These same rare earths are needed for nuclear power plants (neodymium magnets, copper wires and suchlike). Indeed they are needed for all power plants.
But once they were used in nuclear power plants, radioactive contamination makes them impossible to recycle.
That's just pure FUD. Anything on the clean side of the reactor (basically anything this side of the primary heat exchanger is just like any other power plant. I can asure you anything copper is no where near the "dirty" side of the reactor, it just isn't a suitable material. And I'm not sure why you'd need neodymium magnets anywhere. I'd imagine any generator or motor magnets would be eletromagnets.
Even for materials exposed to nuclear waste, things like metals can be cleaned then recycled, the cleanup waste then being considered nuclear waste. Most metals can be recycled. Concrete that's been exposed to nuclear waste (like water from cooling ponds) can be tricky, but metal cladding is used for such ponds, that can be stripped and cleaned, leaving the underlying concrete clean of nuclear contaminants.
No, it's just very safe and reliable if done correctly. The number of hours of skilled people needed to build, maintain and operate new nuclear plants make them too expensive unless electricity prices go up a lot, which they won't.
Night-time prices will slowly decline, but day-time prices will only go down faster from now on. Wholesale electricity prices in German already drop below 1 Euro cent / kWh regularly, and that's _after_ shutting down most nuclear plants.
Wow, you should work in the futures market.
Perhaps Germany just buy in some France's cheap nuclear surplus energy to keep the costs down?
There is evidence that even when things were "done correctly" at Fukushima there were completely unexpected failure modes that no-one had predicted. That's the biggest challenge in engineering safety - handling things that are literally unpredictable.
Fukushima was a catalogue of retrospective bad design, cover-ups, mis-management, a huge freaking earthquake and largest tsunami in memory devastating huge swathes of Japanese countryside and killing many thousands of people.
And still no deaths can be attributed to the nuclear aspect of the regional disaster. Perhaps even the destructive hydrogen explosions could have been avoided (thus preventing much of the fallout) if it had been allowed to vent, but as I understand it, that wasn't allowed due to the fear of "radioactive gases" being vented.
Three Mile Island and Fukushima show us Nuclear is inherently safe, only Chernobyl has had anything like a devastating effect on anything other than economics scales. And the Chernobyl reactors were a picture of how not to do nuclear power.
While I hope he is, I've noticed something similar. On mornings when I haven't gotten enough sleep, the automatic (with cruise control!) made it hard to stay awake. Manual engaged me more and kept me awake.
The study I've seen (no citation, sorry) indicated that drivers who were intoxicated were rubbish at the details, like fine maneuvers (think parking and fitting through small gaps) but not so affected by monotous tasks, like long highway drives, whereas sleep deprivation was the opposite.
In short, get plenty of sleep, stay off the sause.
Connecting flight controls to "The Internet" would be the stupidest of all ideas. If they do this, anyone getting on board would be a candidate for the Darwin awards.
I'm sure they meant to say that all these systems are networked together, using ARINC or other aviation network technologies.
TFS says "an internet". A network -> network connection is an internet connection, regardless of whether it's routed to "the internet".
OS binaries and libraries are often read in a random IO pattern, as the process jumps from one section of code to another. This is where a low latency drive on OS/application startup helps.
The only runtime linker I'm familiar with will prefault the entire binary and then let it be demand paged out, on the basis that binaries are usually small and mostly-used, that reading the entire binary is as cheap as faulting in a few pages, and if some pages aren't used for a while then they can be paged out at no cost later.
And what about libraries? An app could contain 100's of MB of code, even if only a small fraction of it is referenced. I'd rather that code not push out my working set of data.
User data, on the other hand, is usually read/written in a sequential IO pattern, from start to finish.
Since this is the sort of thing that usually deserves a big fat [citation needed], I'll skip that and just point you straight to a peer-reviewed citation that roundly refutes that idea:
A File is Not a File: Understanding the I/O Behavior of Apple Desktop Applications, published at ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2011.
The paper above doesn't entirely refute my assertion:
Summary: A substantial number of tasks contain purely sequential accesses. When the definition of a sequential access is loosened such that only 95% of bytes must be consecutive, then even more tasks contain primarily sequential accesses. These “nearly sequential” accesses result from metadata stored at the beginning of complex multimedia files: tasks frequently touch bytes near the beginning of multimedia files before sequentially reading or writing the bulk of the file.
This was based on observations of IO patterns from the studied applications in the paper.
Loading that word doc? Word will read and parse the file in one fell sweep. Saving the updated document? Why not just write it out in one go, rather than update the document in place (not sure if this is how Word works, BTW).
See the above paper.
Yeah, this was a bad example, as Word docs are highly structured. SQLite files operate similarly.
I have one dedicated to the OS, one for programs, and I'm storing my data on standard SATA III hard-drives. As I understand it, this is the current recommended setup for SSD drives
Urgh, no, if you have 2 SSD, at least RAID them. Or put OS+APPs on one, data on the other, and use the HDD is a live backup for both.
Are you really spending that much time seeking in applications and OS files? That stuff typically gets loaded once on boot and then stays in RAM. It's the data where the fast random read/write times are a big win, and that's the stuff that you're storing on the spinning disks.
OS binaries and libraries are often read in a random IO pattern, as the process jumps from one section of code to another. This is where a low latency drive on OS/application startup helps.
User data, on the other hand, is usually read/written in a sequential IO pattern, from start to finish.
Loading that word doc? Word will read and parse the file in one fell sweep. Saving the updated document? Why not just write it out in one go, rather than update the document in place (not sure if this is how Word works, BTW).
Viewing pictures or listening to music or watch videos? All sequential reads, what HDD are good at.
The only data being written to the drives are OS generated files and Temporary Internet Files, which I now plan to move off to one of my data drives
So, having identified something where an SSD is a speedup (lots of small random reads and writes), you're now going to stop using it for that? At which point, why do you even bother with an SSD?
Personally, I'd have gone for a single bigger SSD, put all my OS/Apps on that one, and use the HDD as backup for the SSD as well as for bulk files (media files etc.)
In fact, I'd have stuck with the small single 128GB SSD for OS/apps + small data, and bought two HDD instead, a fast 7200 rpm one for live big data and backup of SSD, and the other as a backup HDD (which can be a low speed, low power 5400 rpm drive in an external enclosure.)
...Well it IS true they are screwing the workers but in reality most jobs could be done by machines now so I would argue that the vast majority of the service industry jobs aren't even needed anymore.
I think most senior management could also be done by machines. About the only things that can't be done by machines is the playing of golf (machines won't get membership at the club) and consumption of illicit substances (except as fuel).
About 25 years ago, working in an embedded product company, I had a friendly little argument with my software colleagues (me design hardware, UGH!) They insisted that there was nothing around that could compete with the C-compiler-that-later-became-Microsoft's for tight compiled code. So we had a little contest: they wrote a chunk of our kind of code in C, and I did it in Modula-2 (Logitech's compiler.) In both cases we were building reusable code with object methods.
Quite enlightening.
How the comparison would go today, given the advances in compiler optimization, I couldn't guess.
You gave no indication of how the comparison went all those years ago, so we couldn't guess that either. What was your point?
What's with this urge to punish? What has Marvell done that's so evil? Other than being a powerful US corporation, that is.
They made billions of dollars off the patents of others and didn't pay appropriately to the patent holders?
Seagate? I haven't penetrated the patent speak of the patents in question, but the 839 patent looks suspiciously similar to the Seagate patent referenced. This is just an example of courts and expensive lawyers doing the job that should be done up front by the US patent office, ie. looking for and evaluating prior art.
Patent awards should be (as I understand it) compensated on what the plaintiff would have made had the infringement not taken place (lost sales or licensing fees). I would be very surprised if CMU had made $1bn off any licensing program, let alone 2 patents to a single licensee, so I fail to see how such a large reward could be made.
Mandatory reversible sterilization of all children when they turn 12 years of age. Then let them undergo the procedure for free to reverse it after age 21 if they choose to do so.
Dear God, I hope you're not serious! You'd let the government sterilize your child? If this law came in in my country, I'd be on the first to start the revolution.
Just pointing out, you have the easy option of typing www.bing.com in your address bar if you don't like their results.
... and you've always been able to go online and download the browser you prefer through Windows, but that hasn't stopped the US or EU governing bodies from slapping Microsoft with nigh endless anti-trust suits.
Not everyone has that ability. Business had a really bad reputation for using default browsers, as centralized IT enforced draconian machine configurations, the result being that much business software and websites were dependent on Microsoft bugs and incompatibilities, tying people into Microsoft operating systems etc.
But that's not Microsoft's doing, its the IT departments of these businesses, so why is MS getting all the blame?
Because MS abused the lock-in. Explorer standards incompatibilities, and further lock in attempts such as ActiveX were clear attempts at abusing their monopoly.
Do you really think the default browser (Explorer) on the defacto default OS (Windows) would default to google for search? People choose google for a reason.
I fail to see what bearing that has on the topic at hand.
The topic at hand resulted in comparisons to Microsoft anti-trust issues. I was simply comparing the situations.
Just pointing out, you have the easy option of typing www.bing.com in your address bar if you don't like their results.
... and you've always been able to go online and download the browser you prefer through Windows, but that hasn't stopped the US or EU governing bodies from slapping Microsoft with nigh endless anti-trust suits.
Not everyone has that ability. Business had a really bad reputation for using default browsers, as centralized IT enforced draconian machine configurations, the result being that much business software and websites were dependent on Microsoft bugs and incompatibilities, tying people into Microsoft operating systems etc.
Google are popular because their products are good, and continuously improving. Microsoft OSes were popular because they had a monopoly position, and the OS stagnated as a result (Win9x and WinXP are examples of that.)
Do you really think the default browser (Explorer) on the defacto default OS (Windows) would default to google for search? People choose google for a reason.
I think the point is that if they produced 3.5" versions for desktops then they'd be able to use less fragile components, and have more room for handling heat dissipation etc. making the product that bit more durable.
SSDs don't run particularly hot. They consume on the order of half a watt most of the time. Not much heat to dissipate, and better done using metal to metal contact anyway.
I suspect the reason they don't is that it's cheaper to have one production line for all of it and just not give a shit about durability, but rest assured, if customers get fed up enough of that and make enough noise, return enough products, or file enough claims, it will change.
I'd be surprised if component quality was a major factor. Most SSD problems are firmware based issues. In the case of dodgy power supplies, well, all bets are off as far as I'm concered. While undervoltage should not physically damage components, I wouldn't be surprised if a device logically bricks itself instead, though you'd hope there would be a way to reset that with a secure erase.
Eventually OCZ sneakily modified their warranty to include not providing warranty when the drives don't receive enough power rather than getting their engineers to just fix the problem.
What is sneaky about that? Seems a perfectly reasonable clause. Such a drive is probably perfectly fine after (re)formatting.
Remember, FLASH blocks need power to erase and write correctly, and controllers rely on there being sufficient power to write anything.
It was your hardware that sucked in this case. If a laptop is having stability problems of any kind, remove the battery and run off the PSU as a matter of course to test it. I almost junked a perfectly good laptop before I learned that lesson.
<ianal> Copyright itself doesn't require attribution. Copyright in itself gives noone but the copyright owner the right to distribute the copyrighted work.
What the license does is grant third parties the right to redistribute the work under the terms of that license. If that license requires attribution, then so be it. If the license does not explicitly require attribution, then indeed no attribution need be given, but in the case of the GPL, the original work must be available on request, and presumably the original author would have their own details included in the original work, so attribution is unnecessary anyway.
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These same rare earths are needed for nuclear power plants (neodymium magnets, copper wires and suchlike). Indeed they are needed for all power plants.
But once they were used in nuclear power plants, radioactive contamination makes them impossible to recycle.
That's just pure FUD. Anything on the clean side of the reactor (basically anything this side of the primary heat exchanger is just like any other power plant. I can asure you anything copper is no where near the "dirty" side of the reactor, it just isn't a suitable material. And I'm not sure why you'd need neodymium magnets anywhere. I'd imagine any generator or motor magnets would be eletromagnets.
Even for materials exposed to nuclear waste, things like metals can be cleaned then recycled, the cleanup waste then being considered nuclear waste. Most metals can be recycled. Concrete that's been exposed to nuclear waste (like water from cooling ponds) can be tricky, but metal cladding is used for such ponds, that can be stripped and cleaned, leaving the underlying concrete clean of nuclear contaminants.
No, it's just very safe and reliable if done correctly. The number of hours of skilled people needed to build, maintain and operate new nuclear plants make them too expensive unless electricity prices go up a lot, which they won't.
Night-time prices will slowly decline, but day-time prices will only go down faster from now on. Wholesale electricity prices in German already drop below 1 Euro cent / kWh regularly, and that's _after_ shutting down most nuclear plants.
Wow, you should work in the futures market.
Perhaps Germany just buy in some France's cheap nuclear surplus energy to keep the costs down?
There is evidence that even when things were "done correctly" at Fukushima there were completely unexpected failure modes that no-one had predicted. That's the biggest challenge in engineering safety - handling things that are literally unpredictable.
Fukushima was a catalogue of retrospective bad design, cover-ups, mis-management, a huge freaking earthquake and largest tsunami in memory devastating huge swathes of Japanese countryside and killing many thousands of people.
And still no deaths can be attributed to the nuclear aspect of the regional disaster. Perhaps even the destructive hydrogen explosions could have been avoided (thus preventing much of the fallout) if it had been allowed to vent, but as I understand it, that wasn't allowed due to the fear of "radioactive gases" being vented.
Three Mile Island and Fukushima show us Nuclear is inherently safe, only Chernobyl has had anything like a devastating effect on anything other than economics scales. And the Chernobyl reactors were a picture of how not to do nuclear power.
You're half right. Moderating as troll knocks off points (back to 4).
This reply is also partly to undo the moderation.
While I hope he is, I've noticed something similar. On mornings when I haven't gotten enough sleep, the automatic (with cruise control!) made it hard to stay awake. Manual engaged me more and kept me awake.
The study I've seen (no citation, sorry) indicated that drivers who were intoxicated were rubbish at the details, like fine maneuvers (think parking and fitting through small gaps) but not so affected by monotous tasks, like long highway drives, whereas sleep deprivation was the opposite.
In short, get plenty of sleep, stay off the sause.
Oh, and cayenne8 is a total twat.
But I find it fun to shift. And after you've had a few at the bar, having to shift helps keep you alert while driving home.
Please tell me you're kidding!
Connecting flight controls to "The Internet" would be the stupidest of all ideas. If they do this, anyone getting on board would be a candidate for the Darwin awards.
I'm sure they meant to say that all these systems are networked together, using ARINC or other aviation network technologies.
TFS says "an internet". A network -> network connection is an internet connection, regardless of whether it's routed to "the internet".
OS binaries and libraries are often read in a random IO pattern, as the process jumps from one section of code to another. This is where a low latency drive on OS/application startup helps.
The only runtime linker I'm familiar with will prefault the entire binary and then let it be demand paged out, on the basis that binaries are usually small and mostly-used, that reading the entire binary is as cheap as faulting in a few pages, and if some pages aren't used for a while then they can be paged out at no cost later.
And what about libraries? An app could contain 100's of MB of code, even if only a small fraction of it is referenced. I'd rather that code not push out my working set of data.
User data, on the other hand, is usually read/written in a sequential IO pattern, from start to finish.
Since this is the sort of thing that usually deserves a big fat [citation needed], I'll skip that and just point you straight to a peer-reviewed citation that roundly refutes that idea:
A File is Not a File: Understanding the I/O Behavior of Apple Desktop Applications, published at ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2011.
The paper above doesn't entirely refute my assertion:
Summary: A substantial number of tasks contain purely sequential accesses. When the definition
of a sequential access is loosened such that only 95% of bytes must be consecutive, then even more
tasks contain primarily sequential accesses. These “nearly sequential” accesses result from metadata
stored at the beginning of complex multimedia files: tasks frequently touch bytes near the beginning
of multimedia files before sequentially reading or writing the bulk of the file.
This was based on observations of IO patterns from the studied applications in the paper.
Loading that word doc? Word will read and parse the file in one fell sweep. Saving the updated document? Why not just write it out in one go, rather than update the document in place (not sure if this is how Word works, BTW).
See the above paper.
Yeah, this was a bad example, as Word docs are highly structured. SQLite files operate similarly.
I have one dedicated to the OS, one for programs, and I'm storing my data on standard SATA III hard-drives. As I understand it, this is the current recommended setup for SSD drives
Urgh, no, if you have 2 SSD, at least RAID them. Or put OS+APPs on one, data on the other, and use the HDD is a live backup for both.
Are you really spending that much time seeking in applications and OS files? That stuff typically gets loaded once on boot and then stays in RAM. It's the data where the fast random read/write times are a big win, and that's the stuff that you're storing on the spinning disks.
OS binaries and libraries are often read in a random IO pattern, as the process jumps from one section of code to another. This is where a low latency drive on OS/application startup helps.
User data, on the other hand, is usually read/written in a sequential IO pattern, from start to finish.
Loading that word doc? Word will read and parse the file in one fell sweep. Saving the updated document? Why not just write it out in one go, rather than update the document in place (not sure if this is how Word works, BTW).
Viewing pictures or listening to music or watch videos? All sequential reads, what HDD are good at.
The only data being written to the drives are OS generated files and Temporary Internet Files, which I now plan to move off to one of my data drives
So, having identified something where an SSD is a speedup (lots of small random reads and writes), you're now going to stop using it for that? At which point, why do you even bother with an SSD?
Personally, I'd have gone for a single bigger SSD, put all my OS/Apps on that one, and use the HDD as backup for the SSD as well as for bulk files (media files etc.)
In fact, I'd have stuck with the small single 128GB SSD for OS/apps + small data, and bought two HDD instead, a fast 7200 rpm one for live big data and backup of SSD, and the other as a backup HDD (which can be a low speed, low power 5400 rpm drive in an external enclosure.)
...Well it IS true they are screwing the workers but in reality most jobs could be done by machines now so I would argue that the vast majority of the service industry jobs aren't even needed anymore.
I think most senior management could also be done by machines. About the only things that can't be done by machines is the playing of golf (machines won't get membership at the club) and consumption of illicit substances (except as fuel).
What would people switch to? Forth, Pascal?
About 25 years ago, working in an embedded product company, I had a friendly little argument with my software colleagues (me design hardware, UGH!) They insisted that there was nothing around that could compete with the C-compiler-that-later-became-Microsoft's for tight compiled code. So we had a little contest: they wrote a chunk of our kind of code in C, and I did it in Modula-2 (Logitech's compiler.) In both cases we were building reusable code with object methods.
Quite enlightening.
How the comparison would go today, given the advances in compiler optimization, I couldn't guess.
You gave no indication of how the comparison went all those years ago, so we couldn't guess that either. What was your point?
I assure you, having seen my first porn at around age 6 or so, ... I can't remember for the life of me anything about it, but I knew it was porn.
Which sorts of proves his point, no?
What's with this urge to punish? What has Marvell done that's so evil? Other than being a powerful US corporation, that is.
They made billions of dollars off the patents of others and didn't pay appropriately to the patent holders?
Seagate? I haven't penetrated the patent speak of the patents in question, but the 839 patent looks suspiciously similar to the Seagate patent referenced. This is just an example of courts and expensive lawyers doing the job that should be done up front by the US patent office, ie. looking for and evaluating prior art.
Patent awards should be (as I understand it) compensated on what the plaintiff would have made had the infringement not taken place (lost sales or licensing fees). I would be very surprised if CMU had made $1bn off any licensing program, let alone 2 patents to a single licensee, so I fail to see how such a large reward could be made.
IANAL etc.
Mandatory reversible sterilization of all children when they turn 12 years of age. Then let them undergo the procedure for free to reverse it after age 21 if they choose to do so.
Dear God, I hope you're not serious! You'd let the government sterilize your child? If this law came in in my country, I'd be on the first to start the revolution.
need more usb ports 2 is way to few
Pah, USB hubs are cheap.
I mean, seriously, why do you care if Earth becomes another Venus?
My twin nieces, Ruby and Winnie. My nephews Leo and Max.
Sorry to appeal to emotion, but I find your attitude a little cold, a little remote, a little shitty.
Like many on /., he has little chance of breeding, so might as well make the most of it if he's not going to propagate his genes.
(indirectly)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20003704
Just pointing out, you have the easy option of typing www.bing.com in your address bar if you don't like their results.
... and you've always been able to go online and download the browser you prefer through Windows, but that hasn't stopped the US or EU governing bodies from slapping Microsoft with nigh endless anti-trust suits.
Not everyone has that ability. Business had a really bad reputation for using default browsers, as centralized IT enforced draconian machine configurations, the result being that much business software and websites were dependent on Microsoft bugs and incompatibilities, tying people into Microsoft operating systems etc.
But that's not Microsoft's doing, its the IT departments of these businesses, so why is MS getting all the blame?
Because MS abused the lock-in. Explorer standards incompatibilities, and further lock in attempts such as ActiveX were clear attempts at abusing their monopoly.
Do you really think the default browser (Explorer) on the defacto default OS (Windows) would default to google for search? People choose google for a reason.
I fail to see what bearing that has on the topic at hand.
The topic at hand resulted in comparisons to Microsoft anti-trust issues. I was simply comparing the situations.
Just pointing out, you have the easy option of typing www.bing.com in your address bar if you don't like their results.
... and you've always been able to go online and download the browser you prefer through Windows, but that hasn't stopped the US or EU governing bodies from slapping Microsoft with nigh endless anti-trust suits.
Not everyone has that ability. Business had a really bad reputation for using default browsers, as centralized IT enforced draconian machine configurations, the result being that much business software and websites were dependent on Microsoft bugs and incompatibilities, tying people into Microsoft operating systems etc.
Google are popular because their products are good, and continuously improving. Microsoft OSes were popular because they had a monopoly position, and the OS stagnated as a result (Win9x and WinXP are examples of that.)
Do you really think the default browser (Explorer) on the defacto default OS (Windows) would default to google for search? People choose google for a reason.
I think the point is that if they produced 3.5" versions for desktops then they'd be able to use less fragile components, and have more room for handling heat dissipation etc. making the product that bit more durable.
SSDs don't run particularly hot. They consume on the order of half a watt most of the time. Not much heat to dissipate, and better done using metal to metal contact anyway.
I suspect the reason they don't is that it's cheaper to have one production line for all of it and just not give a shit about durability, but rest assured, if customers get fed up enough of that and make enough noise, return enough products, or file enough claims, it will change.
I'd be surprised if component quality was a major factor. Most SSD problems are firmware based issues. In the case of dodgy power supplies, well, all bets are off as far as I'm concered. While undervoltage should not physically damage components, I wouldn't be surprised if a device logically bricks itself instead, though you'd hope there would be a way to reset that with a secure erase.
Eventually OCZ sneakily modified their warranty to include not providing warranty when the drives don't receive enough power rather than getting their engineers to just fix the problem.
What is sneaky about that? Seems a perfectly reasonable clause. Such a drive is probably perfectly fine after (re)formatting.
Remember, FLASH blocks need power to erase and write correctly, and controllers rely on there being sufficient power to write anything.
It was your hardware that sucked in this case. If a laptop is having stability problems of any kind, remove the battery and run off the PSU as a matter of course to test it. I almost junked a perfectly good laptop before I learned that lesson.
No, I'm the real messiah!
You're not the messiah, you're a very naughty boy!
Every military person is supposed to be combat-ready, and the effect of smoking on lung capacity alone would make them significantly less capable.
That explains the American military's performance during the last two World Wars, then...
Oh... wait.
It might explain why they were late to both.
"Sorry I'm late, I was just outside having a smoke."
<ianal>
Copyright itself doesn't require attribution. Copyright in itself gives noone but the copyright owner the right to distribute the copyrighted work.
What the license does is grant third parties the right to redistribute the work under the terms of that license. If that license requires attribution, then so be it. If the license does not explicitly require attribution, then indeed no attribution need be given, but in the case of the GPL, the original work must be available on request, and presumably the original author would have their own details included in the original work, so attribution is unnecessary anyway.
Not legal advice etc.
</ianal>
... just fill the firmware with garbage and brick it.
If not encrypting the comms, I would hope they at least sign the firmware. EUFI for rovers anyone?