Re:don't follow their instructions word for word..
on
Clear Hard Drive Mods
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· Score: 1
True, the magnetics are safe but the magnetoresistive heads are exquisitly sensitive to ESD. So the magnetics stay intact but the heads are blown so they one can't read or write. ESD is evil, too, it doesn't always kill a device right off the bat, just weakens so it fails earlier than it should.
They just closed their fourth round of funding. Note this was 70 million Canadian dollars, US$43 million. Only US$12 million was from venture capitalists, the remaining US$31 million was essentially a loan from the government of Quebec.
These guys have made some pretty wild claims in the past. Their first product was (maybe still is) to be called the PBR 1280. PBR = PetaBitRouter. They claim it scales to ~65000 OC192 ports. That's pretty freaking huge.
We'll see. They claim they're relasing a product later this year.
JHDL may be syntactically simpler that VHDL/Verilog but that's largely due to it being limited to structure (effectively a netlist). If one limited themselves to structural in VHDL or Verilog, one would also throw out most of the syntax.
Yes, it's good to be able to instantiate an AND gate when you need it, it's more productive to move beyond schematic capture when you don't really need to instantiate gates.
VHDL has the generate statement and generics so it supports parametric circuits quite well, and easily enough. Verilog can do it too but it's a kludgey mess compared to VHDL. One can do it with the help of macro preprocessors and parameters.
Nothing against JHDL. I guess I just don't see what it brings to the table that ain't already there.
Looking at some of their examples, it seems that they are striving to use a very high-level language to build a netlist. Whoopie.
They are using Java objects to instantiate gates , flops, and wires. There's hierarchy so an object can be a collection of other objects which is ultimately made up of gates, flops, and wires. In other words C = A + B looks like:
VHDL: C = A + B
Verilog: C = A + B
JHDL: adder(A,B,C) where adder , in turn is a glob of discrete gates.
Frankly, I don't see the point. I could make netlists in any number of languages. I don't have a burning need for a new one. It's not adding anything new and in some ways is a step back. For example, to do a multiplexer, it seems that I would have to instantiate one:
multiplexer(A,B,S,C)
While in Verilog or VHDL I could use a nice case or if-then-else.
if (S == 1'b0)
C = A;
else
C = B;
And instantiating a mux is better/easier/clearer how?
Not only may it be easier to remember, but it would have the obvious advantage of being immune to keyboard loggers. Perhaps they could get a series of x,y coordinates of mouse clicks but presumably the location of the patterns is randomized so this would be of little use.
While I have no particular wish to defend NASA, they are not entirely at fault here. There're two reasons that NASA spacecraft cost so much:
The big reason is that the Internation Space Station, way over budget, is sucking money out of other programs like a black hole.
It's sad that the political boondogle (ISS) to explore the most boring place in the Solar System (low-Earth orbit, been there done that)is killing off other, more interesting and cost-effective projects.
It sounds sort of how RAID (5?) works. Take the original data, expand it with some redundancy and then splat it across 5 drives. Any one drive goes down the data from the other four can be combined to recover the data. The data is "expanded" 5:4. The math to do the recover involves a ton of XOR operations. Some hard drives have nifty hardware support for this to speed things up.
I bet these guys have something like that: add a bit of redundancy, split things up, blast it out UDP to the destination. The receiving end puts it back in order and tries to recover from missing packets by using the XOR operations. It takes more bandwidth but still may be faster than FTP since it doesn't spend most of it's time doing handshakes.
I don't get why the box costs 70-150 kilobucks though. Yikes.
Now there's no way they're getting my bank account info. Don't they think that charging $1000 worth of stuff to my credit card over a couple years is enough to "verify" me?? What I did when I recently hit the $1000 limit was start another PayPal account using a different e-mail address and a different credit card number. That seemed to work just fine.
You'd better not ever write any checks or use a debit card. The evil "they" will have your super-secret checking acount number. [insert scary noises]
I guess you didn't bother looking at the picture in the article. The chimney actually has a small footprint near the center of the large, circular greenhouse. The picture appears to show fields in the area covered by the greenhouse section. I imagine the winds are tend to pick up the closer one gets to the center but are only ferocious right under the intake to the chimney. I bet one could easily grow trees and/or crops everywhere but a small area right around the chimney intake.
More like +1, 0, -1, or from the article: 0, 1, 2. Using the signed-digit (+1,0, -1) representation has some handy properties, like adders without carry-chains.
The site is interesting; Mr. Grubb has definitely put some thought into it.
The one issue that I find problematic is the requirement for bipolar transistors to get a +V and a -V. CMOS uses little power compared to bipolar. A trinary chip would have to be based on bipolar technology which would require more power and be less dense. Also, when laying out a chip one now has to worry about two power supplies instead of one: scratch one layer of metal. Now it's harder to route and even less dense.
So there might be a use for trinary logic in chips that are already bipolar for some reason. A smidgen of trinary logic latched onto a mostly analog chip of some sort? I don't think they have a chance against current CMOS binary chips.
I sympathize with the person, being a Mac guy and all, seeing the crushed G4 hurts a little.
Anyway, Mac or not,it seems this person had three computers (G4, Powertower, some generic PC) PLUS a monitor squished in that box. Although good sized, this was not a huge box. How much packing material could there possibly have been in and around all this gear? Maybe one layer of bubble wrap? The box had to weigh a ton.
I'm sorry but the packer has to share a good chunk of the blame in this case. Every one of those computers should have gotten packed in its own box.
Ever notice how they pack computers in the original box? Several centimeters of styrofoam on all sides. I try to keep the original box for my computer just so it can travel all nice and cozy. Last time I moved, the computer traveled in my trunk; the rest of my crap went via moving van.
Perhaps it has something to do with Firewire being at least 30 times faster than USB? How long would it take to transfer several gigabytes of MP3s over USB?
>>>
RAM is now cheaper when it comes to memory-per-unitofcurrency than hard drives.
In general, RAM is still about a 30x more expensive per megabyte than a hard disk.
512 MB DRAM costs roughly $50. 76 GB HD costs roughly $250. That puts RAM at ~0.1 $/MB and HD at 3.3x10-3 $/MB. 76 GB of RAM would cost ~$7600.
The price per meg for a solid-state HD would be worse than straight RAM since one needs the RAM, for starters, and then a controller/interface, battery, and some non-volatile storage. If the storage is flash then the price/meg just went way up. If a HD then, well, duh.
Now if there's a big break-through in inherently non-volatile memory, like dirt-cheap FRAM, then we might have something.
That's the thing, the mechanisms aren't the same. They often spin faster (10K, 15K), seek faster, are more reliable (>10^6 MTBF), have bigger buffers, and so on. IDE mechanisms are cheap. There's a little overlap at IDE's high end and SCSI's low end where they may share a mechanism. If there were a Cheetah-15K/IDE it would cost about the same as a Cheetah-15K/SCSI.
Once the cameras are everywhere, it will be obvious that anyone wearing a mask must have something to hide -- they're probably a pedophile -- so wearing a mask in public will be outlawed. Interfering with a police investigation or something.
"precipitate dissolved Uranium and other dangerous elements"
Oh yes. Uranium is soooo dangerous. It's about 600 times more common in the Earth's crust than Gold is (~2 ppm vs ~3 ppb). Good luck precipitating all of it out.
Suppose they next discover a trans-Neptunian object that is larger than Pluto. At that point we'll either have to define this new object as a planet or demote Pluto to minor planethood. I guess it's not really proof but it seems that the more and more objects we find comparable to Pluto in size and in nearby orbits the weaker becomes the case for Pluto remaining a planet. Kind of like how Ceres, Vesta, Juno and Pallas all lost their ~50 year-old planethood when hordes of asteroids began to be discovered back in the 1850's.
>>>
And saying that the universe came from a big bang, is just as dogmatic as saying God created it in 7 days.
Hardly. The difference is the scientific view is subject to revision based on new evidence. The religious one is not. All you have to do to convert a bunch of evolutionists into creationists is to provide convincing evidence. Demonstrably, no amount of evidence or common sense will result in the opposite effect.
Why should it be transferred to personal transportation? From the article it doesn't reduce the amount of pollution just where the pollution goes; it's still a diesel engine burning diesel fuel. It just closes the loop so that it can run deep underwater. The average car hopefully stays well above the water and doesn't need a closed loop. They have to provide a supply of oxygen and chemicals and filters to clean the exhaust of soot, water, CO2 and any other undesirables before reusing it. All this stuff probably gets replaced between every trip.
I certainly couldn't type that fast on my Coco's crappy chicklet keyboard but I could easily read faster than the 300 baud (back in the day, a baud == a bps, these new fancy-smancy modems do better). One would log into a BBS and wait patiently for their so-cool ASCII art to get painted on the screen. Things were fine until our phone company introduced call-waiting (but not the nifty *70 override!). Argh. The damnable call-waiting flash disconnected my modem every #$@$#@#-ing time.
What a load of crap. It's not free. The Orbital Power station is not free, nor is the task of getting it from the ground into orbit at several dollars/gram, nor is is the maintenance (being most inconvenient when the plant is in orbit), or ground operations. Just as with terrestrial solar, it ain't the sunlight, it's the capital expense of the collector.
Even better, the reactor can be designed to use some if the neutrons from the fusion reaction to "breed" additional deuterium and tritium so at the expense of some of the power output you don't even have to mine the oceans.
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True, the magnetics are safe but the magnetoresistive heads are exquisitly sensitive to ESD. So the magnetics stay intact but the heads are blown so they one can't read or write. ESD is evil, too, it doesn't always kill a device right off the bat, just weakens so it fails earlier than it should.
Altivec does SP-32-bit FP operations, 4 at a time, not 8-bit "pseudo FP" or whatever the heck you're babbling about.
Er, interleaving is a function of the memory controller and not the RAM itself, no?
I have no idea if the G4 mem controller interleaves or not.
They just closed their fourth round of funding. Note this was 70 million Canadian dollars, US$43 million. Only US$12 million was from venture capitalists, the remaining US$31 million was essentially a loan from the government of Quebec.
These guys have made some pretty wild claims in the past. Their first product was (maybe still is) to be called the PBR 1280. PBR = PetaBitRouter. They claim it scales to ~65000 OC192 ports. That's pretty freaking huge.
We'll see. They claim they're relasing a product later this year.
JHDL may be syntactically simpler that VHDL/Verilog but that's largely due to it being limited to structure (effectively a netlist). If one limited themselves to structural in VHDL or Verilog, one would also throw out most of the syntax.
Yes, it's good to be able to instantiate an AND gate when you need it, it's more productive to move beyond schematic capture when you don't really need to instantiate gates.
VHDL has the generate statement and generics so it supports parametric circuits quite well, and easily enough. Verilog can do it too but it's a kludgey mess compared to VHDL. One can do it with the help of macro preprocessors and parameters.
Nothing against JHDL. I guess I just don't see what it brings to the table that ain't already there.
Looking at some of their examples, it seems that they are striving to use a very high-level language to build a netlist. Whoopie.
They are using Java objects to instantiate gates , flops, and wires. There's hierarchy so an object can be a collection of other objects which is ultimately made up of gates, flops, and wires. In other words C = A + B looks like:
VHDL: C = A + B
Verilog: C = A + B
JHDL: adder(A,B,C) where adder , in turn is a glob of discrete gates.
Frankly, I don't see the point. I could make netlists in any number of languages. I don't have a burning need for a new one. It's not adding anything new and in some ways is a step back. For example, to do a multiplexer, it seems that I would have to instantiate one:
multiplexer(A,B,S,C)
While in Verilog or VHDL I could use a nice case or if-then-else.
if (S == 1'b0)
C = A;
else
C = B;
And instantiating a mux is better/easier/clearer how?
Not only may it be easier to remember, but it would have the obvious advantage of being immune to keyboard loggers. Perhaps they could get a series of x,y coordinates of mouse clicks but presumably the location of the patterns is randomized so this would be of little use.
The big reason is that the Internation Space Station, way over budget, is sucking money out of other programs like a black hole.
It's sad that the political boondogle (ISS) to explore the most boring place in the Solar System (low-Earth orbit, been there done that)is killing off other, more interesting and cost-effective projects.
--Iz
It sounds sort of how RAID (5?) works. Take the original data, expand it with some redundancy and then splat it across 5 drives. Any one drive goes down the data from the other four can be combined to recover the data. The data is "expanded" 5:4. The math to do the recover involves a ton of XOR operations. Some hard drives have nifty hardware support for this to speed things up.
I bet these guys have something like that: add a bit of redundancy, split things up, blast it out UDP to the destination. The receiving end puts it back in order and tries to recover from missing packets by using the XOR operations. It takes more bandwidth but still may be faster than FTP since it doesn't spend most of it's time doing handshakes.
I don't get why the box costs 70-150 kilobucks though. Yikes.
I guess you didn't bother looking at the picture in the article. The chimney actually has a small footprint near the center of the large, circular greenhouse. The picture appears to show fields in the area covered by the greenhouse section. I imagine the winds are tend to pick up the closer one gets to the center but are only ferocious right under the intake to the chimney. I bet one could easily grow trees and/or crops everywhere but a small area right around the chimney intake.
More like +1, 0, -1, or from the article: 0, 1, 2. Using the signed-digit (+1,0, -1) representation has some handy properties, like adders without carry-chains.
The site is interesting; Mr. Grubb has definitely put some thought into it.
The one issue that I find problematic is the requirement for bipolar transistors to get a +V and a -V. CMOS uses little power compared to bipolar. A trinary chip would have to be based on bipolar technology which would require more power and be less dense. Also, when laying out a chip one now has to worry about two power supplies instead of one: scratch one layer of metal. Now it's harder to route and even less dense.
So there might be a use for trinary logic in chips that are already bipolar for some reason. A smidgen of trinary logic latched onto a mostly analog chip of some sort? I don't think they have a chance against current CMOS binary chips.
I sympathize with the person, being a Mac guy and all, seeing the crushed G4 hurts a little.
Anyway, Mac or not,it seems this person had three computers (G4, Powertower, some generic PC) PLUS a monitor squished in that box. Although good sized, this was not a huge box. How much packing material could there possibly have been in and around all this gear? Maybe one layer of bubble wrap? The box had to weigh a ton.
I'm sorry but the packer has to share a good chunk of the blame in this case. Every one of those computers should have gotten packed in its own box.
Ever notice how they pack computers in the original box? Several centimeters of styrofoam on all sides. I try to keep the original box for my computer just so it can travel all nice and cozy. Last time I moved, the computer traveled in my trunk; the rest of my crap went via moving van.
Perhaps it has something to do with Firewire being at least 30 times faster than USB? How long would it take to transfer several gigabytes of MP3s over USB?
>>>
RAM is now cheaper when it comes to memory-per-unitofcurrency than hard drives.
In general, RAM is still about a 30x more expensive per megabyte than a hard disk.
512 MB DRAM costs roughly $50. 76 GB HD costs roughly $250. That puts RAM at ~0.1 $/MB and HD at 3.3x10-3 $/MB. 76 GB of RAM would cost ~$7600.
The price per meg for a solid-state HD would be worse than straight RAM since one needs the RAM, for starters, and then a controller/interface, battery, and some non-volatile storage. If the storage is flash then the price/meg just went way up. If a HD then, well, duh.
Now if there's a big break-through in inherently non-volatile memory, like dirt-cheap FRAM, then we might have something.
-Iz-
That's the thing, the mechanisms aren't the same. They often spin faster (10K, 15K), seek faster, are more reliable (>10^6 MTBF), have bigger buffers, and so on. IDE mechanisms are cheap. There's a little overlap at IDE's high end and SCSI's low end where they may share a mechanism. If there were a Cheetah-15K/IDE it would cost about the same as a Cheetah-15K/SCSI.
It's not against the law -- yet.
Once the cameras are everywhere, it will be obvious that anyone wearing a mask must have something to hide -- they're probably a pedophile -- so wearing a mask in public will be outlawed. Interfering with a police investigation or something.
"precipitate dissolved Uranium and other dangerous elements"
Oh yes. Uranium is soooo dangerous. It's about 600 times more common in the Earth's crust than Gold is (~2 ppm vs ~3 ppb). Good luck precipitating all of it out.
Suppose they next discover a trans-Neptunian object that is larger than Pluto. At that point we'll either have to define this new object as a planet or demote Pluto to minor planethood. I guess it's not really proof but it seems that the more and more objects we find comparable to Pluto in size and in nearby orbits the weaker becomes the case for Pluto remaining a planet. Kind of like how Ceres, Vesta, Juno and Pallas all lost their ~50 year-old planethood when hordes of asteroids began to be discovered back in the 1850's.
>>>
And saying that the universe came from a big bang, is just as dogmatic as saying God created it in 7 days.
Hardly. The difference is the scientific view is subject to revision based on new evidence. The religious one is not. All you have to do to convert a bunch of evolutionists into creationists is to provide convincing evidence. Demonstrably, no amount of evidence or common sense will result in the opposite effect.
Why should it be transferred to personal transportation? From the article it doesn't reduce the amount of pollution just where the pollution goes; it's still a diesel engine burning diesel fuel. It just closes the loop so that it can run deep underwater. The average car hopefully stays well above the water and doesn't need a closed loop. They have to provide a supply of oxygen and chemicals and filters to clean the exhaust of soot, water, CO2 and any other undesirables before reusing it. All this stuff probably gets replaced between every trip.
Uh, I suppose that's why the article used the word "ice" as in the hard, decidedly non-liquid form of H2O.
I certainly couldn't type that fast on my Coco's crappy chicklet keyboard but I could easily read faster than the 300 baud (back in the day, a baud == a bps, these new fancy-smancy modems do better). One would log into a BBS and wait patiently for their so-cool ASCII art to get painted on the screen. Things were fine until our phone company introduced call-waiting (but not the nifty *70 override!). Argh. The damnable call-waiting flash disconnected my modem every #$@$#@#-ing time.
What a load of crap. It's not free. The Orbital Power station is not free, nor is the task of getting it from the ground into orbit at several dollars/gram, nor is is the maintenance (being most inconvenient when the plant is in orbit), or ground operations. Just as with terrestrial solar, it ain't the sunlight, it's the capital expense of the collector.
Even better, the reactor can be designed to use some if the neutrons from the fusion reaction to "breed" additional deuterium and tritium so at the expense of some of the power output you don't even have to mine the oceans.