My wife had a Dell. It worked fine until the battery died and needed replacing. Of course it is a proprietary Dell battery and costs $$$$. Then it died again. And again. So now she has a Mac. The Dell was no bargain.
And when the Mac battery dies? At least you can pop the Dell battery out wihout dismantling it.
Li-ion batteries have a finite life. It's just a function of their chemistry. Get over it.
What are they extraditing him for? Is he charged with any crime? This smells like bullshit to me.
It's total bullshit. The entire point here is that the United States wants to get him out of the UK so that he'll be easier to legally extradite back to the US so he can be tortured.... err, prosecuted, to the fullest extent of the law.
It would be much easier to extradite him from the UK, given our "special relationship". Just ask Christopher Tappin.
like not having to declare varchar sizes versus text versus CLOB versus BLOB.
What's the difference between a text column and a character large object column? MySQL doesn't appear to have distinct types for the two.
Some databases limit the size of text and/or varchar data, so that rows have a limited size. Sybase, for example, used to have a 255 character limit in varchars, and a 2048 byte limit for row size (off the top of my head, details may be wrong.) To store any text larger than 255 characters, the data was effectively stored offline from the row, in a special table, with a reference to the large text in the row.
DB2 also has row size limits, rows not being able to be bigger than ~0.5 the tablespace page size, so this can also require text to be stored offline in LOB tables.
They're all stored and indexed and searchable in the same way (not that you'd want to index any sort of LOB.)
If CLOB is the same thing as text, then why wouldn't you want to support a full-text index on a CLOB? That said, I tend to write my own full-text indexing tools to work around the limitation in MySQL's full-text index: no words shorter than four characters unless you're root, no common English words unless you're root, etc.
I was talking about a table index. As in: CREATE INDEX foo_idx ON foo(textfield);
This is not the same as a full text index, which generally stores an index row for each distinct word in the source row.
Does it act like SQLite, which is dynamically typed
That's one of the annoying thing to me about SQLite,
Either constraints are good or they are bad. Typing is just another constraint, like foreign keys, and various other domain constraints. I cannot see any valid argument for having foreign keys but not type constraints. It jest seems bizarre to me. It's not like they could be optional or anything.
Foreign keys are good, but type independent. You just want to check that some foreign key actually references valid data in another table. If they match, they match.
However, typing in SQL is almost certainly a case of implementation details leaking through the abstraction layer. The data type is defined by the data and how it is used. Traditional SQL databases require that type data up front so they can organise the data on disk. But you shouldn't care how data is organised on disk.
When comparing dates, the data type is implicitly some form of timestamp. Whether that is stored on disk as a string with a "YYYY-MM-DD HH:SS" format, or as a UTC integer offset from 1970-01-01 00:00, it doesn't matter. Using the SQLite way, the two can be transparently stored and compared. There are probably better examples, like not having to declare varchar sizes versus text versus CLOB versus BLOB. They're all stored and indexed and searchable in the same way (not that you'd want to index any sort of LOB.)
And if you don't like it, just declare the types of the columns up front, and SQLite will use type affinity to convert the data for storage.
It's a breath of fresh air, until all the electric plants burning coal have to ramp up production of electricity to meet the demand of all these tailpipe diversion cars.
Unless it's charged at night when there is a surplus of generation capacity.
And to make matters worse they don't "fail gracefully" as the old spinning rust does. honestly i can't remember a HDD that failed without warning in the past....oh hell the last one was probably a Deathstar around 2000, no thanks to SMART you'll usually get SOME kind of indication, be it SMART or noise or weird errors, something, and then you can get your data off. My gamer customers went back to running raptors in RAID because they bought SSDs and lost data, just one day they flipped the switch and poof! No drive even in BIOS and no way for me to get a single byte of data back.
FLASH does (should) indeed fail gracefully. Once a block wears out, programming it will fail, and the FLASH and controller will know this and mark it bad. But other blocks will still be readable, and the now dead block contained no useful data (else the controller wouldn't be erasing it.)
What you're talking about are firmware based bugs, the controller not making the FLASH contents accessible. These problems are probably the result of block translation tables being corrupted, and is entirely the fault of the controller and firmware (not the FLASH.)
So no thanks, until and unless you can give me a drive that works 5 years without fail (And NO I don't give a crap about your warranty unless it covers data, does it? No? Then i don't care and neither will my customers as its not the drive we give a crap about, its our stuff) then me and my customers will stick with the spinning rust. Hell with Win 7 there is no need to boot, superfetch will load all your apps when you need them into RAM based on usage patterns, and with cameras and video sucking up ever more space what does SSD have to offer really? Maybe in servers where IOPS is king, but normal users already have machines MUCH faster than they are, SSD really offers them no benefits over spinning rust IMHO. Hell the new 2.5s even park the heads at the slightest movement so they don't fail like the bad old days. Better to simply use a super fast SDHC for readyboost in that laptop or get a hybrid than to risk losing all your stuff. At least in the hybrid if the NAND fails you still have a HDD that you can still get your stuff off of.
Certainly hybrid storage gives the best of both worlds. Using an SSD as a short term cache, that can be discarded if necessary is certainly one way to go.
But I no more trust a mechanical HD than FLASH to keep my data safe in the short/medium term. And HD can have firmware issues too.
FWIW, almost all my machines at home have SDD in one form or another, from a lowly Acer Aspire One netbook (8GB SSD - very crappy!) up to my work laptop with 80GB Intel G1 SSD. I've not yet lost data as a result of hardware failure over the two years I've had the various drives. Of course, a very small sample size.
Every application's Help menu item has a textbox that filters all menu items. You can also reach this textbox through a shortcut (cmd+shift+?).
So, for example, if I'm editing a document and I want to make some text superscript, Instead of hunting through its menus, I just hit cmd+shift+?, type 'sup' and hit enter.
With sunshine and 30C+ temperatures throughout the year..."
This is a lie. A big one sadly. Despite being on the equator, Kenya and other countries that the equator crosses never have temperatures beyond 30 degrees Celsius for more than 3 months in a year.
In fact for Nairobi, their capital, you will freeze at night and temps never go beyond 28 degrees Celsius for most of the day. Google Nairobi weather (I just did) and you'll find temperature now (it's almost noon there) at 23 degrees Celsius.
Probably more to do with Nairobi's elevation. Nairobi is quite a way above sea level, the air thinner, and therefore not retaining as much heat as at sea level. But as solar cells or solar heating devices rely on solar radiation, rather than the resulting ambient heat, solar devices would be very effective nonetheless.
And every coal mine has had tragic cave ins and deaths. Fossil fuel is causing potential global melt down.
Question is, how many of those melt downs resulted in deaths? How many compared to coal, oil and gas exploration and mining?
And we're not talking about a random blow up here. We're talking a >9 richter scale earth quake and biggest in memory tsunami, which killed infinitely more people than the melt down, and orders of magnitude more people than even Chernobyl.
That analysis is for high-end enterprise-class SSDs that use SLC memory. The lifespan for consumer-class MLC-based SSDs is much worse.
And consumer drives are generally less write heavy as well. Newer enterprise class SSDs are MLC as well. Given the cheapness of MLC, you can increase the amount of FLASH available to make up for the lack of erase cycles, and using deduplication like the SandForce drives, you write less anyway (I wonder how SF drives do GC.)
Simple fact is that firmware errors or user errors will lose your data before the FLASH wears out.
What we will see, I believe, is drives that become smarter and have their own filesystem layer that obscures the LBA from the physical location on the disk. The machine says "write this data to block 43533224" and the HDD just starts writing to whatever free blocks are nearest to its r/w head, using the flash to store the map. It will then defrag itself during downtimes to optimize the locations. (Dear Seagate: if I really just invented this, please pay me.)
Oh god, no, please don't. All the problems in SSD firmware has been related to maintaining the underlying block remapping. Besides, the HDD will have no concept of "free blocks", unless it puts aside tracks just for this purpose (though not necessarily a bad idea, it will waste some capacity). Hmm, perhaps sacrifice 1% of the data tracks for regional based journalling, might improve write performance significantly.
One development on the horizon is shingled recorded writes, where tracks overlap when written, and the resulting overlapped tracks can be read by a much finer head than the write head. This increases capacity, but at the cost of requiring block remapping as writes now have to be written in a continuous log. Thus, you end up with a log structured block device.
While a pain because it requires firmware to handle the block mapping, it does allow low latency fast writes (because they're always sequential) and as you've got the block mapping firmware anyway, you can implement a sophisticated read cache using FLASH or large RAM to satisfy reads without moving the head from the head of the log. Your firmware will already be quite sophisticated anyway, so the step up to a hybrid caching firmware might not be so great as it currently is.
I think the point is that lead can be used to isolate the radioactive material and will stay localized, but if the water is irradiated, it spreads.
Assuming the irradiated water absorbs the neutrons, won't it just be more dense than the surrounding water, and simply sink? Should keep it pretty local. Any containment breach of the Pu or decay products should similarly sink. Unless this thing is sitting on a hydrothermal vent, I'd doubt any living matter will even get close to it to be affected.
The problem is that EU wants to do the RIGHT thing, America does not want to get burned, and China wants to trash the west at any and all costs.
Assuming the chart in TFA is accurate (admittedly from the US DOE), doesn't this refute the EU stance on the Kyoto Protocol, and validate the U.S. stance that any meaningful reduction treaty had to include developing nations? Looking at those lines, it seems even if Kyoto had been ratified by everyone and everyone had hit their 1990-level reduction targets, it would have been rendered almost completely meaningless by the massive increase in emissions from China and India.
What have absolute levels got to do with anything? How about per-capita levels? The US has, what, about 1/4 of the population of China, yet China has only just overtaken the US?
No-one in the west can get on their high horse about increases in emissions from China and India.
Developed nations have caused most of the problem so far, so should take the brunt of the remedial measures. Developing nations, once reaching the so called developed nations in per-capita emissions, should then take the same remedial measures.
Let's count - they have Xeon/Opteron, Itanium, and among their dead platforms, they have PA-RISC, Alpha (DEC/Compaq) and MIPS (Tandem/Compaq). What made them pick this for servers?
Two stroke diesels have a proper pressurized oil system, no oil lubrication in the charge.
Diesel's bad emissions reputation is a thing of the past with common rail electronic injection. No more excess fuel to not quite burn properly causing particulate pollution. Two stroke diesel will be as clean and efficient as any four stroke Diesel, with a power to weight ratio to match an equivalent petrol engine.
As the cost of hybrid batteries plummets, engines will increasingly run at set power levels for long periods of time. The right engine for this role is debatable, but it's almost certainly a turbine, or less possibly a stirling. They run on any fuel, have excellent economy, and have problems primarily with throttling - which isn't a problem on a hybrid. Investing in new conventional piston technology is a waste.
Diesel engines still beat turbines in efficiency. Why do you think all big marine engines are diesel piston engines?
Turbines are great, but loads of heat still pisses out of the exhaust, and they are really difficult to manufacture cheaply.
I'd love to see a two stroke diesel in a car. Almost all automotive diesel engines are turbo-charged these days, which was a big factor against them in the past, and more so for two stroke diesel. But all else being equal, I don't see why a two stroke diesel would be any more expensive to build than a four stroke diesel. Cheaper, even, as they're inherently simpler with less parts. If someone was to come to market with a diesel two stroke, I'd hope it is an opposed piston design.
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My wife had a Dell. It worked fine until the battery died and needed replacing. Of course it is a proprietary Dell battery and costs $$$$. Then it died again. And again. So now she has a Mac. The Dell was no bargain.
And when the Mac battery dies? At least you can pop the Dell battery out wihout dismantling it.
Li-ion batteries have a finite life. It's just a function of their chemistry. Get over it.
What are they extraditing him for? Is he charged with any crime? This smells like bullshit to me.
It's total bullshit. The entire point here is that the United States wants to get him out of the UK so that he'll be easier to legally extradite back to the US so he can be tortured.... err, prosecuted, to the fullest extent of the law.
It would be much easier to extradite him from the UK, given our "special relationship". Just ask Christopher Tappin.
like not having to declare varchar sizes versus text versus CLOB versus BLOB.
What's the difference between a text column and a character large object column? MySQL doesn't appear to have distinct types for the two.
Some databases limit the size of text and/or varchar data, so that rows have a limited size. Sybase, for example, used to have a 255 character limit in varchars, and a 2048 byte limit for row size (off the top of my head, details may be wrong.) To store any text larger than 255 characters, the data was effectively stored offline from the row, in a special table, with a reference to the large text in the row.
DB2 also has row size limits, rows not being able to be bigger than ~0.5 the tablespace page size, so this can also require text to be stored offline in LOB tables.
They're all stored and indexed and searchable in the same way (not that you'd want to index any sort of LOB.)
If CLOB is the same thing as text, then why wouldn't you want to support a full-text index on a CLOB? That said, I tend to write my own full-text indexing tools to work around the limitation in MySQL's full-text index: no words shorter than four characters unless you're root, no common English words unless you're root, etc.
I was talking about a table index. As in:
CREATE INDEX foo_idx ON foo(textfield);
This is not the same as a full text index, which generally stores an index row for each distinct word in the source row.
Does it act like SQLite, which is dynamically typed
That's one of the annoying thing to me about SQLite,
Either constraints are good or they are bad. Typing is just another constraint, like foreign keys, and various other domain constraints. I cannot see any valid argument for having foreign keys but not type constraints. It jest seems bizarre to me. It's not like they could be optional or anything.
Foreign keys are good, but type independent. You just want to check that some foreign key actually references valid data in another table. If they match, they match.
However, typing in SQL is almost certainly a case of implementation details leaking through the abstraction layer. The data type is defined by the data and how it is used. Traditional SQL databases require that type data up front so they can organise the data on disk. But you shouldn't care how data is organised on disk.
When comparing dates, the data type is implicitly some form of timestamp. Whether that is stored on disk as a string with a "YYYY-MM-DD HH:SS" format, or as a UTC integer offset from 1970-01-01 00:00, it doesn't matter. Using the SQLite way, the two can be transparently stored and compared. There are probably better examples, like not having to declare varchar sizes versus text versus CLOB versus BLOB. They're all stored and indexed and searchable in the same way (not that you'd want to index any sort of LOB.)
And if you don't like it, just declare the types of the columns up front, and SQLite will use type affinity to convert the data for storage.
Personally, I like the optional typing in SQLite.
Arguing metric vs. imperial units is pretty much the epitome of bikeshedding.
We can do arithmetic nowadays.
We can do, but people (even rocket scientists!) still get it wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
Technical issues should use SI units.
It's a breath of fresh air, until all the electric plants burning coal have to ramp up production of electricity to meet the demand of all these tailpipe diversion cars.
Unless it's charged at night when there is a surplus of generation capacity.
In case you're not joking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_mark
And to make matters worse they don't "fail gracefully" as the old spinning rust does. honestly i can't remember a HDD that failed without warning in the past....oh hell the last one was probably a Deathstar around 2000, no thanks to SMART you'll usually get SOME kind of indication, be it SMART or noise or weird errors, something, and then you can get your data off. My gamer customers went back to running raptors in RAID because they bought SSDs and lost data, just one day they flipped the switch and poof! No drive even in BIOS and no way for me to get a single byte of data back.
FLASH does (should) indeed fail gracefully. Once a block wears out, programming it will fail, and the FLASH and controller will know this and mark it bad. But other blocks will still be readable, and the now dead block contained no useful data (else the controller wouldn't be erasing it.)
What you're talking about are firmware based bugs, the controller not making the FLASH contents accessible. These problems are probably the result of block translation tables being corrupted, and is entirely the fault of the controller and firmware (not the FLASH.)
So no thanks, until and unless you can give me a drive that works 5 years without fail (And NO I don't give a crap about your warranty unless it covers data, does it? No? Then i don't care and neither will my customers as its not the drive we give a crap about, its our stuff) then me and my customers will stick with the spinning rust. Hell with Win 7 there is no need to boot, superfetch will load all your apps when you need them into RAM based on usage patterns, and with cameras and video sucking up ever more space what does SSD have to offer really? Maybe in servers where IOPS is king, but normal users already have machines MUCH faster than they are, SSD really offers them no benefits over spinning rust IMHO. Hell the new 2.5s even park the heads at the slightest movement so they don't fail like the bad old days. Better to simply use a super fast SDHC for readyboost in that laptop or get a hybrid than to risk losing all your stuff. At least in the hybrid if the NAND fails you still have a HDD that you can still get your stuff off of.
Certainly hybrid storage gives the best of both worlds. Using an SSD as a short term cache, that can be discarded if necessary is certainly one way to go.
But I no more trust a mechanical HD than FLASH to keep my data safe in the short/medium term. And HD can have firmware issues too.
FWIW, almost all my machines at home have SDD in one form or another, from a lowly Acer Aspire One netbook (8GB SSD - very crappy!) up to my work laptop with 80GB Intel G1 SSD. I've not yet lost data as a result of hardware failure over the two years I've had the various drives. Of course, a very small sample size.
I've been doing something similar on OS X.
Every application's Help menu item has a textbox that filters all menu items. You can also reach this textbox through a shortcut (cmd+shift+?).
So, for example, if I'm editing a document and I want to make some text superscript, Instead of hunting through its menus, I just hit cmd+shift+?, type 'sup' and hit enter.
Oh god, does this mean Apple have a patent on it?
With sunshine and 30C+ temperatures throughout the year..."
This is a lie. A big one sadly. Despite being on the equator, Kenya and other countries that the equator crosses never have temperatures beyond 30 degrees Celsius for more than 3 months in a year.
In fact for Nairobi, their capital, you will freeze at night and temps never go beyond 28 degrees Celsius for most of the day. Google Nairobi weather (I just did) and you'll find temperature now (it's almost noon there) at 23 degrees Celsius.
Probably more to do with Nairobi's elevation. Nairobi is quite a way above sea level, the air thinner, and therefore not retaining as much heat as at sea level. But as solar cells or solar heating devices rely on solar radiation, rather than the resulting ambient heat, solar devices would be very effective nonetheless.
...snip war crimes...
This is how you defeat your enemy and make him surrender.
Would the world have the balls to hold the US to account on that, I wonder?
Like girls?
And every coal mine has had tragic cave ins and deaths. Fossil fuel is causing potential global melt down.
Question is, how many of those melt downs resulted in deaths? How many compared to coal, oil and gas exploration and mining?
And we're not talking about a random blow up here. We're talking a >9 richter scale earth quake and biggest in memory tsunami, which killed infinitely more people than the melt down, and orders of magnitude more people than even Chernobyl.
Your time dilation assumes c towards Alpha Centauri, instant deceleration to 0, collect pdf and instant acceleration to c towards earth. Wont work.
Is that c 9x or c 1x? Must be 9x else you wouldn't be going to Alpha Centauri to get the new c spec.
That analysis is for high-end enterprise-class SSDs that use SLC memory. The lifespan for consumer-class MLC-based SSDs is much worse.
And consumer drives are generally less write heavy as well. Newer enterprise class SSDs are MLC as well. Given the cheapness of MLC, you can increase the amount of FLASH available to make up for the lack of erase cycles, and using deduplication like the SandForce drives, you write less anyway (I wonder how SF drives do GC.)
Simple fact is that firmware errors or user errors will lose your data before the FLASH wears out.
What we will see, I believe, is drives that become smarter and have their own filesystem layer that obscures the LBA from the physical location on the disk. The machine says "write this data to block 43533224" and the HDD just starts writing to whatever free blocks are nearest to its r/w head, using the flash to store the map. It will then defrag itself during downtimes to optimize the locations. (Dear Seagate: if I really just invented this, please pay me.)
Oh god, no, please don't. All the problems in SSD firmware has been related to maintaining the underlying block remapping. Besides, the HDD will have no concept of "free blocks", unless it puts aside tracks just for this purpose (though not necessarily a bad idea, it will waste some capacity). Hmm, perhaps sacrifice 1% of the data tracks for regional based journalling, might improve write performance significantly.
One development on the horizon is shingled recorded writes, where tracks overlap when written, and the resulting overlapped tracks can be read by a much finer head than the write head. This increases capacity, but at the cost of requiring block remapping as writes now have to be written in a continuous log. Thus, you end up with a log structured block device.
While a pain because it requires firmware to handle the block mapping, it does allow low latency fast writes (because they're always sequential) and as you've got the block mapping firmware anyway, you can implement a sophisticated read cache using FLASH or large RAM to satisfy reads without moving the head from the head of the log. Your firmware will already be quite sophisticated anyway, so the step up to a hybrid caching firmware might not be so great as it currently is.
I think the point is that lead can be used to isolate the radioactive material and will stay localized, but if the water is irradiated, it spreads.
Assuming the irradiated water absorbs the neutrons, won't it just be more dense than the surrounding water, and simply sink? Should keep it pretty local. Any containment breach of the Pu or decay products should similarly sink. Unless this thing is sitting on a hydrothermal vent, I'd doubt any living matter will even get close to it to be affected.
Assuming the chart in TFA is accurate (admittedly from the US DOE), doesn't this refute the EU stance on the Kyoto Protocol, and validate the U.S. stance that any meaningful reduction treaty had to include developing nations? Looking at those lines, it seems even if Kyoto had been ratified by everyone and everyone had hit their 1990-level reduction targets, it would have been rendered almost completely meaningless by the massive increase in emissions from China and India.
What have absolute levels got to do with anything? How about per-capita levels? The US has, what, about 1/4 of the population of China, yet China has only just overtaken the US?
No-one in the west can get on their high horse about increases in emissions from China and India.
Developed nations have caused most of the problem so far, so should take the brunt of the remedial measures. Developing nations, once reaching the so called developed nations in per-capita emissions, should then take the same remedial measures.
Let's count - they have Xeon/Opteron, Itanium, and among their dead platforms, they have PA-RISC, Alpha (DEC/Compaq) and MIPS (Tandem/Compaq). What made them pick this for servers?
You can already add ARM to the mix. Their current crop of low power thin clients are ARM based:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640405-4063703.html (Wow, nice memorable URL!)
Asok appears to be going through this right now (the evolving to handle sludge, that is):
http://www.dilbert.com/2011-10-31/
Or it might just be water.
Unless it's a work trip.
Two stroke diesels have a proper pressurized oil system, no oil lubrication in the charge.
Diesel's bad emissions reputation is a thing of the past with common rail electronic injection. No more excess fuel to not quite burn properly causing particulate pollution. Two stroke diesel will be as clean and efficient as any four stroke Diesel, with a power to weight ratio to match an equivalent petrol engine.
As the cost of hybrid batteries plummets, engines will increasingly run at set power levels for long periods of time. The right engine for this role is debatable, but it's almost certainly a turbine, or less possibly a stirling. They run on any fuel, have excellent economy, and have problems primarily with throttling - which isn't a problem on a hybrid. Investing in new conventional piston technology is a waste.
Diesel engines still beat turbines in efficiency. Why do you think all big marine engines are diesel piston engines?
Turbines are great, but loads of heat still pisses out of the exhaust, and they are really difficult to manufacture cheaply.
I'd love to see a two stroke diesel in a car. Almost all automotive diesel engines are turbo-charged these days, which was a big factor against them in the past, and more so for two stroke diesel. But all else being equal, I don't see why a two stroke diesel would be any more expensive to build than a four stroke diesel. Cheaper, even, as they're inherently simpler with less parts. If someone was to come to market with a diesel two stroke, I'd hope it is an opposed piston design.
What I don't understand is how were Psystar considered the "end user"? Surely they are just a reseller? Or are middle men banned under Apple law?