end up with far more computing power if you buy best price/performance more often and every time, instead of spending the premium for higher end on more rarely occuring purchases.
I think there is a risk over the next five years of Intel again gaining monopoly or near-monopoly status
I doubt it. It's not a new situation, and as long as AMD can keep delivering better price/performance they will retain significant marketshare. If they fail at that tho, or if Intel lowers prices... but then again, Intel is too fond of charging what the market will bear, so that would be unlikely.
After all, in many games there are places where ads would be appropriate.
Many sites too. How about... price comparison sites? That would be both relevant and appropriate, and, I think, highly effective as the viewers are commonly those considering an imminent purchase. In fact, I sometimes wonder why some segments even bother advertising elsewhere.
Of course, it also requires the product and price to be competitive, so maybe that's why.
Who needs to sell pirated software when you can get it for free? Not to mention that tougher legislation makes pirated software more lucrative, not less.
If one really wanted to solve this problem one would simply free up distribution so anyone could sell any IP they wanted, with a simple mandatory royalty/tax percentage going directly to the artists and writers. Prices would fall towards free market equilibrium and the huge discrepancy of 1200% markup from production price would disappear. So would any profitability in piracy (into which you can include the RIAA labels).
DNA now that is good, and it is something difficult to duplicate.
No need to duplicate it, free samples are falling off you everywhere you go. So no, DNA isn't very good either.
There is however a very good biometric one can use. A neural imprint of a specific token; it currently can't be read without the cooperation of the person, it leaves no imprint around except as the owner desires and controls.
It's known as a 'password'. A technology that is, perhaps, new and radical, but far more secure than other biometrics. Which, unfortunately, isn't particularly secure, just less insecure than the crap the scam artists of the biometrics industry are trying to push on the gullible.
and if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding
That's called a non sequitur.
Most people who receive money in exchange for their work do so without having monopoly rights. There is no evidence that monopoly rights are necessary for monetizing software development; in fact, there's a vast array of evidence suggesting it's not at all necessary.
That evidence ranges from open source companies on one end to the vast majority of programmers hired for coding specific purpose software which is never released and for which copyright or patents is irrelevant.
On the other side is, eh, Microsoft. Claiming that they need software to cost money or they have no business model.
$0.17 Musicians' unions - Dump it, they're obviously not doing a good job. $0.80 Packaging/manufacturing - Cut it. CD burning is cheap; could be done in the shop on demand. $0.82 Publishing royalties - Double it to $1.60. This is what actually goes to songwriters etc, which is the actual reason for copyright $0.80 Retail profit - Whatever they feel they can take; that's free market competition, say it's fair as it is. $0.90 Distribution - CD's could be printed in the shop on demand. $1.60 Artists' royalties - fair at $1.60. Again, this part fits in the purpose of copyright. $1.70 Label profit - Zero. Labels are not in the public interest and should not be supported by government sponsored monopolies. $2.40 Marketing/promotion - Zero. Marketing is not in the public interest and should not be protected by copyright. $2.91 Label overhead - Zero again. Not in the public interest. They can compete like anyone else. $3.89 Retail overhead - Print on demand reduces overhead drastically. $1.50 for amortized print-on-demand machine.
See, I cut the cost down to the $5 range, while doubling songwriter royalties and keeping artist royalties.
I also cut down the amount of annoying marketing, leveling the playing field for independent artists. Much easier to get playtime and gain popularity because people _like your music_ if you don't have to compete against juggernaut marketing machines and payola.
Now, to make it even simpler, dump the exclusive copying right of copyright, reconstruct it as a royalty right and simply put a 50% sales tax on the material going to the artists and writers in question. Wal-mart et al could copy and sell to their hearts content, _competing_ in a _free market_, while the social purpose of copyright is served by the appropriate institution that handles all such social purposes.
Exactly the kind of use I had in mind. The huge but very linear datasets where track jumping is minimal that tend to make up the vast bulk of personal storage these days and that will only increase.
OS, software, databases, etc, need low latency to be 'fast'. Bulk multimedia storage doesn't.
I'd go apeshit for a 5TB drive that's quiet, inexpensive and could transfer on the order or 30-40MB/sec.
A 5-10 TB drive would probably be doable today with existing surface density. I dont think you'd lose that much on the transfer rate tho; data rate depends on the surface velocity which remains almost as high due to the increased circumference.
And, yes, I had a bigfoot too. It's not something you want to put your OS on; then again, as noted, flash might be the best thing to put that on whatever you do to disk speed. Personally I have most my OS cached in actual RAM on my workstations in combination with the RAM on my iSCSI storage servers. But it's not that part that causes most issues; it's finding actual space for storing the ever increasing amount of mythtv recordings...
I'd imagine that one way to forestall the inevitable victory of SSD would be more intelligent caching and a larger onboard cache for hard drives.
Actually I'd suggest they play their strengths rather than their weakness. Disks are never going to compete with flash on seek times. They'd be better off dumping the entire 'speed' thing to flash and moving backwards to slower rotational speeds and vastly larger platter area. Can you imagine 5 1/4 inch disks with todays data density?
In the real world, spending one billion dollars to save a life might be a bad idea if spending that same money on some other program would save two lives.
Indeed. Considering that traffic has killed approximately 280.000 Americans since 9/11 one could wonder how many lives would have been saved, had the 'war on terror' money been spent on improving road safety.
One could also question wether terrorists would find terror a useful weapon if nobody cared more than they do about traffic risks.
I wonder what would happen if Al Qaeda claimed they'd infiltrated the safety departments of several multinational car manufacturers, as well as the DMV and a multitude of road planning commissions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd agree it used to be, but since F8 and CentOS 5.1 I'm using it across most my machines. With setroubleshoot the logging is very clear and many alerts will even tell you exactly what to run to fix the problem. The more complicated stuff isn't worse than following the FAQ link and then sending the actual audit alert through audit2allow and some other commands to update the policy to allow whatever it was complaining about.
Personally I think it's painless enough now that I can use it to coddle my inner paranoid.
I'd have less reason to put off doing the things I need to do
That would assume that just because the RIAA and MPAA disappeared there would not be any entertainment produced. A more likely possibility would be that instead there was even more entertainment produced.
You don't like the RIAA? Just stop listening to music!
Just stop listening to RIAA music. There's plenty of non-RIAA music, and social music services like last.fm or pandora to help you find music you like, as opposed to music the RIAA wants you to buy.
existing iSCSI over 1GB tcpip is a lot less than 1/4 of 4GB
I'd have to wonder what kind of config you're running then. I've gotten 90MB per second over $15 RTL8169 cards and a $70 D-Link gigabit switch. Between consumer grade pc's running ietd on linux to a linux iscsi initiator. I have no doubt that 10GB ethernet will wipe the floor with FC.
Remember the planning phase when the iSCSI sales rep promised better performance per $ than SAN?
Remember the planning phase when the SAN vendor promised cheaper storage than disks in every server? I saw an article the other day about a SAN consultant who had helped companies cut storage costs by $75000 per terabyte. That's impressive for something that costs around $200...
Your database servers may have some requirements (particularly if, as is so often the case, the application developers are using the database the wrong way), but the vast majority of servers can share SAN and NAS connection without a problem, even on 1Gb networks.
So get the expensive option for your databases and let them carry the whole cost for the expensive infrastructure. Maybe it turns out you'd be better off distributing the databases and putting them on cheaper hardware too. Consolidation and expensive hardware isn't an end to itself (well, except for the ones actually selling the expensive hardware).
to do so would destroy ISO's credibility in the wider world
And to not do so would destroy ISO's credibility in the wider world, as well.
Many ISO standards have had flaws before; now adding corruption and outright blatant incompetence at their primary purpose to the list of sins will impact ISO relevance. Perhaps that was partially Microsofts intention; the end result is more likely to be a migration to a standards building process with more integrity.
This will work
No it wont. This isn't 1990 where people communicate through mass media or read books and encyclopedias to get information. Anyone using the internet to look up ISO will come across references to the corruption in question.
even those that support them typically now are digital devices with an analogue to digital convertor for legacy support.
DVI-D only devices aren't that common, most have DVI-I. DVI-I is essentially digital inputs plus VGA pins, so you just need a cheapo adapter.
VGA-only things, on the other hand, are fairly common and it will take a fair while until they're gone, so all things considering, I'd say it's a fair compromise for the moment.
Toying with that formula is unwise
Actually, I'd say toying with the formula is exactly what's needed. The 8.9" screen is nice, but mainly because the old version left a lot of space unused. A 7" screen version with a 7.1" rest-of-the-computer would also be nice. A Psion series 3/5 size would be even nicer.
There are a whole host of sizes that can and will be, or become, usable, cheap and practical in the next few years. The concept to realize is that this is not a desktop replacement, this is a versatile data entry/display/net access device. As long as they're kept _cheap_ you can even sell various models to the same customer; I'd like the 9" version for office use, but a smaller (large pocket sized), more durable version (and more power efficient, preferably with standard size batteries) would be useful out in the woods or on vacation.
CEO of Seagate said he wasn't worried about SSD impacting their market
Frankly, I'd be surprised if Seagate was losing much business to SSDs yet. Samsung, on the other hand, appears to be wiping the floor with them.
why people make acquisitions purely due to design and dimension of a laptop
I certainly do it. I find current laptops largely useless; they could lower the price to close to zero and I still wouldn't find it a decent desktop replacement. Nor do I consider anything with a 15 inch screen particularly portable.
For me, standard laptops are simply a bad compromise. Bad enough that I'd rather lug around whatever data I need to on an USB drive between decent performance desktops.
Sure there's a category of UMPC's I find useful, but they're in the $2000 range. That's not a price I'm prepared to pay for what is essentially a portable USB data reader/writer.
Enter the EEE. It's small enough to fit (just barely) within acceptable dimensions (the Psion series 3 was the last similar thing I found acceptable). Its cheap enough so that I can even buy one now and then another when the 9" screen comes out (alternately, if a 7 inch total size version comes out). Performance is good enough for a portable device (it's _not_ a desktop replacement, nor does it try and fail to be one), keyboard is qwerty. It's a data reader and data entry device with network access. Exactly what I need out of a portable.
And then it even runs Linux. I mean, that's almost too much of the good stuff.
The continued taboo of suicide essentially comes down to the refusal of people to face their own mortality. They fear death and the loss of existence and meaning so much they cannot abide others voluntarily choosing to end their existence.
In its abstracted essence, dispassionately viewed, suicide is merely a life span adjustment. No more or less valid than any other such adjustment, smoking, taking a dangerous job, engaging in dangerous sports, etc. Any such activity carries a penalty on the length of life, suicide is merely a slightly more real-time rescheduling the termination point.
Troubles are temporary? Life is temporary, existence an infinitesimal aberration in the fabric of endless nothing.
People look for difficult and dangerous ways to accomplish it?
The most difficult and dangerous way to accomplish it is to stay alive.
The easiest to just wait.
It will come.
just about every corporation out there today (and yesterday) had participated in monopolistic behavior at some point.
Fine. I have no objection at all to banning them from public sales. Most of them have competitors, perhaps smaller, perhaps much smaller, who have been content to play by the rules, so this would be another good way to encourage a competetive free market.
After all, screening employees criminal records isn't that rare today so I can hardly see why we couldn't require even higher standards from corporate entities. Breaking competition law and damaging the free market should not be a profitable venture.
I'm willing to pay a premium to have technology advance faster.
Sure. The thing is indications are that patents make technology advance slower instead. Monopolies do not tend to encourage efficiency; Microsoft with all its resources can barely keep pace with an underfinanced rag-tag bunch of geeks.
There are various other models for diverting funds to have technology advance faster without the damaging aspects of monopoly rights; they were never intended to accomplish faster technological advances, they were originally intended as a way to enrich the friends of the crown at the expense of the populace. As such, they are serving their original purpose well.
only the idea is valuable
Ideas are a dime a dozen; attaching monopoly rights to them simply makes the market less efficient and ends up with transaction costs that dwarf the inherent value of the improvement.
in cases where the patent is non-trivial
There are no non-trivial patents. All innovation is evolutionary steps from previous work. For anyone sufficiently skilled in the appropriate art, all solutions are obvious.
The only way you can delude yourself into being amazed at a new step is by not knowing the intermediary steps. And that, in itself, precludes you from being sufficiently skilled.
The days are over when you could lock an inventor in a basement for 20 years and he'd come out with something revolutionary. Today, if you lock an inventor in a basement the only thing you'll get is something nineteen years out of date. Mass communication and mass evolutionary development beats a single genious every time.
is shunned by it's own community.
What part of which community?
As far as I can tell, Red Hat has a very good reputation and is widely appreciated. They hire a lot of important coders, they contribute much and they release most of their software under GPL. Sure you have the distro of the day crowd, but they'll always be installing new distributions.
If they didn't plan properly then that's their fault when i do start to use all the bandwidth all the time.
Personally I've been upgraded two times without even asking for it. From 2.5 to 8 to 24mbit. While it's 'nice', it's by no means necessary, and I can certainly wait for background downloading of whatever data I want. So I place the blame solidly on the ISP; if you don't want the usage levels, then cap the bitrate. I want a fixed price, but I could certainly live with a 4-8mbit connection.
But if the DSL and Cable guys are whining now, just wait 'til we get the gigawhine about to erupt in the wireless/3G space. That's being sold apparently barely even expecting customers to surf the web or read mail.
Intel has a pretty major advantage over AMD.
Measured by performance, yes. But then, I haven't based CPU purchases on performance since I was a teenager and computers had single-digit MHz's. Over time you end up with far more computing power if you buy best price/performance more often and every time, instead of spending the premium for higher end on more rarely occuring purchases.
I think there is a risk over the next five years of Intel again gaining monopoly or near-monopoly status
I doubt it. It's not a new situation, and as long as AMD can keep delivering better price/performance they will retain significant marketshare. If they fail at that tho, or if Intel lowers prices... but then again, Intel is too fond of charging what the market will bear, so that would be unlikely.
After all, in many games there are places where ads would be appropriate.
Many sites too. How about... price comparison sites? That would be both relevant and appropriate, and, I think, highly effective as the viewers are commonly those considering an imminent purchase. In fact, I sometimes wonder why some segments even bother advertising elsewhere.
Of course, it also requires the product and price to be competitive, so maybe that's why.
If one really wanted to solve this problem one would simply free up distribution so anyone could sell any IP they wanted, with a simple mandatory royalty/tax percentage going directly to the artists and writers. Prices would fall towards free market equilibrium and the huge discrepancy of 1200% markup from production price would disappear. So would any profitability in piracy (into which you can include the RIAA labels).
and that of the general slashdot population
I'm sorry, we just haven't been paid as much as you.
So there's no technical reason to reject OOXML
With the level of bribes and vote stacking Microsoft had to engage in to get this passed it's obvious it would have been rejected on technical merits.
It significantly raises the barrier of entry
It significantly lowers the barrier of entry. Compared to figuring out someones password or stealing a key duplicating biometric data is trivial.
DNA now that is good, and it is something difficult to duplicate.
No need to duplicate it, free samples are falling off you everywhere you go. So no, DNA isn't very good either.
There is however a very good biometric one can use. A neural imprint of a specific token; it currently can't be read without the cooperation of the person, it leaves no imprint around except as the owner desires and controls.
It's known as a 'password'. A technology that is, perhaps, new and radical, but far more secure than other biometrics. Which, unfortunately, isn't particularly secure, just less insecure than the crap the scam artists of the biometrics industry are trying to push on the gullible.
and if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding
That's called a non sequitur.
Most people who receive money in exchange for their work do so without having monopoly rights. There is no evidence that monopoly rights are necessary for monetizing software development; in fact, there's a vast array of evidence suggesting it's not at all necessary.
That evidence ranges from open source companies on one end to the vast majority of programmers hired for coding specific purpose software which is never released and for which copyright or patents is irrelevant.
On the other side is, eh, Microsoft. Claiming that they need software to cost money or they have no business model.
No shit. Wonder what makes them say that then.
$0.17 Musicians' unions - Dump it, they're obviously not doing a good job.
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing - Cut it. CD burning is cheap; could be done in the shop on demand.
$0.82 Publishing royalties - Double it to $1.60. This is what actually goes to songwriters etc, which is the actual reason for copyright
$0.80 Retail profit - Whatever they feel they can take; that's free market competition, say it's fair as it is.
$0.90 Distribution - CD's could be printed in the shop on demand.
$1.60 Artists' royalties - fair at $1.60. Again, this part fits in the purpose of copyright.
$1.70 Label profit - Zero. Labels are not in the public interest and should not be supported by government sponsored monopolies.
$2.40 Marketing/promotion - Zero. Marketing is not in the public interest and should not be protected by copyright.
$2.91 Label overhead - Zero again. Not in the public interest. They can compete like anyone else.
$3.89 Retail overhead - Print on demand reduces overhead drastically. $1.50 for amortized print-on-demand machine.
See, I cut the cost down to the $5 range, while doubling songwriter royalties and keeping artist royalties.
I also cut down the amount of annoying marketing, leveling the playing field for independent artists. Much easier to get playtime and gain popularity because people _like your music_ if you don't have to compete against juggernaut marketing machines and payola.
Now, to make it even simpler, dump the exclusive copying right of copyright, reconstruct it as a royalty right and simply put a 50% sales tax on the material going to the artists and writers in question. Wal-mart et al could copy and sell to their hearts content, _competing_ in a _free market_, while the social purpose of copyright is served by the appropriate institution that handles all such social purposes.
For holding an archive of my gigaton of DVDs?
Exactly the kind of use I had in mind. The huge but very linear datasets where track jumping is minimal that tend to make up the vast bulk of personal storage these days and that will only increase.
OS, software, databases, etc, need low latency to be 'fast'. Bulk multimedia storage doesn't.
I'd go apeshit for a 5TB drive that's quiet, inexpensive and could transfer on the order or 30-40MB/sec.
A 5-10 TB drive would probably be doable today with existing surface density. I dont think you'd lose that much on the transfer rate tho; data rate depends on the surface velocity which remains almost as high due to the increased circumference.
And, yes, I had a bigfoot too. It's not something you want to put your OS on; then again, as noted, flash might be the best thing to put that on whatever you do to disk speed. Personally I have most my OS cached in actual RAM on my workstations in combination with the RAM on my iSCSI storage servers. But it's not that part that causes most issues; it's finding actual space for storing the ever increasing amount of mythtv recordings...
I'd imagine that one way to forestall the inevitable victory of SSD would be more intelligent caching and a larger onboard cache for hard drives.
Actually I'd suggest they play their strengths rather than their weakness. Disks are never going to compete with flash on seek times. They'd be better off dumping the entire 'speed' thing to flash and moving backwards to slower rotational speeds and vastly larger platter area. Can you imagine 5 1/4 inch disks with todays data density?
In the real world, spending one billion dollars to save a life might be a bad idea if spending that same money on some other program would save two lives.
Indeed. Considering that traffic has killed approximately 280.000 Americans since 9/11 one could wonder how many lives would have been saved, had the 'war on terror' money been spent on improving road safety.
One could also question wether terrorists would find terror a useful weapon if nobody cared more than they do about traffic risks.
I wonder what would happen if Al Qaeda claimed they'd infiltrated the safety departments of several multinational car manufacturers, as well as the DMV and a multitude of road planning commissions.