By my opinion, we won't be seeing truly useful personal computing devices until they make them for $20-30/item (So that you can buy several, spread them out over a desk, and not be too worried if you loose them/somebody accidentally borrows them/break them/etc.)
If you discover then publish Coca Cola's secret formula, then I bet you'd be in jail or at least sued for an insane amount of money.
IANAL, but:
1) The formula for Coke is not copyrighted. It is secret. Copyright means disclosure and Coke is unwilling to disclose.
2) Secret != government classified. Just because Coke has a secret document doesn't mean it is criminal to possess or publish the document. The methods by which one obtains a document could be criminal, however.
3) The part of the DCMA being discussed here is the prohibition of the development and sale of tools to circumvent copyright protection. This is unique to the DCMA and therefore is new.
Really? How can you explain the 1,000,000+ tracks from 150,000+ artists available for free on MP3.com? The reality is that most artists (the ones who don't make any money from their art) want the widest possible distribution of their music. The best way to do that is to make it available for free. But, after they find fame and are finally able to charge for their music, they want to stop contributing to the public domain. I don't have a problem with this; those first songs were just the equivalent of a "loss leader" in product marketing. They were the price of building a brand.
My proposal doesn't necessarily require an authorized member of the band to submit approval, although I initially presented it that way. It hinges on the idea that anyone can submit music for sharing. A distributed MP3.com, if you will. A large network of moderators (probably voluntary, a la Slashdot but probably with more qualifications than pure random selection) would approve songs for distribution. How about a hybrid opt-in/out: Napster could filter opt-in requests with the opt-out database it currently keeps, relaxing it to reduce the false-positives. Let the human moderators manage the false-negatives.
A simple reporting mechanism would fastrack songs to be removed. Ever surf HotOrNot.com? I don't know the mechanics, but there's a link to click if a picture is "broken, copyrighted, or inappropriate." If enough "basic" users report a song or a single moderator (or a record label or the original artist), the song gets yanked.
Napster will never develop a filter that will reliably differentiate copyrighted from noncopyrighted songs. It's as absurd as claiming I can build an OS that's uncrackable. We humans are pretty clever-- we'd figure out how to get around it in no time. Which is exactly what the record companies want-- Napster beat them to the punch with electronic distribution, and they want their piece of the pie.
Of course there are a ton more kinks to my idea. But I think the broader solution of opt-in would be more successful than their current opt-out strategy. Someone else mentioned eDonkey2000; I love their concept of "slices" (my term)-- if I'm on my broadband connection and ten people connected to the net via modem have the song I want, I can download different "slices" of the song from them simultaneously, aggregating their bandwidth. Finally, all those modem user libraries don't go to waste!
Why not change the from a banned-song system to an authorized-song system? Much like authors submit their work to MP3.com, Napster could allow authors to register their song along with an MD5 checksum. Not only would the checksum prevent copyrighted songs from masquerading as approved songs, but incomplete and corrupted downloads would be blocked from trading. A simple moderation/reporting/blocking system could be assembled to block songs posted as original work which were actually copyrighted-- enough reports, or a report from a "trusted" user, and the song would be removed from the authorized list.
While technically correct, you have to look at the bigger picture. Rebooting may not fix the root cause of the problem, but it could very possibly get the system back online. Who's to say that it's not a 1 PPM problem that won't affect the system again for another hour/day/month/year? Once the packets are flowing again, then you can relax and take the time to root cause the problem and fix it.
You can make a case that valuable troubleshooting info is lost when systems are rebooted. I agree, but counter that all good systems should have detailed event logging. Leaving the system online and intact is the best way to root cause a bug. But, sometimes getting back online as fast as possible is more important.
Not necessarily. Bit density will rise from 20 to 25 Gbit/in^2. Not only does this mean that each track will have more bits but it also means they can squeeze the width of each track. Thinner tracks == shorter distance == shorter seek time.
But, the cool part of this tech is that they are overcoming what was thought to be a limitation in magnetic film technology: the minimum grain size of the media. AFC reduces the grain size lower than was previously thought possible, extending the life of magnetic film hard drives. Before too much longer, we'll be out of headroom and have to develop new storage technologies to get more dense and faster data storage.
Y'know what makes me happy about this? No mention of patents anywhere.
I disagree. This is exactly what patents are designed to protect. This technology isn't "one-click buying" nor "hyperlink page transition." Significant work was required to develop the technology. IBM hires some of the brightest scientists in the world and pumps billions into blue sky research. Many technologies go nowhere, and the money is shot. Others can be productized and make enough money to allow the research arm to operate at a profit. Let's be honest: IBM isn't NASA. If research stopped driving a profit to IBM's bottom line, they'd shut it down.
they even admit that they expect their competitors to produce drives with this shortly
This is because IBM Research operates as a seperate entity from IBM Storage. I'm sure they will license the technology to all of the platter manufacturers to maximize the profit to the company. Although keeping it proprietary would no doubt help Storage, Research has no charter to help them out. They'll probably make more money licensing it anyway.
IBM is a business. For-profit businesses are supposed to make money. What differentiates some businesses from others is how they play the game. I happen to think IBM is a Good Thing (tm). They make money (for the most part now) responsibly and fairly and give back to the community. They took the risk when they funded the resereach-- they should definitely reap the rewards.
and w/o leaving license plate images on the security cameras (so trespassing charges can't be filed)
According to the article, repo men have the right to enter private property to retrieve their customers' property. Hence, no trespassing charges could be filed. Now a locked parking area, that's a different story....
Re:Tidal generators are the stuff dreams are made
on
Wave Driven Generators
·
· Score: 1
As far as coastal habitats, from the article:
[Mass power generation] would probably involve large-scale wave plants in near-shore or off-shore environments, a technology still being developed.
Now, I'm not saying there are no ecological implications as a result of this technology, but I think that it must certainly be less than those from fossil fuels and nuclear power generation.
As far as overconsumption, what do you figure is the "right" amount of consumption? 1950s? 1900s? If consumption can be maintained without the negative impact on resources, is it a bad thing?
The Adbuster article you reference specifically translates the negative impact of consumption in to fossil fuel consumption-- with technolgies such as the tidal generator, the negative externality of pollution goes away. The heat issue is entirely different, but advances in technology are reducing losses due to heat at a pretty good rate.
Why am I going to spend $800 (after I finish upgrading the system to have even less capability than the one I have now) for a machine that only runs experimental Linux ports?
Becuase it's not $800. You can get it right now for less than $400. If you were lucky (like me), you could have ordered one when it was less than $300 (shipped!).
Now I just have to get a Compact Flash and figure out how I can dual boot WinCE and NetBSD/hpcmips. Oh, oh; I think I'm about to geek-out.
Seagate's spin relies on latency (2 ms) and seek time (1.9 ms) and as usual, they don't tell us how they come up with those figures. Even if those figures are correct, that still doesn't explain how Seagate's new 15-K rpm drives would be better. Imagine now, you have a server, it's transaction-busy, and you need to have lots and lots of io.
The originally referred article at EE Times quotes some IOMeter numbers. They don't specify which profile they were running, but I assume it was the default profile, which is essentially a TPC-like workload (2k blocks, 67% read, 100% random). The only flaw with this profile is that the queue depth is only 1, whereas in a real server it's going to be > 50.
Why does this matter? Drives have a pretty sophisticated cache system. Paired with this is a command reordering algorithm which lets the drive choose which command it will execute next, based on predicted performance. For example, if the drive sees that commands 2 and 4 are sequential, it will do them before command 3.
Would you rely on ONE 15-K rpm hd, or would you rather have 2 or more slower-spinning drives, maybe several, connected to raid-5 array, so to spread out the io load?
RAID-5 is about the worst thing you can do to your storage array performance. RAID-5 pushes THREE TIMES the number of IOs to your drives, plus adds a lot of overhead while your RAID card calculates parity. Really want the best IO performance you can get? Buy as many drives as you can and run them at RAID-0 (or RAID-1 if you want redundancy). If you have WAY too much money, buy the biggest drives available and only plan to use 1/2 of it; drives use the outer cylinders first so the data will only be a head-switch away instead of a seek.
And since we're talking about performance, Ultra160 doesn't buy you anything. It's all hype. Ultra320 may have some benefit, due to some changes in the arbitration sequencing.
A drive that spins 15-K rpm spins twice as fast as a drive that spins at 7400 rpm, that means, a 15-K rpm drives will NEVER last as long as the other one which spins half as fast. and Furrthermore, the recent MTBF from all HD manufacturers are almost always bogus anyway. How I long for the old time where MTBF means just that, Mean Time Between Failures.
What data do you use to support that claim? Because it's just not true. Drive reliability is approaching 1,000,000 hours MTBF. This is independent of spindle speed. Most drives fail because of handling damage. Even though drives will be able to withstand 200G non-op shock before too long, that is still less than the G-load when you drop a drive 1/2" on to a hard surface. It may not fail right away, but the particles you make when the head slaps the platter will eventually accumulate on a head and kill the drive.
MTBF still means Mean Time Before Failure. But this assumes that the drive is treated properly. I work for a box manufacturer, and we make our vendors complete a demonstrated million hour test. That's almost 115 years of continuous runtime (or 1000 drives for 1000 hours, Weibull). Want to know why all of your drives always fail earlier? Look no further than how you treat them.
I've done some reading about these new drives and word is that the super high RPMs generate so much heat that Seagate has taken to routing coolant through the drive heads just like blood through your body. Of course the little coolant pipes are tiny tiny, but they're there, chillin out, to use the parlance of our times.
This is ridiculous. There are no cooling devices on HDDs. Drive HDAs are designed to run as hot as 65C indefinitely (and much hotter for short durations), which is easy to maintain with fans. Drive heads are solid-state devices which have very high heat tolerances.
Drive manufacturers have kept the power (and thus heat) dissipation down by reducing the diameter of the platters. The power consumed by the spindle motor is a fifth-order function of the diameter of the platters, so even a small reduction in size greatly reduces the spindle motor power requirements. Over the years, the electronics on the PCB have migrated to lower voltages, which also helps the power.
Losing IP that you are already shipping and losing IP from a product that is a year away from the market are two totally different things.
The gravy-money made off a product is in the first few months while others are racing to catch up and get their product to market. For the most part, profit margins decline significantly after a competitor enters the arena and price wars begin. Ever notice the price of Intel processors after AMD ups the ante?
Besides, the issue is not really about losing IP; it's about value-added features. If a competitor got his hands on that unit, he would not only be able to reverse engineer the technology, but he would also know every cool feature Microsoft planned to incorporate and make sure his product had the same (or better).
So, Microsoft stood to lose:
a limited run prototype, probably in short supply,
IP developed for this, and
some amount of competive advantage against other web appliance makers (feature set)
Sounds like a pretty big deal to me! Depending on the circumstances, that box could have been worth a whole lot more to Microsoft than $1M.
The privacy implication is that the listening data can be tied back to an individual user. If Real Networks takes your personal listening habit data, abtracts and combines it with other listener data such that your identity is no longer attached to that data, and then destroys the original data, is your privacy still violated? It's no different than taking the average of 1,000 numbers, saving that average, and deleting the original data. I'm not sure that our privacy is really protected in this way, but if so I have no problem if this data is collected-- it's my way of payment for a little free entertainment. I prefer Shoutcast anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
By my opinion, we won't be seeing truly useful personal computing devices until they make them for $20-30/item (So that you can buy several, spread them out over a desk, and not be too worried if you loose them/somebody accidentally borrows them/break them/etc.)
You mean something like this?
If you discover then publish Coca Cola's secret formula, then I bet you'd be in jail or at least sued for an insane amount of money.
IANAL, but:
1) The formula for Coke is not copyrighted. It is secret. Copyright means disclosure and Coke is unwilling to disclose.
2) Secret != government classified. Just because Coke has a secret document doesn't mean it is criminal to possess or publish the document. The methods by which one obtains a document could be criminal, however.
3) The part of the DCMA being discussed here is the prohibition of the development and sale of tools to circumvent copyright protection. This is unique to the DCMA and therefore is new.
Try $900 here
Or actually go to Wal-Mart and buy one for $400. Wal-Mart != walmart.com
But why pay $400 when you can get one for even less.
Really? How can you explain the 1,000,000+ tracks from 150,000+ artists available for free on MP3.com? The reality is that most artists (the ones who don't make any money from their art) want the widest possible distribution of their music. The best way to do that is to make it available for free. But, after they find fame and are finally able to charge for their music, they want to stop contributing to the public domain. I don't have a problem with this; those first songs were just the equivalent of a "loss leader" in product marketing. They were the price of building a brand.
My proposal doesn't necessarily require an authorized member of the band to submit approval, although I initially presented it that way. It hinges on the idea that anyone can submit music for sharing. A distributed MP3.com, if you will. A large network of moderators (probably voluntary, a la Slashdot but probably with more qualifications than pure random selection) would approve songs for distribution. How about a hybrid opt-in/out: Napster could filter opt-in requests with the opt-out database it currently keeps, relaxing it to reduce the false-positives. Let the human moderators manage the false-negatives.
A simple reporting mechanism would fastrack songs to be removed. Ever surf HotOrNot.com? I don't know the mechanics, but there's a link to click if a picture is "broken, copyrighted, or inappropriate." If enough "basic" users report a song or a single moderator (or a record label or the original artist), the song gets yanked.
Napster will never develop a filter that will reliably differentiate copyrighted from noncopyrighted songs. It's as absurd as claiming I can build an OS that's uncrackable. We humans are pretty clever-- we'd figure out how to get around it in no time. Which is exactly what the record companies want-- Napster beat them to the punch with electronic distribution, and they want their piece of the pie.
Of course there are a ton more kinks to my idea. But I think the broader solution of opt-in would be more successful than their current opt-out strategy. Someone else mentioned eDonkey2000; I love their concept of "slices" (my term)-- if I'm on my broadband connection and ten people connected to the net via modem have the song I want, I can download different "slices" of the song from them simultaneously, aggregating their bandwidth. Finally, all those modem user libraries don't go to waste!
Why not change the from a banned-song system to an authorized-song system? Much like authors submit their work to MP3.com, Napster could allow authors to register their song along with an MD5 checksum. Not only would the checksum prevent copyrighted songs from masquerading as approved songs, but incomplete and corrupted downloads would be blocked from trading. A simple moderation/reporting/blocking system could be assembled to block songs posted as original work which were actually copyrighted-- enough reports, or a report from a "trusted" user, and the song would be removed from the authorized list.
While technically correct, you have to look at the bigger picture. Rebooting may not fix the root cause of the problem, but it could very possibly get the system back online. Who's to say that it's not a 1 PPM problem that won't affect the system again for another hour/day/month/year? Once the packets are flowing again, then you can relax and take the time to root cause the problem and fix it.
You can make a case that valuable troubleshooting info is lost when systems are rebooted. I agree, but counter that all good systems should have detailed event logging. Leaving the system online and intact is the best way to root cause a bug. But, sometimes getting back online as fast as possible is more important.
Not necessarily. Bit density will rise from 20 to 25 Gbit/in^2. Not only does this mean that each track will have more bits but it also means they can squeeze the width of each track. Thinner tracks == shorter distance == shorter seek time.
But, the cool part of this tech is that they are overcoming what was thought to be a limitation in magnetic film technology: the minimum grain size of the media. AFC reduces the grain size lower than was previously thought possible, extending the life of magnetic film hard drives. Before too much longer, we'll be out of headroom and have to develop new storage technologies to get more dense and faster data storage.
Y'know what makes me happy about this? No mention of patents anywhere.
I disagree. This is exactly what patents are designed to protect. This technology isn't "one-click buying" nor "hyperlink page transition." Significant work was required to develop the technology. IBM hires some of the brightest scientists in the world and pumps billions into blue sky research. Many technologies go nowhere, and the money is shot. Others can be productized and make enough money to allow the research arm to operate at a profit. Let's be honest: IBM isn't NASA. If research stopped driving a profit to IBM's bottom line, they'd shut it down.
they even admit that they expect their competitors to produce drives with this shortly
This is because IBM Research operates as a seperate entity from IBM Storage. I'm sure they will license the technology to all of the platter manufacturers to maximize the profit to the company. Although keeping it proprietary would no doubt help Storage, Research has no charter to help them out. They'll probably make more money licensing it anyway.
IBM is a business. For-profit businesses are supposed to make money. What differentiates some businesses from others is how they play the game. I happen to think IBM is a Good Thing (tm). They make money (for the most part now) responsibly and fairly and give back to the community. They took the risk when they funded the resereach-- they should definitely reap the rewards.
and w/o leaving license plate images on the security cameras (so trespassing charges can't be filed)
According to the article, repo men have the right to enter private property to retrieve their customers' property. Hence, no trespassing charges could be filed. Now a locked parking area, that's a different story....
As far as coastal habitats, from the article:
[Mass power generation] would probably involve large-scale wave plants in near-shore or off-shore environments, a technology still being developed.
Now, I'm not saying there are no ecological implications as a result of this technology, but I think that it must certainly be less than those from fossil fuels and nuclear power generation.
As far as overconsumption, what do you figure is the "right" amount of consumption? 1950s? 1900s? If consumption can be maintained without the negative impact on resources, is it a bad thing?
The Adbuster article you reference specifically translates the negative impact of consumption in to fossil fuel consumption-- with technolgies such as the tidal generator, the negative externality of pollution goes away. The heat issue is entirely different, but advances in technology are reducing losses due to heat at a pretty good rate.
Consumption is not necessarily a bad thing.
the IBM cluster is 256 boxes, so if they are SMP, you have 512 procs
Assuming they are using the Netfinity 8500R (8-way SMP), there could be a total of 2048 processors.
Why am I going to spend $800 (after I finish upgrading the system to have even less capability than the one I have now) for a machine that only runs experimental Linux ports?
Becuase it's not $800. You can get it right now for less than $400. If you were lucky (like me), you could have ordered one when it was less than $300 (shipped!).
Now I just have to get a Compact Flash and figure out how I can dual boot WinCE and NetBSD/hpcmips. Oh, oh; I think I'm about to geek-out.
Seagate's spin relies on latency (2 ms) and seek time (1.9 ms) and as usual, they don't tell us how they come up with those figures. Even if those figures are correct, that still doesn't explain how Seagate's new 15-K rpm drives would be better. Imagine now, you have a server, it's transaction-busy, and you need to have lots and lots of io.
The originally referred article at EE Times quotes some IOMeter numbers. They don't specify which profile they were running, but I assume it was the default profile, which is essentially a TPC-like workload (2k blocks, 67% read, 100% random). The only flaw with this profile is that the queue depth is only 1, whereas in a real server it's going to be > 50.
Why does this matter? Drives have a pretty sophisticated cache system. Paired with this is a command reordering algorithm which lets the drive choose which command it will execute next, based on predicted performance. For example, if the drive sees that commands 2 and 4 are sequential, it will do them before command 3.
Would you rely on ONE 15-K rpm hd, or would you rather have 2 or more slower-spinning drives, maybe several, connected to raid-5 array, so to spread out the io load?
RAID-5 is about the worst thing you can do to your storage array performance. RAID-5 pushes THREE TIMES the number of IOs to your drives, plus adds a lot of overhead while your RAID card calculates parity. Really want the best IO performance you can get? Buy as many drives as you can and run them at RAID-0 (or RAID-1 if you want redundancy). If you have WAY too much money, buy the biggest drives available and only plan to use 1/2 of it; drives use the outer cylinders first so the data will only be a head-switch away instead of a seek.
And since we're talking about performance, Ultra160 doesn't buy you anything. It's all hype. Ultra320 may have some benefit, due to some changes in the arbitration sequencing.
A drive that spins 15-K rpm spins twice as fast as a drive that spins at 7400 rpm, that means, a 15-K rpm drives will NEVER last as long as the other one which spins half as fast. and Furrthermore, the recent MTBF from all HD manufacturers are almost always bogus anyway. How I long for the old time where MTBF means just that, Mean Time Between Failures.
What data do you use to support that claim? Because it's just not true. Drive reliability is approaching 1,000,000 hours MTBF. This is independent of spindle speed. Most drives fail because of handling damage. Even though drives will be able to withstand 200G non-op shock before too long, that is still less than the G-load when you drop a drive 1/2" on to a hard surface. It may not fail right away, but the particles you make when the head slaps the platter will eventually accumulate on a head and kill the drive.
MTBF still means Mean Time Before Failure. But this assumes that the drive is treated properly. I work for a box manufacturer, and we make our vendors complete a demonstrated million hour test. That's almost 115 years of continuous runtime (or 1000 drives for 1000 hours, Weibull). Want to know why all of your drives always fail earlier? Look no further than how you treat them.
I've done some reading about these new drives and word is that the super high RPMs generate so much heat that Seagate has taken to routing coolant through the drive heads just like blood through your body. Of course the little coolant pipes are tiny tiny, but they're there, chillin out, to use the parlance of our times.
This is ridiculous. There are no cooling devices on HDDs. Drive HDAs are designed to run as hot as 65C indefinitely (and much hotter for short durations), which is easy to maintain with fans. Drive heads are solid-state devices which have very high heat tolerances.
Drive manufacturers have kept the power (and thus heat) dissipation down by reducing the diameter of the platters. The power consumed by the spindle motor is a fifth-order function of the diameter of the platters, so even a small reduction in size greatly reduces the spindle motor power requirements. Over the years, the electronics on the PCB have migrated to lower voltages, which also helps the power.
The gravy-money made off a product is in the first few months while others are racing to catch up and get their product to market. For the most part, profit margins decline significantly after a competitor enters the arena and price wars begin. Ever notice the price of Intel processors after AMD ups the ante?
Besides, the issue is not really about losing IP; it's about value-added features. If a competitor got his hands on that unit, he would not only be able to reverse engineer the technology, but he would also know every cool feature Microsoft planned to incorporate and make sure his product had the same (or better).
So, Microsoft stood to lose:
- a limited run prototype, probably in short supply,
- IP developed for this, and
- some amount of competive advantage against other web appliance makers (feature set)
Sounds like a pretty big deal to me! Depending on the circumstances, that box could have been worth a whole lot more to Microsoft than $1M.The privacy implication is that the listening data can be tied back to an individual user. If Real Networks takes your personal listening habit data, abtracts and combines it with other listener data such that your identity is no longer attached to that data, and then destroys the original data, is your privacy still violated? It's no different than taking the average of 1,000 numbers, saving that average, and deleting the original data. I'm not sure that our privacy is really protected in this way, but if so I have no problem if this data is collected-- it's my way of payment for a little free entertainment. I prefer Shoutcast anyway.