A truly special reply suggesting mitigating a theoretical, limited, network security vulnerability by quite literally leaving the physical keys to the castle out in public. Please hand in your risk assessment credentials at the door.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying you should leave a key right outside the door all the time. I'm suggesting hiding a key somewhere non-obvious, *temporarily*, as a backup method in case you can't have an actual human being present. The alternative is an always-on, globally-accessible network attack surface for your front door lock. If that's compromised, getting in is as easy as "send me X bitcoins and I'll open the door at Y o'clock".
A lot of those examples are solved problems, and at worst are minor inconveniences. Many IoT proposals can easily be replaced with three existing categories of solution: "other people", "paying attention", and "non-networked computing". To address your specific examples:
Thermostat: Schedule the turn-on in advance. Alternate, come home, move your luggage inside, turn on the AC, and go out to dinner. Laundry machines: Check a clock every so often. Broken fridge: Show failure status on an LCD. Or have a USB port that you can plug a laptop or a smart phone into. Freezing weather: Ask a neighbor or a friend to check on your house once every day or two. You may already be doing this if you have pets. Door opening: See above re: neighbor or friend, or hide a key somewhere. Out-of-reach window shades: Close them before you leave for work. Dishwasher: Assuming that scheduling is really that much of a money-save, start it manually before you go to bed. Or use a time delay. Or load the data into the washer via USB.
The more serious problems are much more rare, and that must be weighed against the constant vulnerability from having internet-connected appliances and the upkeep required to secure them.
Perhaps a better option would be to get away from the idea that networking should imply both internet access and full remote control. Is there any reason an embedded device can't limit communications to its own subnet? Stick an upgradable, patchable PC on the network to act as a master, and have it talk to the outside world. Meanwhile, the appliance should be designed at the hardware level so that remote access only gets you status information and the ability to trigger a few well-defined fail-safe modes. Using a stove as an example, you would be able to tell if the burners are on, or force them off, but you wouldn't be able to turn them on or change the heat setting.
Thank you for the correction. There's still something I don't understand, though:
Fast forward out of the CRT era, and you have TV screens that do a lot of the same things computer monitors started doing years before. The precise horizontal timing controls, buffering, pixel perfect rasterization without jitter... But the source still can't be synched with the screen because it's an external source.
My understanding was that modern HDTVs are computer monitors are essentially interchangeable (the panels are the same, at least), and that HDMI video and DVI-D are very similar. Digital video is of course encoded for a fixed resolution. So what's the difference between, say, a PC decoding Blu-ray video into a monitor vs. a set-top player decoding the same video into an HDTV?
The whole reason why they went with 4k instead of 2160p for the name is because 4k is shorter, easier to say and looks like it is bigger than 2160p.
It's also a more accurate name in that horizontal resolution doesn't vary with a movie's aspect ratio. A "1080p" movie could be 1920x1080 (16:9) or ~1920x800 (21:9) or any other vertical resolution. The 1920 ("2k") is the real constant. I think the usage of lines was a holdover from the days of analog TV when vertical resolution was discrete but horizontal was continuous.
Sorry for this long cri de coeur, but you guys are my peeps and the responses broke my heart. You're my guys, my people, my tribe. Can't you back us up?
Thank you for posting. I'm sorry that so many of my brethren willfully ignore the direct personal experience of many, many, many women in favor of a comforting fantasy. Hopefully at least a few of them will be persuaded by your words.
The problems started as soon as I made that decision. First I had to figure out how to buy Watch Dogs digitally for PC. That took more than simple Googling, surprisingly. I had to go to the official Ubisoft site originally, and figure out that Uplay is in fact Ubisoft’s digital storefront, and then there still wasn’t any clear indicator it would be digital delivery, except for the fact that they didn’t ask for a shipping address.
[emphasis mine]
He didn't think to try Steam? Or Origin? Or Amazon.com? Or, heck, picking up a DVD from GameStop or Best Buy? This is a big release. It's not exactly hard to find.
I'm not sure about NAND flash, which is a block device, but in NOR flash sequential reads are faster due to prefetching, where the next memory word is read before the CPU has finished processing the first one. For NAND, I'd imagine you could start caching the next page. Not sure if that's actually done, though.
It takes a bit of effort and a lot of downloading, but it is possible to get HD-quality fan reconstructions of the original theatrical cuts of the Star Wars trilogy. This obviously doesn't help the mass market, but if you want to show your friends and family the original movies, it's as close as one can currently get.
how is spinning off your fabrication capability 'good' in the long run?
I don't work at AMD, but I do work at another company that relies partly on foundries.
Basically, it's economies of sale and competition. Semiconductor fabrication processes keep getting more expensive. Foundries specialize in process development and spread the R&D across many, many customers. Unless you're willing to spend a fortune keeping up (as Intel is), have special requirements, or need a ton of volume, you have little to gain and a lot to lose from rolling your own process. Remember, you don't just have to make transistors, you also have to have good enough yield to turn a profit and good enough reliability to keep your customers. If you fail, you have to spend even more money to fix the fab on top of the money you're losing on the stuff you manufacture. Meanwhile, TSMC is cheerfully cranking out wafers for your competitors.
OpenWRT is so fucking easy to install and configure (easier than some consumer out-of-the-box experiences, even) that there really is no excuse if you expect a secure local network... there is no actual technical knowledge required, just basic keyboard/mouse skills, and reading comprehension.
I think you're *wildly* overestimating the skill and confidence of the average home network user and the quality of open source project web sites. Let me walk you through the hidden minefield in your instructions. I'll use a Linksys WRT150N for reference.
The real Step 1 is "realize that I'm supposed to install OpenWrt, and understand what that means". Most users have little to no idea of how the router actually works, so the idea of upgrading the firmware is not an obvious one.
But let's say someone tells them to do it. They go to the OpenWrt web site. The second sentence under "What is OpenWrt?" is "Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management.". Many users will be too terrified to proceed beyond this point. But let's say they make it to the Table of Hardware, and skip past the text about developer snapshots and hardware VLANs and the note from 2009 saying that the page might not be up to date. (That's not realistic -- many users expect to read sequentially.) Instead of a column that says "yes, this router is supported", there's a column named "Status" that gives the first OpenWrt version that supports the router. Next to that there's a column named "Version" that is undefined. I'm assuming it's the router version, but many users could get confused. But the important column is the "Target" column, which lists the specific OpenWrt platform that users should (but probably won't) remember for later. There are two targets for the WRT150N and no indication of which to choose. One of them no longer exists in the current version.
Clicking on the model number in the table gives me an unorganized series of notes from various users. One of them, "An account of flashing OpenWrt to a WRT150N", sounds sort of like installation instructions, but is too brief and technical to be of any use. It does have a working download link, but it's to a version that's five years old. The one after that suggests that one target option (the nonexistent one) is better than the other. None of this is in clear newbie-friendly language and it's all after pages of Linux log dumps. If they land on this page, most users will probably click the back button as fast as they can.
Alternately, we could do it your way:
Step 1, find out what runs on your router (at wikidevi or similar)
That's somewhat better, but they still have to read through a dense, abbreviation-heavy table of technical specs. (That's after they figure out they need to search for their router's model number and not "Linksys".) At least there's a simple indication that OpenWrt supports the router. But how would they know to go to WikiDevi? I hadn't even heard of it before today. And most importantly, how would they figure out which target to use, or even that targets exist?
step 2, download the firmware image
Now we're in for some fun! There's a download link at the top of the OpenWrt site. Clicking on it gives me a directory listing. None of the directory names look like they contain software to download, even to me. On the right side of the OpenWrt main page there's another download link for the latest release. This gives another directory listing. (Apparently the correct directory is/attitude_adjustment/12.09.) Now there's a list of subdirectories that look (to me) like p
Wouldn't that mean that eons ago, we had a crisis to solve and managed to create the worlds biggest ice-box in the process...
There was no "we". That ice sheet formed tens of millions of years ago, which means it is older than hominids (not just humans). The "crisis" involved was a mass extinction event, which did not in any way get "solved".
The world is constantly changing, for better or worse, and people always seem genuinely surprised when it changes.
Yeah, having agriculture and cities will do that to you.
I'm all for LGBT rights and such, but really to criticize a game just cuz it don't include your sexual orientation..?
You're talking like this is a small thing, like the game didn't include their exact hair color or that one shirt they like to wear. People were upset because Nintendo was pretending that their relationship with their spouse did not and could not exist. That's not a small thing in a "life simulator", nor is it an attitude that's limited to games. And when Nintendo was called on it, they tried to dodge the issue rather than confronting it.
A better question is, what about this bothers you so much? Regardless of what kind of product it is, customers (potential and actual) have every right to criticize it. This is core game functionality. What's wrong with talking about it?
What's next? Is the LGBT community going to demand air time in Disney cartoons next?
I'm not sure what you're exactly trying to say with that, but Disney might be a bit ahead of you there.
First it was global warming, then climate change and now global climate disruption?
They're the same thing. People get confused because they expect "warming" to mean "hotter everywhere", when it really means "more energy in the atmosphere". Heat is energy. Energy makes things happen. The atmosphere is a huge, complex, nonlinear system. Adding energy to it is not as simple as putting a pot of water on the stove.
Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere causes the greenhouse effect, which leads to global warming. Global warming leads to global climate change. And since we've built our worldwide civilization around assumptions about local climates, it's fair to call that climate disruption.
These are very simple ideas. I'm not sure why people have so much trouble with them.
Not if you're a Slashdot reader it's not. Unless you know of a way to block all the stupid Bitcoin stories? If so, please share.
I always wonder what the vitriol against BitCoin comes from... from a technical viewpoint it is a very very clever system. I really don't understand why people get so upset.
I get that it's a clever system, but that's not why it gets a story a day here. Bitcoin is billed as a world-changing grass-roots utopian revolution to create a new economy based around a "hard" currency. As a revolution, it's bad economics and worse politics. As a social movement, it's driven by for-profit right-wing propaganda originally designed to scare people into driving up the price of gold. As a commodity of value, it's driven by speculators. As an economy, it's tailor-made for money-laundering and smuggling. If it succeeds, it will start an era of money-driven politics that will make Citizens United seem like a fond memory. There is literally nothing to like about Bitcoin aside from the technology.
As far as effects on the outside world, the coin miners have driven up the price of decent video cards. I guess it's better than the gold speculators driving up the price of wedding rings, but still annoying.
The article is talking about enterprise-grade SSDs using data from 2012. As for the performance difference, it seems to be mainly due to the difference between SLC, MLC, and TLC. From page 4:
Even if economic forces are favorable to continuing price reductions of SSDs and NAND flash, a 2012 study by Microsoft Research (PDF) has found that a dilemma arises when trying to increase density and reduce cost of SSDs. The study looked at 45 flash chips from six different manufacturers and found that, as density increases, bit error rate (BER) and performance decrease. This is because the number of ranges of electrical charges necessary to store data on a single cell increase as densities increase.
The researchers found that, as feature size decreases (increasing density), bit error rates increase. While the SLC and MLC chips with cells that had feature sizes of between 80 and 60 nanometers (nm) usually had BERs of 1e-08, those with feature sizes of 40 nm had BERs at or below 1e-07, and the TLC chips with feature sizes of 20 nm had BERs of, at best, 1e-03.
In addition, researchers also found that increasing density also increases read and write latencies. NAND chips with feature sizes above 64nm had read latencies of 20us or less and write latencies of 0.5ms or less, while those with feature sizes of 32nm or less had read latencies between 20us and 60us and write latencies between 0.5ms and 2.5ms.
This leaves SSD and NAND manufacturers with a choice among density, cost, reliability, and performance. In any scenario, at least one of these four must be sacrificed to improve the others. This means that, even if SSDs can achieve cost parity with HDDs, it will be at the expense of reliability, density or performance. In fact, as discussed above, enterprise-grade SSDs already sacrifice write performance, cost and even density to address the threat of reduced reliability and data integrity and have built non-2.5” form factor configurations and added special coding or technologies to meet reliability and performance demands, resulting in more costly products.
[emphasis mine]
More bits per cell requires more precise current sensing, which slows down reads and writes. I suspect parasitic capacitance due to the physical size of the array is also a factor. Performance is also affected by the controller, which may mask some of the bit-level performance differences.
Yeah, I have a lot of those too. I even ended up with a duplicate copy of Civ IV and all its expansions, plus games like Sniper Elite and Red Faction: Armageddon that I definitely never purchased. Also, the multiplayer for a lot of games is a separate Steam title.
But let's talk hypotheticals: if there's a worldwide catastrophe in which civilization is interrupted, somebody specializing in gymel wouldn't provide much use to fellow survivors.
Are you kidding me? Without electronics and industry, all performance arts are live and local. There's no high-quality music on demand from iTunes or YouTube, no recorded music playing at restaurants, parties, or festivals, no constant background music in television and movies. Maybe you can get crappy records made out of wax if you're lucky.
During the day, when most people are doing grunt work, the gymel expert might not be anything special. (Or they might -- people are not solely defined by their profession.) But at night, when everyone's sitting around a fire relaxing? I bet someone who can make strange and beautiful music would be very popular indeed.
That map is so much better and more informative than the tube map that I don't know why the latter exists at all. I know it's supposed to be a simplification, but if you condense that many cables into one route you end up with a map of countries that border the sea, not network routes. For example, there's nothing on the tube map to indicate that the UK is only one or two hops from Japan, or that the Seychelles are at the end of a line, even though it's clearly visible in both your map and the tube map's questionably accurate source material.
At the state level yes... but was overturned later... what's your point?
Five years after it was passed, yes. And the Supreme Court case was resolved on a technicality about Article III standing.
If you bothered to do any research, you'd know that same sex couples who were already married prior to Prop 8 being passed were grandfathered in... so there was no legal limbo, they were married before it passed and married after it passed.
No, they most certainly were not. The full text of Prop 8 was:
Section I. Title This measure shall be known and may be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act." Section 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution, to read: Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
There is no grandfather clause in there. The California Supreme Court did the grandfathering the year after Prop 8 passed. And the same sort of people Brendan Eich donated money to showed up to defend Prop 8 there, too.
This was not a small thing for the people affected by it, nor were the resulting court trials insignificant. If you'd like to understand this better, I recommend reading the transcripts of Perry v. Schwarzenegger.
Seconded. 2-4 GB is enough to turn off your page file in Windows, and that's where performance improvements for normal desktop apps ends for me. I have 16 GB for gaming, but I'm not sure I've ever used more than 8.
His $1000 donation did not deny anyone anything, it did however assist an organization which could be seen to try to 'deny rights'... that group and it's side lost.
You know Prop 8 passed, right? Plunging thousands of gay and lesbian couples who had already married into years of legal limbo? Which was part of an ongoing movement to continue denying gay and lesbian couples legal recognition forever? And you're aware that that movement springs directly from millennia of unjustified prejudice and violent persecution that still lingers today, right? And that all of this deeply affects the lives of many Mozilla employees and Firefox developers? There's a larger context here, and none of that disappears just because a federal court throws out a law.
Eich had every right to be CEO of the foundation
Nobody has a right to a specific job. Especially a job that makes them the public face of an organization that relies on a large and diverse group of outside developers. Eich chose to be an oppressive bigot, and chooses not to apologize for it. That's his choice, but he doesn't get to dodge the consequences just because he's a good coder or manager.
The Mozilla Foundation board should have known better. This isn't a new criticism.
Slashdot Mirror
A truly special reply suggesting mitigating a theoretical, limited, network security vulnerability by quite literally leaving the physical keys to the castle out in public. Please hand in your risk assessment credentials at the door.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying you should leave a key right outside the door all the time. I'm suggesting hiding a key somewhere non-obvious, *temporarily*, as a backup method in case you can't have an actual human being present. The alternative is an always-on, globally-accessible network attack surface for your front door lock. If that's compromised, getting in is as easy as "send me X bitcoins and I'll open the door at Y o'clock".
A lot of those examples are solved problems, and at worst are minor inconveniences. Many IoT proposals can easily be replaced with three existing categories of solution: "other people", "paying attention", and "non-networked computing". To address your specific examples:
Thermostat: Schedule the turn-on in advance. Alternate, come home, move your luggage inside, turn on the AC, and go out to dinner.
Laundry machines: Check a clock every so often.
Broken fridge: Show failure status on an LCD. Or have a USB port that you can plug a laptop or a smart phone into.
Freezing weather: Ask a neighbor or a friend to check on your house once every day or two. You may already be doing this if you have pets.
Door opening: See above re: neighbor or friend, or hide a key somewhere.
Out-of-reach window shades: Close them before you leave for work.
Dishwasher: Assuming that scheduling is really that much of a money-save, start it manually before you go to bed. Or use a time delay. Or load the data into the washer via USB.
The more serious problems are much more rare, and that must be weighed against the constant vulnerability from having internet-connected appliances and the upkeep required to secure them.
Perhaps a better option would be to get away from the idea that networking should imply both internet access and full remote control. Is there any reason an embedded device can't limit communications to its own subnet? Stick an upgradable, patchable PC on the network to act as a master, and have it talk to the outside world. Meanwhile, the appliance should be designed at the hardware level so that remote access only gets you status information and the ability to trigger a few well-defined fail-safe modes. Using a stove as an example, you would be able to tell if the burners are on, or force them off, but you wouldn't be able to turn them on or change the heat setting.
Thank you for the correction. There's still something I don't understand, though:
Fast forward out of the CRT era, and you have TV screens that do a lot of the same things computer monitors started doing years before. The precise horizontal timing controls, buffering, pixel perfect rasterization without jitter... But the source still can't be synched with the screen because it's an external source.
My understanding was that modern HDTVs are computer monitors are essentially interchangeable (the panels are the same, at least), and that HDMI video and DVI-D are very similar. Digital video is of course encoded for a fixed resolution. So what's the difference between, say, a PC decoding Blu-ray video into a monitor vs. a set-top player decoding the same video into an HDTV?
The whole reason why they went with 4k instead of 2160p for the name is because 4k is shorter, easier to say and looks like it is bigger than 2160p.
It's also a more accurate name in that horizontal resolution doesn't vary with a movie's aspect ratio. A "1080p" movie could be 1920x1080 (16:9) or ~1920x800 (21:9) or any other vertical resolution. The 1920 ("2k") is the real constant. I think the usage of lines was a holdover from the days of analog TV when vertical resolution was discrete but horizontal was continuous.
Sorry for this long cri de coeur, but you guys are my peeps and the responses broke my heart. You're my guys, my people, my tribe. Can't you back us up?
Thank you for posting. I'm sorry that so many of my brethren willfully ignore the direct personal experience of many, many, many women in favor of a comforting fantasy. Hopefully at least a few of them will be persuaded by your words.
Yeah, this part is pretty ridiculous:
The problems started as soon as I made that decision. First I had to figure out how to buy Watch Dogs digitally for PC. That took more than simple Googling, surprisingly. I had to go to the official Ubisoft site originally, and figure out that Uplay is in fact Ubisoft’s digital storefront, and then there still wasn’t any clear indicator it would be digital delivery, except for the fact that they didn’t ask for a shipping address.
[emphasis mine]
He didn't think to try Steam? Or Origin? Or Amazon.com? Or, heck, picking up a DVD from GameStop or Best Buy? This is a big release. It's not exactly hard to find.
I'm not sure about NAND flash, which is a block device, but in NOR flash sequential reads are faster due to prefetching, where the next memory word is read before the CPU has finished processing the first one. For NAND, I'd imagine you could start caching the next page. Not sure if that's actually done, though.
That was well-written and enjoyable (and utterly horrifying) story. Thanks for posting the link!
It takes a bit of effort and a lot of downloading, but it is possible to get HD-quality fan reconstructions of the original theatrical cuts of the Star Wars trilogy. This obviously doesn't help the mass market, but if you want to show your friends and family the original movies, it's as close as one can currently get.
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition
Harmy's THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Despecialized Edition
Harmy's RETURN OF THE JEDI Despecialized Edition
how is spinning off your fabrication capability 'good' in the long run?
I don't work at AMD, but I do work at another company that relies partly on foundries.
Basically, it's economies of sale and competition. Semiconductor fabrication processes keep getting more expensive. Foundries specialize in process development and spread the R&D across many, many customers. Unless you're willing to spend a fortune keeping up (as Intel is), have special requirements, or need a ton of volume, you have little to gain and a lot to lose from rolling your own process. Remember, you don't just have to make transistors, you also have to have good enough yield to turn a profit and good enough reliability to keep your customers. If you fail, you have to spend even more money to fix the fab on top of the money you're losing on the stuff you manufacture. Meanwhile, TSMC is cheerfully cranking out wafers for your competitors.
OpenWRT is so fucking easy to install and configure (easier than some consumer out-of-the-box experiences, even) that there really is no excuse if you expect a secure local network ... there is no actual technical knowledge required, just basic keyboard/mouse skills, and reading comprehension.
I think you're *wildly* overestimating the skill and confidence of the average home network user and the quality of open source project web sites. Let me walk you through the hidden minefield in your instructions. I'll use a Linksys WRT150N for reference.
The real Step 1 is "realize that I'm supposed to install OpenWrt, and understand what that means". Most users have little to no idea of how the router actually works, so the idea of upgrading the firmware is not an obvious one.
But let's say someone tells them to do it. They go to the OpenWrt web site. The second sentence under "What is OpenWrt?" is "Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management.". Many users will be too terrified to proceed beyond this point. But let's say they make it to the Table of Hardware, and skip past the text about developer snapshots and hardware VLANs and the note from 2009 saying that the page might not be up to date. (That's not realistic -- many users expect to read sequentially.) Instead of a column that says "yes, this router is supported", there's a column named "Status" that gives the first OpenWrt version that supports the router. Next to that there's a column named "Version" that is undefined. I'm assuming it's the router version, but many users could get confused. But the important column is the "Target" column, which lists the specific OpenWrt platform that users should (but probably won't) remember for later. There are two targets for the WRT150N and no indication of which to choose. One of them no longer exists in the current version.
Clicking on the model number in the table gives me an unorganized series of notes from various users. One of them, "An account of flashing OpenWrt to a WRT150N", sounds sort of like installation instructions, but is too brief and technical to be of any use. It does have a working download link, but it's to a version that's five years old. The one after that suggests that one target option (the nonexistent one) is better than the other. None of this is in clear newbie-friendly language and it's all after pages of Linux log dumps. If they land on this page, most users will probably click the back button as fast as they can.
Alternately, we could do it your way:
Step 1, find out what runs on your router (at wikidevi or similar)
That's somewhat better, but they still have to read through a dense, abbreviation-heavy table of technical specs. (That's after they figure out they need to search for their router's model number and not "Linksys".) At least there's a simple indication that OpenWrt supports the router. But how would they know to go to WikiDevi? I hadn't even heard of it before today. And most importantly, how would they figure out which target to use, or even that targets exist?
step 2, download the firmware image
Now we're in for some fun! There's a download link at the top of the OpenWrt site. Clicking on it gives me a directory listing. None of the directory names look like they contain software to download, even to me. On the right side of the OpenWrt main page there's another download link for the latest release. This gives another directory listing. (Apparently the correct directory is /attitude_adjustment/12.09.) Now there's a list of subdirectories that look (to me) like p
Wouldn't that mean that eons ago, we had a crisis to solve and managed to create the worlds biggest ice-box in the process...
There was no "we". That ice sheet formed tens of millions of years ago, which means it is older than hominids (not just humans). The "crisis" involved was a mass extinction event, which did not in any way get "solved".
The world is constantly changing, for better or worse, and people always seem genuinely surprised when it changes.
Yeah, having agriculture and cities will do that to you.
I'm all for LGBT rights and such, but really to criticize a game just cuz it don't include your sexual orientation..?
You're talking like this is a small thing, like the game didn't include their exact hair color or that one shirt they like to wear. People were upset because Nintendo was pretending that their relationship with their spouse did not and could not exist. That's not a small thing in a "life simulator", nor is it an attitude that's limited to games. And when Nintendo was called on it, they tried to dodge the issue rather than confronting it.
A better question is, what about this bothers you so much? Regardless of what kind of product it is, customers (potential and actual) have every right to criticize it. This is core game functionality. What's wrong with talking about it?
What's next? Is the LGBT community going to demand air time in Disney cartoons next?
I'm not sure what you're exactly trying to say with that, but Disney might be a bit ahead of you there.
First it was global warming, then climate change and now global climate disruption?
They're the same thing. People get confused because they expect "warming" to mean "hotter everywhere", when it really means "more energy in the atmosphere". Heat is energy. Energy makes things happen. The atmosphere is a huge, complex, nonlinear system. Adding energy to it is not as simple as putting a pot of water on the stove.
Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere causes the greenhouse effect, which leads to global warming. Global warming leads to global climate change. And since we've built our worldwide civilization around assumptions about local climates, it's fair to call that climate disruption.
These are very simple ideas. I'm not sure why people have so much trouble with them.
I mean, its completely optional.
Not if you're a Slashdot reader it's not. Unless you know of a way to block all the stupid Bitcoin stories? If so, please share.
I always wonder what the vitriol against BitCoin comes from ... from a technical viewpoint it is a very very clever system. I really don't understand why people get so upset.
I get that it's a clever system, but that's not why it gets a story a day here. Bitcoin is billed as a world-changing grass-roots utopian revolution to create a new economy based around a "hard" currency. As a revolution, it's bad economics and worse politics. As a social movement, it's driven by for-profit right-wing propaganda originally designed to scare people into driving up the price of gold. As a commodity of value, it's driven by speculators. As an economy, it's tailor-made for money-laundering and smuggling. If it succeeds, it will start an era of money-driven politics that will make Citizens United seem like a fond memory. There is literally nothing to like about Bitcoin aside from the technology.
As far as effects on the outside world, the coin miners have driven up the price of decent video cards. I guess it's better than the gold speculators driving up the price of wedding rings, but still annoying.
This is graduate level, though. Grad-level books tend to stick around for decades.
Can the Internet of Things stop people from using inappropriate hashtags in long-form content? If so, then please sign me up.
The article is talking about enterprise-grade SSDs using data from 2012. As for the performance difference, it seems to be mainly due to the difference between SLC, MLC, and TLC. From page 4:
Even if economic forces are favorable to continuing price reductions of SSDs and NAND flash, a 2012 study by Microsoft Research (PDF) has found that a dilemma arises when trying to increase density and reduce cost of SSDs. The study looked at 45 flash chips from six different manufacturers and found that, as density increases, bit error rate (BER) and performance decrease. This is because the number of ranges of electrical charges necessary to store data on a single cell increase as densities increase.
The researchers found that, as feature size decreases (increasing density), bit error rates increase. While the SLC and MLC chips with cells that had feature sizes of between 80 and 60 nanometers (nm) usually had BERs of 1e-08, those with feature sizes of 40 nm had BERs at or below 1e-07, and the TLC chips with feature sizes of 20 nm had BERs of, at best, 1e-03.
In addition, researchers also found that increasing density also increases read and write latencies. NAND chips with feature sizes above 64nm had read latencies of 20us or less and write latencies of 0.5ms or less, while those with feature sizes of 32nm or less had read latencies between 20us and 60us and write latencies between 0.5ms and 2.5ms.
This leaves SSD and NAND manufacturers with a choice among density, cost, reliability, and performance. In any scenario, at least one of these four must be sacrificed to improve the others. This means that, even if SSDs can achieve cost parity with HDDs, it will be at the expense of reliability, density or performance. In fact, as discussed above, enterprise-grade SSDs already sacrifice write performance, cost and even density to address the threat of reduced reliability and data integrity and have built non-2.5” form factor configurations and added special coding or technologies to meet reliability and performance demands, resulting in more costly products.
[emphasis mine]
More bits per cell requires more precise current sensing, which slows down reads and writes. I suspect parasitic capacitance due to the physical size of the array is also a factor. Performance is also affected by the controller, which may mask some of the bit-level performance differences.
Yeah, I have a lot of those too. I even ended up with a duplicate copy of Civ IV and all its expansions, plus games like Sniper Elite and Red Faction: Armageddon that I definitely never purchased. Also, the multiplayer for a lot of games is a separate Steam title.
But let's talk hypotheticals: if there's a worldwide catastrophe in which civilization is interrupted, somebody specializing in gymel wouldn't provide much use to fellow survivors.
Are you kidding me? Without electronics and industry, all performance arts are live and local. There's no high-quality music on demand from iTunes or YouTube, no recorded music playing at restaurants, parties, or festivals, no constant background music in television and movies. Maybe you can get crappy records made out of wax if you're lucky.
During the day, when most people are doing grunt work, the gymel expert might not be anything special. (Or they might -- people are not solely defined by their profession.) But at night, when everyone's sitting around a fire relaxing? I bet someone who can make strange and beautiful music would be very popular indeed.
That map is so much better and more informative than the tube map that I don't know why the latter exists at all. I know it's supposed to be a simplification, but if you condense that many cables into one route you end up with a map of countries that border the sea, not network routes. For example, there's nothing on the tube map to indicate that the UK is only one or two hops from Japan, or that the Seychelles are at the end of a line, even though it's clearly visible in both your map and the tube map's questionably accurate source material.
At the state level yes... but was overturned later... what's your point?
Five years after it was passed, yes. And the Supreme Court case was resolved on a technicality about Article III standing.
If you bothered to do any research, you'd know that same sex couples who were already married prior to Prop 8 being passed were grandfathered in... so there was no legal limbo, they were married before it passed and married after it passed.
No, they most certainly were not. The full text of Prop 8 was:
Section I. Title
This measure shall be known and may be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act."
Section 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution, to read:
Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
There is no grandfather clause in there. The California Supreme Court did the grandfathering the year after Prop 8 passed. And the same sort of people Brendan Eich donated money to showed up to defend Prop 8 there, too.
This was not a small thing for the people affected by it, nor were the resulting court trials insignificant. If you'd like to understand this better, I recommend reading the transcripts of Perry v. Schwarzenegger.
Seconded. 2-4 GB is enough to turn off your page file in Windows, and that's where performance improvements for normal desktop apps ends for me. I have 16 GB for gaming, but I'm not sure I've ever used more than 8.
His $1000 donation did not deny anyone anything, it did however assist an organization which could be seen to try to 'deny rights'... that group and it's side lost.
You know Prop 8 passed, right? Plunging thousands of gay and lesbian couples who had already married into years of legal limbo? Which was part of an ongoing movement to continue denying gay and lesbian couples legal recognition forever? And you're aware that that movement springs directly from millennia of unjustified prejudice and violent persecution that still lingers today, right? And that all of this deeply affects the lives of many Mozilla employees and Firefox developers? There's a larger context here, and none of that disappears just because a federal court throws out a law.
Eich had every right to be CEO of the foundation
Nobody has a right to a specific job. Especially a job that makes them the public face of an organization that relies on a large and diverse group of outside developers. Eich chose to be an oppressive bigot, and chooses not to apologize for it. That's his choice, but he doesn't get to dodge the consequences just because he's a good coder or manager.
The Mozilla Foundation board should have known better. This isn't a new criticism.
Why is marriage a "basic human right?" It's never been a basic human right.
It's been a basic human right for probably longer than you've been alive.
And the concept of a gay marriage never existed in the 6,000 years of recorded history until about 15 years ago.
It goes back much farther than that. Even in the modern United States, gay marriage is an old idea -- again, probably older than you are.