It's my understanding that SSDs tend to fail on write which is detectable allowing the SSD to both be aware of the problem and write the data to another cell. As such I don't think failures should be either less predictable or more unforgiving than with mechanical disks.
The failure scenario I've seen with flash involves rebooting the machine and finding the device to have bad blocks.:(
Hey, I can do the same thing for a hard drive, count that 1.5 TB as 3 instead.
This is not a fair assumption. With hard drives, you're probably going to be running ZFS with compression and block-level de-dedup turned on, so for many usage scenarios you should assume 6 or 8TB.
For PCRAM or MRAM it makes sense, but Flash can not be written on a byte level (well, it can, but only once and then you have to erase the entire cell)
Hrm, are there filesystems which fragment on purpose so you can gang your writes into blocks on flash and updates the pointers (by the block, of course) to locate? Seek shouldn't be a problem anymore.
Hell, there's no reason why they couldn't just integrate a 20 or 40gb SSD right into the motherboard.
I opened up an new HP server the other day to find an SD card slot on the mobo, for 'embedded' booting.
Finding an SLC SD card in the 16GB range is a bitch, though. I've had so many MLC flash parts go bad-block on me ('wear-leveling', hahahah, I believed that 5 dead boot drives ago) that MLC's not really an option. Only one slot, no RAID.
Everyone expected China to do this. It also means that they are saying that the Chinese in HK are different from the rest of China.
Wait, the mainland Chinese have been able to access Google's.hk search, without filters, all along but.cn was censored? That makes no sense. OK, I'll read the article...
Ah, OK - so google.com.hk was already censored. Google just rubbed the dog's face in it by redirecting.cn so lots of mainland users would see the 'you've got censorship' page. The actual action taken was telling the companies to cancel their deals with Google.
Perhaps my reading comprehension is on the fritz, but the summary led me to believe China had changed their great-firewall settings in response to Google's redirect, and it sounds like that didn't happen.
Good on Google for giving up the Android in China business to take a stand. I'm not sure if throwing grenades on the way out was the best long-term strategy, but somebody over in Mountain View ought to go hang a set of brass truck nuts on their HQ sign.
Or, to put it another way: plenty of people are interested in flying under these conditions, if you're not, don't.
I am and enjoy being spun silly at the amusement park, riding the high seas, and flying through thunderstorms.
But I have absolutely no interest in flying in zero-G with tourists who can't hold their cookies. I'd have to think twice about being paid $200K for that experience.
...and another 'I' dotted in Oracle's plan to kill off Solaris, and force Linux as their high-end product.
Oracle isn't stupid about making money. They're probably seeing if Solaris can be made profitable on its own. If not, it gets the whack. But not giving it the full chance would be a foolish disposition of an asset.
how significant it is, and what the expected impact on American business and transportation will be.
One impact on the entire non-aviation sector is that we can stop worrying the US Government will return to selective availability of GPS. They've said the change is permanent, but one must deem whether such promises would be maintained if they became strategically disadvantageous.
If it means airplanes will start having trouble navigating, this effectively removes the temptation to do it for political reasons (as yet-undreamed applications develop with the mass proliferation of GPS smartphones this temptation may well arise). Militarily, they could afford to lose a few airliners, so if we or the government comes under attack, hope you're not landing nearby on IFR.
I mean hey if Google loses source to their search engine no biggie right?
Perhaps, they do have many trade secrets, but they also have patents and are valuable because of their prominence.
Or Microsoft the source to Office?
What's the fear, a Chinese copy of Office? They already copy it for free in China - why add the effort?
Cisco the source to their IOS
They've licensed it before and I think it's been leaked at least once, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them. Cisco sells hardware.
It's all no big deal right and they should have been prepared somehow?
Either they're tremendously stupid or the money they're losing from being in China isn't as great as the money they're gaining from being in China.
Even if you have backups you've lost everything else.
Agreed, only knowledge can be so distributed, not assets.
How exactly do you verify backups to the nth degree for accuracy?
You have your workers work off of the central data every day. They'll notice if the data goes screwy. You back up deltas between current and last, keep a long history and do checksumming.
If you were Walmart could you do backups and verify them before the data was stale?
Sure, backup snapshots. But most R&D shops don't produce massive floods of transactional data.
These look like knock-offs, not mechanical copies, right? The FourTwo 'clone' looks like a go-cart underneath. They're violating our concept of 'design patents', not 'utility patents', right? Not that their culture necessarily recognizes these concepts.
Hell they have cloned entire companies to produce counterfeits - to the point that when people tried to shut down the factories the companies thought they had a legit license to produce.
I recall Cisco being one of many companies which got some press when their factories kept producing after the quitting bell and so-called counterfeits eventually making it to the US. But Cisco hasn't left China or become unprofitable over it. Some say they're better off having Chinese sysadmins learn IOS on $200 routers rather than some other technology (e.g. bsd) because they'd never get the $7000 for them over there.
It costs you 100million to research and perfect a new technique. They steal it and setup a production line for 20million and begin competing with you for a far lower, possibly Govt. subsidized, cost. Ooops.
Could be. The odds seem low, though. If your organization is a 1-trick-pony, then, yeah, probably a high risk.
Oh and those backups? Maybe they break into those servers and trash them or flip a bit in the firmware of the router, HDD, or whatever spiffy device you backed it up on....
So verify your backups? Don't keep them all online?
Oh and how many companies do you really think are building contingency funds?
They could be foolish and not do it, sure. Those companies will be less resilience. Investors beware.
The Chinese are even copying CARS for kripes sake - closely enough that parts like entire DOORS from theirs fit our designs...
Actually, I did. You seem to have missed that I did was supply the reality behind your comments and highlight that it would be a complex and expensive process that you didn't seem to understand the realities of.
Actually I do. That's why I counted it in the cost calculation.
And seemingly still don't understand the complexity and reality, instead falling back on the "it's easy to do from the keyboard" mentality
What can I say? I've been personally involved in doing this kind of thing before. It works if you have the desire to make it work.
The IRS isn't quite that Orwellian in this case. More Humpty-Dumptyish (Carolinian?). They claim that the tax system is "voluntary" because the taxpayer gets to figure his own taxes rather than just getting sent a bill and told to pay. They don't claim that filing is voluntary (except for certain low-income taxpayers, most of whom are better off if they do file) or that paying is voluntary.
It's the definition of 'voluntary' that's the crux - here are two guys arguing both the plain definition and, the (IMHO) Orwellian re-definition.
Accepting the re-definition of the plain word allows the argument.
Well they're probably not going to cull features and probably going to design more efficiently, but it raises the question - what's better about this rewrite than, say, unbound, with several years' head-start in the rewrite race?
It appears you didn't read the entirety of my comment before replying. The time and cost to re-build a seized lab was highlighted as the primary consideration for whether this makes sense or not.
If the procedures for creating the materials samples or prototypes aren't being stored as data, then it can't work. So building and enforcing SOP's is a necessary step, but any ISO9000 manufacturing company is going to be doing that anyway.
Good point about long-running experiments. They would either need to be done in multiple locations or build that into the cost calculation. All this must be calculated against the actual risk of the local government seizing your lab (which is probably very small).
Perhaps 'to Google' will be redefined to mean 'get your ass handed to you by a company who has mountains of money, logs everything, never throws away data, and has a team of Ph.D's to counter your illegal prosecution'. If not for permanent corporate charters, somebody at Viacomm would be going to jail.
On the other hand, I was told last week to 'google for the restaurant on your Tom-Tom'. I had a full 10 seconds of 'WTF?' before I realized it now means 'to search for something on an electronic gizmo' to some. I had just begun to understand the 'use any Internet search engine' colloquialism and now this...
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Where did you find reports from the field? All I've seen are lab studies and guesses.
Newegg reviews. I'm nearly serious.
It's my understanding that SSDs tend to fail on write which is detectable allowing the SSD to both be aware of the problem and write the data to another cell. As such I don't think failures should be either less predictable or more unforgiving than with mechanical disks.
The failure scenario I've seen with flash involves rebooting the machine and finding the device to have bad blocks. :(
Oh, wow! I am even more impressed by ZFS now.
It is mighty.
This is probably worth a separate Slashdot story.
Hey, I can do the same thing for a hard drive, count that 1.5 TB as 3 instead.
This is not a fair assumption. With hard drives, you're probably going to be running ZFS with compression and block-level de-dedup turned on, so for many usage scenarios you should assume 6 or 8TB.
Yes, it may be hard to believe, but there still exist places where Internet access isn't practical (generally due to high cost).
I'm in the US. Something like 21% of the population can't or doesn't want to access the Internet.
Here we have discount stores which sell the spinning plastic in very large volumes for $6.
For PCRAM or MRAM it makes sense, but Flash can not be written on a byte level (well, it can, but only once and then you have to erase the entire cell)
Hrm, are there filesystems which fragment on purpose so you can gang your writes into blocks on flash and updates the pointers (by the block, of course) to locate? Seek shouldn't be a problem anymore.
Hell, there's no reason why they couldn't just integrate a 20 or 40gb SSD right into the motherboard.
I opened up an new HP server the other day to find an SD card slot on the mobo, for 'embedded' booting.
Finding an SLC SD card in the 16GB range is a bitch, though. I've had so many MLC flash parts go bad-block on me ('wear-leveling', hahahah, I believed that 5 dead boot drives ago) that MLC's not really an option. Only one slot, no RAID.
Everyone expected China to do this. It also means that they are saying that the Chinese in HK are different from the rest of China.
Wait, the mainland Chinese have been able to access Google's .hk search, without filters, all along but .cn was censored? That makes no sense. OK, I'll read the article...
Ah, OK - so google.com.hk was already censored. Google just rubbed the dog's face in it by redirecting .cn so lots of mainland users would see the 'you've got censorship' page. The actual action taken was telling the companies to cancel their deals with Google.
Perhaps my reading comprehension is on the fritz, but the summary led me to believe China had changed their great-firewall settings in response to Google's redirect, and it sounds like that didn't happen.
Good on Google for giving up the Android in China business to take a stand. I'm not sure if throwing grenades on the way out was the best long-term strategy, but somebody over in Mountain View ought to go hang a set of brass truck nuts on their HQ sign.
Or, to put it another way: plenty of people are interested in flying under these conditions, if you're not, don't.
I am and enjoy being spun silly at the amusement park, riding the high seas, and flying through thunderstorms.
But I have absolutely no interest in flying in zero-G with tourists who can't hold their cookies. I'd have to think twice about being paid $200K for that experience.
Mega-yuck. Virgin Puketastic, not.
So to make sure I have this car analogy right... you're saying that these new reactors are like a Volkswagen Jetta?
No, they should last a long time and require very little maintenance.
...and another 'I' dotted in Oracle's plan to kill off Solaris, and force Linux as their high-end product.
Oracle isn't stupid about making money. They're probably seeing if Solaris can be made profitable on its own. If not, it gets the whack. But not giving it the full chance would be a foolish disposition of an asset.
how significant it is, and what the expected impact on American business and transportation will be.
One impact on the entire non-aviation sector is that we can stop worrying the US Government will return to selective availability of GPS. They've said the change is permanent, but one must deem whether such promises would be maintained if they became strategically disadvantageous.
If it means airplanes will start having trouble navigating, this effectively removes the temptation to do it for political reasons (as yet-undreamed applications develop with the mass proliferation of GPS smartphones this temptation may well arise). Militarily, they could afford to lose a few airliners, so if we or the government comes under attack, hope you're not landing nearby on IFR.
I'm having trouble seeing what the big deal is here.
Oracle is building a successful business around open source software in the full spirit of the GPL. They must be destroyed at all costs .. oh, wait.
I mean hey if Google loses source to their search engine no biggie right?
Perhaps, they do have many trade secrets, but they also have patents and are valuable because of their prominence.
Or Microsoft the source to Office?
What's the fear, a Chinese copy of Office? They already copy it for free in China - why add the effort?
Cisco the source to their IOS
They've licensed it before and I think it's been leaked at least once, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them. Cisco sells hardware.
It's all no big deal right and they should have been prepared somehow?
Either they're tremendously stupid or the money they're losing from being in China isn't as great as the money they're gaining from being in China.
Even if you have backups you've lost everything else.
Agreed, only knowledge can be so distributed, not assets.
How exactly do you verify backups to the nth degree for accuracy?
You have your workers work off of the central data every day. They'll notice if the data goes screwy. You back up deltas between current and last, keep a long history and do checksumming.
If you were Walmart could you do backups and verify them before the data was stale?
Sure, backup snapshots. But most R&D shops don't produce massive floods of transactional data.
As for cars... Mini Cooper\Lifan 320, Matiz\Cherry QQ - (body panels interchange!), Honda CRV\Laibo SR-V, Frontera\Landwing X6 (priced 50% less and a ZERO star crash rating), BMW 5 series\Brilliance M2, Yaris\Florid, MB CLK\BYD S8, Landcruiser\Dadi Shuttle, Fortwo\Houyun's electric car, RR Phantom\Geely GE. More info: http://www.theautoindustrieblog.com/2009/03/chinese-clone-cars.html Jalopnik covers this stuff often -> http://jalopnik.com/371517/take-a-look-inside-a-chinese-smart-fourtwo-cloning-factory
These look like knock-offs, not mechanical copies, right? The FourTwo 'clone' looks like a go-cart underneath. They're violating our concept of 'design patents', not 'utility patents', right? Not that their culture necessarily recognizes these concepts.
Hell they have cloned entire companies to produce counterfeits - to the point that when people tried to shut down the factories the companies thought they had a legit license to produce.
I recall Cisco being one of many companies which got some press when their factories kept producing after the quitting bell and so-called counterfeits eventually making it to the US. But Cisco hasn't left China or become unprofitable over it. Some say they're better off having Chinese sysadmins learn IOS on $200 routers rather than some other technology (e.g. bsd) because they'd never get the $7000 for them over there.
But there's no talent in Phoenix ... Why Paypal is located here, I have no idea.
q.e.d.
It costs you 100million to research and perfect a new technique. They steal it and setup a production line for 20million and begin competing with you for a far lower, possibly Govt. subsidized, cost. Ooops.
Could be. The odds seem low, though. If your organization is a 1-trick-pony, then, yeah, probably a high risk.
Oh and those backups? Maybe they break into those servers and trash them or flip a bit in the firmware of the router, HDD, or whatever spiffy device you backed it up on....
So verify your backups? Don't keep them all online?
Oh and how many companies do you really think are building contingency funds?
They could be foolish and not do it, sure. Those companies will be less resilience. Investors beware.
The Chinese are even copying CARS for kripes sake - closely enough that parts like entire DOORS from theirs fit our designs...
So far old cars, right?
Actually, I did. You seem to have missed that I did was supply the reality behind your comments and highlight that it would be a complex and expensive process that you didn't seem to understand the realities of.
Actually I do. That's why I counted it in the cost calculation.
And seemingly still don't understand the complexity and reality, instead falling back on the "it's easy to do from the keyboard" mentality
What can I say? I've been personally involved in doing this kind of thing before. It works if you have the desire to make it work.
Any method strong enough to see this incredibly small effect winds up being big enough to completely obliterate the thing you were trying to see.
Ah, I didn't understand the energies involved. Thank you for your excellent reply.
The IRS isn't quite that Orwellian in this case. More Humpty-Dumptyish (Carolinian?). They claim that the tax system is "voluntary" because the taxpayer gets to figure his own taxes rather than just getting sent a bill and told to pay. They don't claim that filing is voluntary (except for certain low-income taxpayers, most of whom are better off if they do file) or that paying is voluntary.
It's the definition of 'voluntary' that's the crux - here are two guys arguing both the plain definition and, the (IMHO) Orwellian re-definition.
Accepting the re-definition of the plain word allows the argument.
What I want to know is - when will kdawson not be such a tool?
When you learn to use Slashdot's preferences system.
I'm still waiting for the evil part.
Dolphin bones are at least creepy.
Well they're probably not going to cull features and probably going to design more efficiently, but it raises the question - what's better about this rewrite than, say, unbound, with several years' head-start in the rewrite race?
It appears you didn't read the entirety of my comment before replying. The time and cost to re-build a seized lab was highlighted as the primary consideration for whether this makes sense or not.
If the procedures for creating the materials samples or prototypes aren't being stored as data, then it can't work. So building and enforcing SOP's is a necessary step, but any ISO9000 manufacturing company is going to be doing that anyway.
Good point about long-running experiments. They would either need to be done in multiple locations or build that into the cost calculation. All this must be calculated against the actual risk of the local government seizing your lab (which is probably very small).
Heh, that's funny. Fortunately fiber optics run to cold places pretty well.
Viacomming, drawn from a new verb. To Viacom.
Perhaps 'to Google' will be redefined to mean 'get your ass handed to you by a company who has mountains of money, logs everything, never throws away data, and has a team of Ph.D's to counter your illegal prosecution'. If not for permanent corporate charters, somebody at Viacomm would be going to jail.
On the other hand, I was told last week to 'google for the restaurant on your Tom-Tom'. I had a full 10 seconds of 'WTF?' before I realized it now means 'to search for something on an electronic gizmo' to some. I had just begun to understand the 'use any Internet search engine' colloquialism and now this...