In my honest opinion, there's two things that Vista did badly; 1, released too early (for reasons that constitute their own debate), and 2, not enough work done on trimming fat so it runs on older/cheaper machines. We're seeing inroads being made by Linux (and XP) because of this.
Except point 2 is rubbish. At release, Vista was usable on machines up to 6-7 years old (ca. 800Mhz-1Ghz P3), with minor and cheap upgrades (RAM, video card if you wanted Aero).
Instead we'd live in a world where content is created and paid for:
* Different financing models, eg: product placement, ads inserted at the distribution point, etc.
*Profits* might decrease (or, more accurately, be differently distributed). But the idea that no money whatsoever could be made in the absence of copyright, is just silly.
The part I don't get about this talking point is, instead of using someone else's work, why not make your own? Isn't that more creative than just copying someone else's work?
Arguably, a modification of "someone else's work" _is_ "making your own", and can be just as creative as the original.
Besides, it's not like most "original" works really are - only 7 different story plots, limited number of "nice" sound combinations, etc.
When tour groups of non-tech people come by the server room, I used to emphasize reliability by pulling a hard disk out of a running server, hand it to them, and then put it back in the server. The server doesn't skip a beat (and these were common off-the-shelf Dell rackmount servers costing $2,500 or so).
Presumably you only did this until someone competent saw it happen and had you fired ?
The problem is that the capacity has been growing faster than the transfer-bandwith. Thus it takes a longer and longer time to read (or write) a complete disk. This gives a larger window for double-failure.
No, the point is that (statistically) you can't actually read all of the data without having another read error (statistically speaking).
Whether you read it all at 100MB/sec or 10MB/sec (ie: how long it takes) is irrelevant (within reason). The problem is that published URE rates are such that you "will" have at least one during the rebuild (because of the amount of data).
The solution, as outlined by a few other posters, are more intelligent RAID5 implementations that don't take an entire disk offline just because of a single sector read error (some already act like this, most don't).
I installed Vista because I was sick of hearing how bad it was. Long story short, after the fresh install and setting up all my drivers so I had the latest of all devices in the Device Manager, I was having applications crash about every 5 minutes. So I figured it was a 64 bit problem. I installed Vista Ultima 32-bit and got all the drivers updated. Same problem. I updated the firmware. Same problem. I installed Windows XP SP3. 3 months later and if it's had a single application crash in that time, I'd be surprised.
Sounds like you were running afoul of DEP to me. Which applications ?
Sadly, this has lead to what I can only call "hiring voodoo" -- the irrational belief without evidence that a relatively untrained interviewer will mysteriously be able to find out more about "what a candidate is really like" in an hour than the candidate's university or co-workers (references) found out in several years.
The problem with references, is that they won't give you negative information, only "not explicitly positive" information. This means you need to play "guess what they really mean" when a reference is anything other than glowing, and try to figure out where in the spectrum from flat-out incompetent to average, your potential employee lies.
"Microsoft's IE8 browser includes a keystroke-logging search suggestion tool similar to the one that Google modified Monday after coming under fire from users. Unlike Chrome, IE8 Beta 2 doesn't enable the feature -- which some have compared to a keylogger -- by default. One privacy expert said that was a "huge difference.""
1. This information wasn't in the original post I responded to.
2. It's not enabled by default.
3. Sending input entered into the URL bar != keylogger.
With IE8 having the functionality to log keystrokes and send those back home the level of privacy is debatable.
From the IE8 Privacy statement, that almost no one will go though the trouble of reading:
"When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with some standard information from your computer such as IP address, browser type, regional and language settings,"
So, the only evidence we have for the genesis of life, at least in this thought experiment, is that a human being was required to create it -- after all, we don't see it popping up out of dirt, do we?
"Present" != "required". Someone needs to flip a light switch to turn it on, that doesn't mean the element won't glow when a current is passed through it in the absence of said human.
No, the only genesis of life that comes not from re-production was the artificial creation by a human being.
So, if you say that life can arise on its own, without descending from existing life, you would be arguing a position with no evidence.
Exactly which part of the proposed experiment, do you feel involved life "descending" ?
In Einstein's terms, you've made it too simple. But to argue a position that life can be created by a human being, or an intelligent being in general, is to take a position with evidence, as in the case of our thought experiment.
Only if there is some reason to consider the human a dependent variable. What is the rationale for doing so ? What contribution does the human make, that could not occur in nature ?
If we suspect that life may arise without intelligent interference, we have no evidence for our suspicions, but it we suspect that life requires intelligent interference, we do have evidence of that when a scientist creates life.
We have no evidence that "interference" is "required" (unless some unique contribution from the "interference" can be hypothesised and supported). OTOH, we have compelling evidence that in a certain set of environmental circumstances, live can arise spontaneously.
Anywho, one of the questions was something like "Suppose a scientist creates life from scratch in a test tube. Is that evidence of abiogenesis, or creationism?" One answer, that most scientifically minded people choose, is that the scientist isn't doing anything that couldn't have happened in nature without the scientist, so therefore it's evidence of abiogenesis. Other people, those more creation minded, say that an intelligent being, in this case a scientist, created life from raw materials, so therefore, its evidence that life is created by intelligence.
Science dictates you take the simpler answer - the one that doesn't require a certain set of environmental conditions that can exist naturally *and* a man in a white coat to actually provide them (a rather massive, additional variable in the equation).
People of a certain bent might see evidence for Creationism, but that simply means they are not following the principles of science, in that instance. Further, a teacher who doesn't highlight this flawed reasoning, either a) doesn't understand what they're teaching, or b) is pushing an agenda.
I wasn't making an argument against evolution.. I was suggesting some remotely sensible arguments against evolution and asking why people who are against evolution never come up with anything similar.
I was merely making the point that your examples *aren't* particularly good.
Why are chicken eggs so tasty? Animals have been stealing eggs from birds for millions of years, shouldn't they have evolved some non-tasty additives by now?
How do you propose a non-tasty egg reproduce to pass on its non-tasty genes, given its tastiness is unknown until reproduction is impossible ?
(Personally, I wouldn't say eggs are "tasty" though. They usually need something else with them...)
Iron is an essential part of metabolism. Brains and nervous systems are basically electrical systems. Some animals even have a compass. So why do no animals have radios? Not even primitive ones.
Passive vs active interaction.
Impressive results have been seen in modeling evolution - for example, genetic algorithms - but all of these systems plateau after a certain amount of runtime. This is the so called "local maxima" problem. Yet biologists claim with a straight face that Darwinian evolution is open ended.
I'll have to leave this one for someone more knowledgable in genetics than I.
Horizontal gene transfer has been observed in the lab between multi-cellular organisms.. doesn't this just completely blow away the traditionalist "tree of life" assumption?
In what way is reviewing an assumption in the face of new evidence a problem with a scientific theory ?
If you could post an explanation of how I could safely play this game without buying a dedicated machine which will never do anything but play this one game, that'd be great.
Buy $30 hard disk, install dedicated OS for playing DRM-encumbered games, dual boot as necessary.
See how easy it is to turn your PC into a console ?
Still means you might have failures somewhat clustered.
No, it doesn't. There's nothing to suggest failures would be any more "clustered" than they would be for a traditional disk RAID.
I would opt for an option that used a RAID 1 and a traditional hard drive, with slower sync times, for reliability and price. Still gives you insanely fast reads, still gives you faster writes to the primary drive It is just slower for the mechanical to catchup, which doesn't affect actual performance since that is done on the raid card, not the system.
It will most certainly affect "actual performance", unless your entire dataset fits within the cache on your RAID controller.
What if the drives realiably fail within a given period of time?
If the device craps out after a very specific amount of time or read/write cycles, it will be a *huge* problem for RAID arrays, which assume that failures are randomly distributed.
I'm not saying this is likely (far from it), [...]
I think you've pretty much answered your own questions...
Yeah, but the reason it speeds up mechanical hard drives is because your kernel can schedule I/O on multiple spindles, effectively parallelizing your I/O. Flash chips don't have to batch up a lot of transactions in memory and then block the process for long periods of time. Flash does not typically operate synchronous to the bus speed it's connected to, so you could get some speed benefits by accessing multiple banks in tandem, but probably not as much.
You get exactly the same (relative) performance and reliability benefit from RAIDing SSDs as you do from RAIDing regular drives.
Before rushing to buy these for database use, I would want a good look at MTBF values. Especially MTBF values for really heavy use, which may be completely different from estimated desktop use.
So use RAID1, just like you would with normal drives.
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In my honest opinion, there's two things that Vista did badly; 1, released too early (for reasons that constitute their own debate), and 2, not enough work done on trimming fat so it runs on older/cheaper machines. We're seeing inroads being made by Linux (and XP) because of this.
Except point 2 is rubbish. At release, Vista was usable on machines up to 6-7 years old (ca. 800Mhz-1Ghz P3), with minor and cheap upgrades (RAM, video card if you wanted Aero).
Mac OS X 10.4 works wonderfully on our 400MHz G3, 400MHz G4 and 800MHz G4.
If you're happy with OS X on Macs like those, you'll be more than happy with Vista on equivalently-aged (and especially -priced) PC hardware.
Without copyright anyone can be a distribution point and so the creator gets no money from them.
Except most people will go for the most convenient and easily-found option. Like, say, the "creator's" web site.
Instead we'd live in a world where content is created and paid for:
* Different financing models, eg: product placement, ads inserted at the distribution point, etc.
*Profits* might decrease (or, more accurately, be differently distributed). But the idea that no money whatsoever could be made in the absence of copyright, is just silly.
The part I don't get about this talking point is, instead of using someone else's work, why not make your own? Isn't that more creative than just copying someone else's work?
Arguably, a modification of "someone else's work" _is_ "making your own", and can be just as creative as the original.
Besides, it's not like most "original" works really are - only 7 different story plots, limited number of "nice" sound combinations, etc.
I'll see your "pretty rich musical culture for the several thousands of years" and raise you a "perfect cost free reproduction for about 10 years".
Reality disagrees with your implication people only make music when they're getting paid to.
And they have quite a few old computers with PCI slots (hard to find these days) stockpiled in case of failure.
Huh ? Most motherboards I've looked at recently have at least a couple of PCI slots on them.
Sure you don't mean ISA ?
Actually, HPFS and NTFS are completely different. However, even if they weren't it wouldn't matter, because HPFS was also created by Microsoft.
When tour groups of non-tech people come by the server room, I used to emphasize reliability by pulling a hard disk out of a running server, hand it to them, and then put it back in the server. The server doesn't skip a beat (and these were common off-the-shelf Dell rackmount servers costing $2,500 or so).
Presumably you only did this until someone competent saw it happen and had you fired ?
NTFS is actually a pretty good file system. It's probably because it was originally designed by IBM.
NTFS was designed and built in-house at Microsoft specifically for Windows NT.
The problem is that the capacity has been growing faster than the transfer-bandwith. Thus it takes a longer and longer time to read (or write) a complete disk. This gives a larger window for double-failure.
No, the point is that (statistically) you can't actually read all of the data without having another read error (statistically speaking).
Whether you read it all at 100MB/sec or 10MB/sec (ie: how long it takes) is irrelevant (within reason). The problem is that published URE rates are such that you "will" have at least one during the rebuild (because of the amount of data).
The solution, as outlined by a few other posters, are more intelligent RAID5 implementations that don't take an entire disk offline just because of a single sector read error (some already act like this, most don't).
I installed Vista because I was sick of hearing how bad it was. Long story short, after the fresh install and setting up all my drivers so I had the latest of all devices in the Device Manager, I was having applications crash about every 5 minutes. So I figured it was a 64 bit problem. I installed Vista Ultima 32-bit and got all the drivers updated. Same problem. I updated the firmware. Same problem. I installed Windows XP SP3. 3 months later and if it's had a single application crash in that time, I'd be surprised.
Sounds like you were running afoul of DEP to me. Which applications ?
Sadly, this has lead to what I can only call "hiring voodoo" -- the irrational belief without evidence that a relatively untrained interviewer will mysteriously be able to find out more about "what a candidate is really like" in an hour than the candidate's university or co-workers (references) found out in several years.
The problem with references, is that they won't give you negative information, only "not explicitly positive" information. This means you need to play "guess what they really mean" when a reference is anything other than glowing, and try to figure out where in the spectrum from flat-out incompetent to average, your potential employee lies.
Actual speeds might even be competitive with a 100Mb LAN.
"Microsoft's IE8 browser includes a keystroke-logging search suggestion tool similar to the one that Google modified Monday after coming under fire from users. Unlike Chrome, IE8 Beta 2 doesn't enable the feature -- which some have compared to a keylogger -- by default. One privacy expert said that was a "huge difference.""
1. This information wasn't in the original post I responded to.
2. It's not enabled by default.
3. Sending input entered into the URL bar != keylogger.
With IE8 having the functionality to log keystrokes and send those back home the level of privacy is debatable.
From the IE8 Privacy statement, that almost no one will go though the trouble of reading:
"When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with some standard information from your computer such as IP address, browser type, regional and language settings,"
One of these things, is not like the other.
So, the only evidence we have for the genesis of life, at least in this thought experiment, is that a human being was required to create it -- after all, we don't see it popping up out of dirt, do we?
"Present" != "required". Someone needs to flip a light switch to turn it on, that doesn't mean the element won't glow when a current is passed through it in the absence of said human.
No, the only genesis of life that comes not from re-production was the artificial creation by a human being.
So, if you say that life can arise on its own, without descending from existing life, you would be arguing a position with no evidence.
Exactly which part of the proposed experiment, do you feel involved life "descending" ?
In Einstein's terms, you've made it too simple. But to argue a position that life can be created by a human being, or an intelligent being in general, is to take a position with evidence, as in the case of our thought experiment.
Only if there is some reason to consider the human a dependent variable. What is the rationale for doing so ? What contribution does the human make, that could not occur in nature ?
If we suspect that life may arise without intelligent interference, we have no evidence for our suspicions, but it we suspect that life requires intelligent interference, we do have evidence of that when a scientist creates life.
We have no evidence that "interference" is "required" (unless some unique contribution from the "interference" can be hypothesised and supported). OTOH, we have compelling evidence that in a certain set of environmental circumstances, live can arise spontaneously.
Anywho, one of the questions was something like "Suppose a scientist creates life from scratch in a test tube. Is that evidence of abiogenesis, or creationism?" One answer, that most scientifically minded people choose, is that the scientist isn't doing anything that couldn't have happened in nature without the scientist, so therefore it's evidence of abiogenesis. Other people, those more creation minded, say that an intelligent being, in this case a scientist, created life from raw materials, so therefore, its evidence that life is created by intelligence.
Science dictates you take the simpler answer - the one that doesn't require a certain set of environmental conditions that can exist naturally *and* a man in a white coat to actually provide them (a rather massive, additional variable in the equation).
People of a certain bent might see evidence for Creationism, but that simply means they are not following the principles of science, in that instance. Further, a teacher who doesn't highlight this flawed reasoning, either a) doesn't understand what they're teaching, or b) is pushing an agenda.
I wasn't making an argument against evolution.. I was suggesting some remotely sensible arguments against evolution and asking why people who are against evolution never come up with anything similar.
I was merely making the point that your examples *aren't* particularly good.
Fuckwit.
Why are chicken eggs so tasty? Animals have been stealing eggs from birds for millions of years, shouldn't they have evolved some non-tasty additives by now?
How do you propose a non-tasty egg reproduce to pass on its non-tasty genes, given its tastiness is unknown until reproduction is impossible ?
(Personally, I wouldn't say eggs are "tasty" though. They usually need something else with them...)
Iron is an essential part of metabolism. Brains and nervous systems are basically electrical systems. Some animals even have a compass. So why do no animals have radios? Not even primitive ones.
Passive vs active interaction.
Impressive results have been seen in modeling evolution - for example, genetic algorithms - but all of these systems plateau after a certain amount of runtime. This is the so called "local maxima" problem. Yet biologists claim with a straight face that Darwinian evolution is open ended.
I'll have to leave this one for someone more knowledgable in genetics than I.
Horizontal gene transfer has been observed in the lab between multi-cellular organisms.. doesn't this just completely blow away the traditionalist "tree of life" assumption?
In what way is reviewing an assumption in the face of new evidence a problem with a scientific theory ?
If you could post an explanation of how I could safely play this game without buying a dedicated machine which will never do anything but play this one game, that'd be great.
Buy $30 hard disk, install dedicated OS for playing DRM-encumbered games, dual boot as necessary.
See how easy it is to turn your PC into a console ?
Still means you might have failures somewhat clustered.
No, it doesn't. There's nothing to suggest failures would be any more "clustered" than they would be for a traditional disk RAID.
I would opt for an option that used a RAID 1 and a traditional hard drive, with slower sync times, for reliability and price. Still gives you insanely fast reads, still gives you faster writes to the primary drive It is just slower for the mechanical to catchup, which doesn't affect actual performance since that is done on the raid card, not the system.
It will most certainly affect "actual performance", unless your entire dataset fits within the cache on your RAID controller.
What if the drives realiably fail within a given period of time?
If the device craps out after a very specific amount of time or read/write cycles, it will be a *huge* problem for RAID arrays, which assume that failures are randomly distributed.
I'm not saying this is likely (far from it), [...]
I think you've pretty much answered your own questions...
Yeah, but the reason it speeds up mechanical hard drives is because your kernel can schedule I/O on multiple spindles, effectively parallelizing your I/O. Flash chips don't have to batch up a lot of transactions in memory and then block the process for long periods of time. Flash does not typically operate synchronous to the bus speed it's connected to, so you could get some speed benefits by accessing multiple banks in tandem, but probably not as much.
You get exactly the same (relative) performance and reliability benefit from RAIDing SSDs as you do from RAIDing regular drives.
Before rushing to buy these for database use, I would want a good look at MTBF values. Especially MTBF values for really heavy use, which may be completely different from estimated desktop use.
So use RAID1, just like you would with normal drives.