While oftware bugs will probably cause some catastrophic accidents from self-driving cars, in the grand scheme of things they would probably be safer.
What will really kill them in the US, at least, is lawyers. If I rear-end someone, who's at fault? Me, and my insurance company gets to pay. When a computer-driven Google-car rear-ends someone, who's at fault. Me? Nah, I was half-asleep, listening to music, brushing my teeth, watching videos, etc. _I_ wasn't driving. Hey, Google wrote the software....they have a lot of money....
Case in point: the media coverage and lawsuits of the supposed Prius accelerator malfunction. That was just a single drive-by-wire element. A fully autonomous car will get trampled flat by the thundering herds of lawyers.
Ugh. Sounds like a bad idea. Hard drive channels are noisy. How will ZFS fare if lots and lots of sectors read from every drive have at least a couple of bits in error? With no ECC in the drive, errors would be common.
Hard drives are random-access devices and sectors are the smallest atomic unit that a drive can normally physically read and write. It doesn't read or write half a sector. When emulating a write to a 512 byte logical block with 4096 byte physical blocks on the media, it has to read the whole 4K sector, modify it with the changed 512 bytes, and rewrite the entire 4K sector.
The concept of sectors could be hidden from the interface, theoretically. You could put the whole file system into the drive (OSD), for example, or allow the host to address bytes, hiding all the read/modify/writes. But, all the common hard drive interfaces (ATA/SCSI) use blocks/sectors.
I think that comparing it to hard drives is not as accurate as a comparison with high-end tape drives. Such drives can cost $15,000 or more. The cost, capacity and speed are roughly comparable but the holodrive has random-access and its disks might be more durable than tape cartridges.
You don't have to worry about inserting it into an ordinary CD/DVD drives because it's in a 135x153x11 mm cartridge. This is exactly the same dimensions of existing MO cartridges. I suppose one could cram one of their holo-cartridges into a MO drive or maybe if one had one of those ancient CD-ROMs that used a caddy...
I like this from the PDF: "Recording Format: Phase Conjugate Polytopic Holographic". Not sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds cool.
From the original press release they are claiming they demonstrated 515 gigabits per square inch. Presumably the media they use has more than one square inch because they claim their first product will sport 300 gigabytes of user data and a 23 megabytes/second transfer rate.
"That's pretty wild for a single "head" drive. I wonder if this could translate into devices similar to hard drives using similar methods."
Probably not.
From what I've read, holographic storage consists of storing lots of 2D images, essentially 2D bar codes like on a FedEx package, that are read and written as a unit, all at once. The "head" in a holographic drive is more like a camera than a hard disk head. That's how they get such parallelism.
Hard drive heads are fundamentally serial. There have been attempts to have more than one head functioning in parallel but they haven't been terribly successful so far. Even then, it's a fairly small number of heads, usually two, so we're only talking about doubling performance.
Nope. They have small holes to let air move in and out. There's a filter behind the hole. There are often bigger holes behind warranty-void-if-removed stickers.
The heads are design to fly over the platters on an air bearing so disc drives don't work in either a vacuum or in oil.
But, the holes are small and oil viscous. It might run for a while. Maybe someone with a PC-in-a-tank and an old hard drive could experiement to see how long one lasts.
This gadget appears to be a removable-media WORM drive so it's fairer to compare it to a CD-R/DVD-R/BluRay-R than to a hard drive.
Compared to those sorts of devices, 300 GB is pretty good, per disk. Dual Layer DVD-R is 8.5 GB. I'm not sure what recordable BluRay or HDDVD will be, probably tens of gigs not hundreds. So if it ships at 10X the capacity of BD-R, which may or may not be shipping around the same time, that's not too shabby.
With our litigious culture, no company in their right minds would expose themselves to such a liability.
Take the recent incident where a bus driver had a heart attack. Since he's human, either no one gets sued or maybe Amtrak gets a law suit. If a computer had been driving, the computer manufacturer, the bus manufacturer, the software company, and Amtrak would now have lawyers knocking their doors down.
Brings back memories of college with me whining to a professor about getting some points back on a test because of a stupid sign error. He wouldn't budge. Wise man, that professor.
If you ask me, the wrong company got to keep the HP name when they split. I used to think of great calcs, scopes, and logic analyzers when I thought "HP". Now I just try not to think of them at all.
Perhaps when Carly gets done bleeding HP dry, Agilent can buy back the name on the cheap. By then, though, they may not want it.
Agilent needs to come out with a nice, well-built RPN calculator...
I've used these doo-hickies. The thing has an expiration date (about a year) and you have to swap out periodically. The battery lasts long enough to get you past the exp. date. Never had one croak before it had to be swapped anyway.
When I read your post's reference to "Killer Angels" my brain misfired and I was thinking "Broken Angels" by Richard Morgan (also "Altered Carbon"). Now, I'd really like to see a mini-series inspired by those two books. Probably have to be on HBO, though. hehe
bah, Picard wasn't a gadget guy. He couldn't be bothered to fiddle with the presets to his replicator. If you look close, it has a blinking "12:00" on one of the displays.
Buying a 1GB drive years ago cost $400, it would retail today for $4
Think of it this way: the most expensive thing in a hard drive is the head disk assembly. One they've reduced it to one head and one side of one platter it's about as cheap as it's going to get. Everything else has to be there or it isn't a hard drive. That one side of one platter translates into the 40-80 GB capacity of today's cheapest hard drives.
$450,000 is probably for the smallest configuration that the system is available in, probably one shelf with only a couple of line cards. A full-blown system with 72 shelves, fully stocked with line cards, would probably be 10's of millions. Throw in the special room required for the massive cooling and power supply requirements of these beasts and you're talking real money.
The margin for these monster routers is actually quite juicy.
I wrote a friggen module on my CoCo, (TRS-80 Color Computer).
Who's the geek?
I guess that would be me. On MY CoCo I had an elaborate DM's helper. It had a 2D combat map with monsters and player's positions, monster database, wandering monsters, tracked stats and XPs, on and on. Hehe. Nerd-O-Rama.
"We probably could have had something in place to shoot such a threat down if we had fully funded the Star Wars MDS project, but sadly geopolitics killed that project."
Doubtful. Weapons for bringing down delicate ICBMs -- even if they had surprised everyone and actually worked -- would be useless against a mountain of rock and ice moving at kilometers per second.
It would be like flicking peas at the Exxon Valdez.
To deal with large objects on a collision course we first need a few decades of warning. Given time, a little nudge can make a big difference. For a rock kilometers in diameter, even thermonuclear explosions count as nudges. If we only have a few months of warning; we're well and truly screwed.
"Lunokhod could manage between 0.8 and 2 kilometres per hour depending on soil"
I remember seeing a picture of the Lunokhod rover back when I was in school. Articles on the net mention tens of thousands of pics taken by these rovers but I can't seem to find any examples. Have the Russians not made them public? Any links?
"So... how do we plan for this? Any creative ideas out there?"
1) Get up to your eyeballs in debt. The hyperinflation and other fun stuff that will happen when the US gets its costs adjusted will wipe it all out and you'll be sitting pretty. Just think how small that $2500/month mortgage will seem when Big Macs cost $800!
2) Invest in barrels. These will be THE hot fashion item after the crash. Every newly bankrupted, homeless, jobless person who's lost even the clothes off their back will need one.
3) Keep in shape. To distract attention from the $800 Big Macs, there are likely to be a series of pointless wars. This could make the military one of the few places that's hiring.
4) Keep your membership up to date in radical organizations. Radicals tend to take over during times of disruptions. It's likelty to be neo-fascists or neo-communists; probably neo-fascists are more likely in the US. You want to be on the winning side and avoid any troublesome pogroms or purges so make sure the likely Supreme-Leader doesn't have you on his shit list.
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Give them as much notice as you like but be prepared for them to cut you loose early.
Whenever I give notice, I'm prepared to be walked that instant.
While oftware bugs will probably cause some catastrophic accidents from self-driving cars, in the grand scheme of things they would probably be safer.
What will really kill them in the US, at least, is lawyers. If I rear-end someone, who's at fault? Me, and my insurance company gets to pay. When a computer-driven Google-car rear-ends someone, who's at fault. Me? Nah, I was half-asleep, listening to music, brushing my teeth, watching videos, etc. _I_ wasn't driving. Hey, Google wrote the software....they have a lot of money....
Case in point: the media coverage and lawsuits of the supposed Prius accelerator malfunction. That was just a single drive-by-wire element. A fully autonomous car will get trampled flat by the thundering herds of lawyers.
Ugh. Sounds like a bad idea. Hard drive channels are noisy. How will ZFS fare if lots and lots of sectors read from every drive have at least a couple of bits in error? With no ECC in the drive, errors would be common.
Hard drives are random-access devices and sectors are the smallest atomic unit that a drive can normally physically read and write. It doesn't read or write half a sector. When emulating a write to a 512 byte logical block with 4096 byte physical blocks on the media, it has to read the whole 4K sector, modify it with the changed 512 bytes, and rewrite the entire 4K sector.
The concept of sectors could be hidden from the interface, theoretically. You could put the whole file system into the drive (OSD), for example, or allow the host to address bytes, hiding all the read/modify/writes. But, all the common hard drive interfaces (ATA/SCSI) use blocks/sectors.
Sounds like you are referring to the product that InPhase Technology announced.
They aren't shipping and probably never will. I hear they are out of money, didn't make payroll last month, and could shut down any day now.
The vast bulk of Seagate's manufacturing is not in the States but in Singapore and Malaysia.
A lot, but not all, of the design is in the States (Colorado and Minnesota), but that's moving offshore too.
Seagate's incorporated in the Cayman Islands, not the States.
So, what great "American" company are we worried about? I don't see one.
I think that comparing it to hard drives is not as accurate as a comparison with high-end tape drives. Such drives can cost $15,000 or more. The cost, capacity and speed are roughly comparable but the holodrive has random-access and its disks might be more durable than tape cartridges.
On Inphase's web site they have a PDF file with details on their media.
/ download/DataSheet_MEDIA.pdf
http://www.inphase-tech.com/products/professional
You don't have to worry about inserting it into an ordinary CD/DVD drives because it's in a 135x153x11 mm cartridge. This is exactly the same dimensions of existing MO cartridges. I suppose one could cram one of their holo-cartridges into a MO drive or maybe if one had one of those ancient CD-ROMs that used a caddy...
I like this from the PDF: "Recording Format: Phase Conjugate Polytopic Holographic". Not sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds cool.
Iz
From the original press release they are claiming they demonstrated 515 gigabits per square inch. Presumably the media they use has more than one square inch because they claim their first product will sport 300 gigabytes of user data and a 23 megabytes/second transfer rate.
"That's pretty wild for a single "head" drive. I wonder if this could translate into devices similar to hard drives using similar methods."
Probably not.
From what I've read, holographic storage consists of storing lots of 2D images, essentially 2D bar codes like on a FedEx package, that are read and written as a unit, all at once. The "head" in a holographic drive is more like a camera than a hard disk head. That's how they get such parallelism.
Hard drive heads are fundamentally serial. There have been attempts to have more than one head functioning in parallel but they haven't been terribly successful so far. Even then, it's a fairly small number of heads, usually two, so we're only talking about doubling performance.
Nope. They have small holes to let air move in and out. There's a filter behind the hole. There are often bigger holes behind warranty-void-if-removed stickers.
The heads are design to fly over the platters on an air bearing so disc drives don't work in either a vacuum or in oil.
But, the holes are small and oil viscous. It might run for a while. Maybe someone with a PC-in-a-tank and an old hard drive could experiement to see how long one lasts.
Iz
Here's a link to the company's web site.
This gadget appears to be a removable-media WORM drive so it's fairer to compare it to a CD-R/DVD-R/BluRay-R than to a hard drive.
Compared to those sorts of devices, 300 GB is pretty good, per disk. Dual Layer DVD-R is 8.5 GB. I'm not sure what recordable BluRay or HDDVD will be, probably tens of gigs not hundreds. So if it ships at 10X the capacity of BD-R, which may or may not be shipping around the same time, that's not too shabby.
Iz
With our litigious culture, no company in their right minds would expose themselves to such a liability.
Take the recent incident where a bus driver had a heart attack. Since he's human, either no one gets sued or maybe Amtrak gets a law suit. If a computer had been driving, the computer manufacturer, the bus manufacturer, the software company, and Amtrak would now have lawyers knocking their doors down.
Iz
"But, but it was just a sign error!"
Brings back memories of college with me whining to a professor about getting some points back on a test because of a stupid sign error. He wouldn't budge. Wise man, that professor.
If you ask me, the wrong company got to keep the HP name when they split. I used to think of great calcs, scopes, and logic analyzers when I thought "HP". Now I just try not to think of them at all.
Perhaps when Carly gets done bleeding HP dry, Agilent can buy back the name on the cheap. By then, though, they may not want it.
Agilent needs to come out with a nice, well-built RPN calculator...
I've used these doo-hickies. The thing has an expiration date (about a year) and you have to swap out periodically. The battery lasts long enough to get you past the exp. date. Never had one croak before it had to be swapped anyway.
When I read your post's reference to "Killer Angels" my brain misfired and I was thinking "Broken Angels" by Richard Morgan (also "Altered Carbon"). Now, I'd really like to see a mini-series inspired by those two books. Probably have to be on HBO, though. hehe
bah, Picard wasn't a gadget guy. He couldn't be bothered to fiddle with the presets to his replicator. If you look close, it has a blinking "12:00" on one of the displays.
Buying a 1GB drive years ago cost $400, it would retail today for $4
Think of it this way: the most expensive thing in a hard drive is the head disk assembly. One they've reduced it to one head and one side of one platter it's about as cheap as it's going to get. Everything else has to be there or it isn't a hard drive. That one side of one platter translates into the 40-80 GB capacity of today's cheapest hard drives.
Iz
$450,000 is probably for the smallest configuration that the system is available in, probably one shelf with only a couple of line cards. A full-blown system with 72 shelves, fully stocked with line cards, would probably be 10's of millions. Throw in the special room required for the massive cooling and power supply requirements of these beasts and you're talking real money.
The margin for these monster routers is actually quite juicy.
Iz
I wrote a friggen module on my CoCo, (TRS-80 Color Computer).
Who's the geek?
I guess that would be me. On MY CoCo I had an elaborate DM's helper. It had a 2D combat map with monsters and player's positions, monster database, wandering monsters, tracked stats and XPs, on and on. Hehe. Nerd-O-Rama.
Iz
"We probably could have had something in place to shoot such a threat down if we had fully funded the Star Wars MDS project, but sadly geopolitics killed that project."
Doubtful. Weapons for bringing down delicate ICBMs -- even if they had surprised everyone and actually worked -- would be useless against a mountain of rock and ice moving at kilometers per second.
It would be like flicking peas at the Exxon Valdez.
To deal with large objects on a collision course we first need a few decades of warning. Given time, a little nudge can make a big difference. For a rock kilometers in diameter, even thermonuclear explosions count as nudges. If we only have a few months of warning; we're well and truly screwed.
Iz
"Lunokhod could manage between 0.8 and 2 kilometres per hour depending on soil"
I remember seeing a picture of the Lunokhod rover back when I was in school. Articles on the net mention tens of thousands of pics taken by these rovers but I can't seem to find any examples. Have the Russians not made them public? Any links?
Iz
"So... how do we plan for this? Any creative ideas out there?"
1) Get up to your eyeballs in debt. The hyperinflation and other fun stuff that will happen when the US gets its costs adjusted will wipe it all out and you'll be sitting pretty. Just think how small that $2500/month mortgage will seem when Big Macs cost $800!
2) Invest in barrels. These will be THE hot fashion item after the crash. Every newly bankrupted, homeless, jobless person who's lost even the clothes off their back will need one.
3) Keep in shape. To distract attention from the $800 Big Macs, there are likely to be a series of pointless wars. This could make the military one of the few places that's hiring.
4) Keep your membership up to date in radical organizations. Radicals tend to take over during times of disruptions. It's likelty to be neo-fascists or neo-communists; probably neo-fascists are more likely in the US. You want to be on the winning side and avoid any troublesome pogroms or purges so make sure the likely Supreme-Leader doesn't have you on his shit list.
Iz