Edison...didn't invent the light bulb. In fact, he bought the patents from others who'd been there before him but weren't able to make it practical.
So, if he BOUGHT the patents from others, then I guess there was value in patenting the idea (at least for the people who sold the patents and got paid).
I can't find the website where I originally read the numbers I quoted, but that website showed the calculations similar to yours, and they came up with the 5 year, 20GB figure. However I did find the numbers I quoted straight from Intel:
Wear leveling does not extend the drive life in any way...It simply causes it to maintain capacity as long as possible
But that IS extending the life. Without wear leveling, if I've got an 80GB drive and I store 50GB of data on it which I frequently modify, then after X years that 50GB will be worn out and I'll be left with 30GB. That isn't enough for me to use, so essentially the drive is dead as far as I'm concerned. Now consider a drive with wear leveling. After X years, I will only have used up 5/8 of the write cycles across the entire drive. I can still use the drive for another 0.6X years. Wear leveling has extended the useful life of the drive by 60%.
But even for more typical usage, it's possible for wear leveling to actually extend the number of writes that can be done if the wear leveling works in certain ways. For this to make sense, you have to understand how SSD storage is organized. Much like a HDD, which is organized into sectors, clusters, platters, etc, we have a similar organization with SSDs. You have bytes grouped into pages, and multiple pages are grouped into blocks (and it goes on from there). The smallest group of data which you can write on an SSD is a page. However, the smallest group you can erase is a block.
SSDs don't allow you to overwrite a page with your new data. Instead, you must first erase it and then write the new data to it. The problem here is that you have to erase a block at a time, but the rest of the pages in the block could already contain other data. So what happens is that the controller copies all of the pages that you don't want to modify from that block into cache, erases the block, writes back all of the page that are staying the same, and then writes your new block. Now surely you can see the problem here...you've only intended to write to one single page, but you've also used up a write cycle for every single page that you DIDN'T modify.
So how can wear leveling help this? Well, lets say that block consists of 10 pages, and only 9 of those pages are filled. You now want to modify one of those 9 pages. Well, instead of doing an erase, which uses up a write cycle on 9 of the 10 pages, the wear leveling can simply say "OK, I won't erase page 4...instead I'll just remember that I don't care about the data stored there. I'll also write this new data for page 4 into page 10 and remember that the data is now stored there". Thus to make that modification, we only use up a write cycle on a single page instead of 9 of the pages. Now, the next time we go to make a write, we'll have to erase the entire block and write to 9 of those pages. However, we'll once again have an empty page, so on the 3rd write we can do the same thing we did the first time. As a result, instead of a single modification writing to 9 pages each time, it averages 5 page writes each time (alternates between 1 and 9 pages).
Of course the wear leveling can be extended to perform the same type of thing across multiple block. The advantage here would be that, as lots of data gets modified, each page may eventually be migrated out of that block without the block having to be erased. Eventually, we could end up with the block being empty and then we can erase it without rewriting pointlessly to any of the page (or if it's almost empty, we'll only rewrite a few pages).
Other things wear leveling could do is recognize that some blocks never seem to get modified, and then shuffle that data to a different spot on the drive so that you don't end up with certain blocks that suffer almost no write-wear while other blocks are reaching their limit.
I don't know which specific techniques current SSD drives implement, but these are a few possibilities. I'm sure there are others.
Drives will get better and although we're still looking at SSDs in their infancy, as a boot/application drive I still believe it's the single best upgrade you can do to your machine today. I've moved all of my testbeds to SSDs as well as my personal desktop
I doubt he would have been so positive about SSDs if their benefit was as minimal as you seem to indicate.
That's compared to the first generation X25-M. If you've got one of those, by all means keep it (I plan to). If you DON'T already have an SSD, then getting one is often regarded as one of the most cost effective performance upgrades you can make at this point in time. Of course, that will depend on what you do. If gaming is your thing, then a faster hard drive isn't going to mean much as long as you've got sufficient ram.
I suspect we'll see the 2nd gen X-25M launch at prices similar to the current X-25M, and then drop down to the $225/80GB that you can get them in 1,000 unit quantities over the next couple months.
Although they aren't yet in stock, zipzoomfly is already listing the price at $223.25 (though you can't preorder).
Too bad the streaming write performance didn't go up significantly, because that's the only place where the Intel drives lag behind their competition.
Actually, for the G1 versions, the enterprise version (X25-E) was almost even with the OCZ vertex on streaming writes. The X25-M model fell behind by about 2-3x. However, one of the reviews (don't recall which site) did some investigation of various scenarios, the drive shows some curious performance stats that strongly indicated the X25-M was intentionally capped at 80GB (presumably to give additional justification for the higher price X25-E). So it's likely not that these drives are slower, but that Intel is betting that the decreased performance for sequential access is not a strong enough selling point for most users to give their competition a significant advantage. That may or may not be true when selling to the average user (who isn't often informed and thus wowed by large numbers), but to someone who is informed I suspect they are correct (most users won't be nearly as affected by the competitions faster sequential access as they will be by Intel's faster random access.
Actually, not true. The 80GB X25-M uses 0.15 watts at load. That's 0.001875 watt/GB. Scaling up to 2TB, you are talking about 3.7 watts total under load. At idle, the X25-M is 0.06 watts. That's 0.00075 watt/GB, or 1.5 watt at for 2TB. I don't know if any magnetic hard drive can match that, much less a 2TB model.
Then again, it's a silly comparison at the moment, since your electric cost per kwh would have to be insane before you'd recover the price difference of the drive itself in any meaningful timeframe.
SSDs are still very susceptible to static discharge versus HDD due to more surface area having sensitive parts.
Well actually, my X25-M drive has no circuitry exposed other than the sata and power connectors. Everything else is completely enclosed, so unless the case is likely to transmit enough of the charge to the circuitry (I have no idea whether or not it would), SSD's should be LESS susceptible to that problem.
And while you are examining the downsides of SSDs, it's also fair to say that data recovery from a damaged SSD is likely to be more problematic. I'm not sure what the feasibility of data recovery is, but at the very least, it's probably fair to say that there are currently fewer companies that can do it, and they surely have a lot less experience.
To me, Trim-less, and at least 25% slower is obsolete.
Again, it is not 25% slower. Most of the tests show 10% at most. Then again, if you are going to compare it to any other drive (you know, other then the drive that was announced only 2 days ago and can't actually be bought from any retailer yet), even the old "slow" model was leaps and bounds above any traditional hard drive on the market for the majority of tasks performed by most users.
Yes, I'm aware of what is in that document (that's how I figured out what the columns were to begin with). That document skips over the first 3 columns of the output for it's numbering (major device number, minor device number, and device name). It considers column 4 to be field 1. Not sure why they wrote the document that way, but PsychiKiller's command above uses awk to print out the 10th column, and that does indeed give you the number of bytes written.
Unless you system is maxed out on ram, I don't see the point. 4GB of extra ram will give you the same ability as a 4GB swap file. I've never had any problems running either windows or linux with no swap as long as you have sufficient ram (under windows, the only downside is that I think it won't be able to give you any debug info if the entire OS crashes, because the swap file is where it dumps the crash log)
I'm not the person you were replying to, but I too bought a X25-M 80GB back in April (though I only payed $300, so I only overpaid by $75). That said: 1) I've enjoyed the increased performance over the last 4 months. I've done a lot of work where I've benefited from the increased performance, so I feel I've gotten at least a good portion of that $75 in the form of the value of increased productivity (I use this computer for work for my business). 2) I've had no performance complaints from the new drive. Compared to my old drive, there are nearly zero times that I'm waiting on disk I/O anymore, so if it might be a little slower (and look at the charts in the article...it's not 25% slower) I'm not really noticing where it could be improved. 3) Obsolete? I do not think that word means what you think it means. My G1 drive is neither "No longer in use" nor "Outmoded in design, style, or construction". It has been surpassed (very slightly) by a newer model, but if that translate to obsolete, then I guess anyone who isn't paying $1000 for a Core i7-975 CPU is also buying obsolete hardware. And of course, anyone who does buy a Core i7-975 for $1000 will promptly be mocked by you when the price drops to $900 or a new model 1/3 GHz faster comes out or something.
This has been covered many times. It's a good number. I can't recall the article, but basically if you write 20GB per day, you'll get more than 5 years out of it thanks to wear leveling and extra space (SSDs actually have more capacity than they make available to you). Now, you might scoff at that but: 1) 20GB/day is a lot for the typical user. 2) People who routinely do more than 20GB/day probably need a lot more storage than SSDs currently provide (you are talking about filling the drive in 4 days) so you probably won't be using an SSD for those purposes anyway 3) People who buy into SSDs at this point in time are typically more on the cutting edge, and are likely no have moved on before the drive wears out. 4) When the drive finally does start having problems, my understanding is that it won't just fail and you'll have lost data. The failure should happen on write, and if it fails to write that will be detectable. If it writes successfully, then it should be readable. If it does fail, I believe that part will just be marked inaccessible and the data will be written somewhere else. The drive should (again, as far as I know) provide details of the failure to SMART and other disk utilities, so the problem can be detected before it progresses to a critical stage. This is much better than magnetic media, where the typical failure is that you go to read data and it is suddenly inaccessible.
Of course, this is all just what I've read about previous generations. I have no data about the 34nm, but I have no reason to suspect it's any worse.
PS. If you want to know how much you currently write to disk and you run a linux system, check out/proc/diskstats. The 10th column should be number of sectors written. Each sector is 512 bytes, so take value*512/1024/1024/1024 and you'll get the number of GB each device has written since bootup.
Uhhhh, yeah sure. That would be nice if they didn't sell the draft-n routers at best buy along with all the ones that are based on final specs and with a sufficiently clear warning about future problems. As it is, they ARE available in the store, and it ISN'T sufficiently clear just what they are buying into, so you end up with people going to the store, looking at the offerings, and saying "I could buy this g-thingy for $x, or I could pay a littler more and get this n-thingy which is faster....I'll buy the better one".
Even if it is there, how many non-techie people are going to know that draft n means "this is an unfinished protocol that most likely will change in the future, possibly rendering this device incompatible with devices based on the finalize protocol".
Thanks for the offer but I'm already wearing Stafford underwear and pants. You can keep your ass-covering.
1) Too much information. I neither need to nor care to know the brand of underwear you wear
2) If you took that as some type of offer, I'm beginning to see how you really DID think that guy was complaining about a base 2 vs base 10 issue. Misreading posts apparently is a common habit of yours. I'm beginning to wonder how you will misread this reply.
but the only reason why I read this article was because I was curious what relevance it had to technology
Slashdot isn't "Technology news for nerds"...just "News for nerds". And before you jump on that, "nerd" doesn't just mean computer programming or whatever. Nerds have a passion for a variety of topics, and one subject I find they are often passionate about is civil rights/constitutional violations/etc. So open up your nerd horizons. Don't feel the need to be stereotyped into sitting behind your computer with a pocket protector and tape on your glasses. If legal rights isn't your cup of tea, that's fine...we all have our individual interests, so just pass on the story without posting. I promise I'll do the same the next time there's a Firefly story or something.
Huh? The first Wright Brothers flight was 1903. According to wikipedia, "Heavier-than-air aircraft were first used in the military in the Italo-Turkish War", and that war took place in 1911-12.
Unless you mean they were unable to build an exactly identical plane from blueprints and get it to function, which wouldn't be a surprise since the blueprints wouldn't account for any variations that were introduced (accidentally or intentionally) when the Wright Brothers built their plane.
I see no indication at all that he beleived 1 MHz == 1024 x 1024 hertz. You made a mistake and misunderstood what his original post was trying to address. No shame in that...many of us have done the same from time to time. However, just admit your mistake instead of making up stuff to cover your ass.
I don't think it would be too difficult to deal with. On the card, in addition to the digits, you would also have 2 reference point. Have the user place the card on the screen and then click on the 2 reference points. By knowing the distance, you could then generate the image in the correct resolution. That could either be done through a java or flash app, or it could be done using an imagemap type of method to gather the coordinates (no javascript needed) and then rescale the image server-side. Yeah, it's a bit less elegant but it still should work alright. I wouldn't be surprised to see some companies buy into this, at least as a trial.
Sure you could, as long as 1) they seal tightly so as to not let wind to flow through, and 2) you had a strong enough shutter on the outside to protect it (go for steel/iron if you please).
It all might not be as inexpensive or (in the case of the buried house I suggested) as asthetically pleasing as you'd like, but you didn't say it was cost prohibitive or too strange...you said there was no way possible.
The skyscraper I was talking about was the 37 story Bank One Tower. As I said, the windows blew out, which resulted in extensive internal (but non-structural) damage. The owners didn't deem it worth repairing or worth demolishing so it sat vacant for several years. They finally decided to demolish it, then changed their mind when it again turned out to be too expensive to do. Finally someone bought it and turned it into condos.
No way possible? Really? Without doing any research on the matter, I can think of one way off the top of my head. Tornado shelters are built recessed into the ground and they always seem to withstand tornadoes. So the obvious first way is to construct buildings so they are recessed into the ground (or build them above ground and then bury them), and design all the windows with strong shutters.
Aside from that, if you want something more conventional, I'm sure better materials can do the job for many of the cases. After all, skyscrapers and nuclear reactors have withstood direct hits. There was a skyscraper in Texas that was hit in the last decade. It sustained extensive damage from the fact that the windows blew out, but as I recall it suffered no structural damage. Certainly you can build a smaller building of similar design, and one where it would be practical to be able to shutter closed all the windows quickly so that you can defend against even that.
Granted, there will always be extreme examples that will take out anything, but you can't protect anything, anywhere 100% of the time.
Because otherwise you end up with the case that no one codec works in all browsers, so websites will have to support both formats by encoding all their videos twice. Instead, I suspect most website owners would just say "yeah....OR I could just keep doing it in flash and only worry about 1 format that can work in all browsers."
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So, if he BOUGHT the patents from others, then I guess there was value in patenting the idea (at least for the people who sold the patents and got paid).
I can't find the website where I originally read the numbers I quoted, but that website showed the calculations similar to yours, and they came up with the 5 year, 20GB figure. However I did find the numbers I quoted straight from Intel:
http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/asmo-na/eng/products/nand/feature/index.htm
Expand the "Comparison chart" link a few paragraphs from the top. You will see an additional table. Last row in the table:
"5 years - 35TB written, up to 20GB/day for 5 years"
But that IS extending the life. Without wear leveling, if I've got an 80GB drive and I store 50GB of data on it which I frequently modify, then after X years that 50GB will be worn out and I'll be left with 30GB. That isn't enough for me to use, so essentially the drive is dead as far as I'm concerned. Now consider a drive with wear leveling. After X years, I will only have used up 5/8 of the write cycles across the entire drive. I can still use the drive for another 0.6X years. Wear leveling has extended the useful life of the drive by 60%.
But even for more typical usage, it's possible for wear leveling to actually extend the number of writes that can be done if the wear leveling works in certain ways. For this to make sense, you have to understand how SSD storage is organized. Much like a HDD, which is organized into sectors, clusters, platters, etc, we have a similar organization with SSDs. You have bytes grouped into pages, and multiple pages are grouped into blocks (and it goes on from there).
The smallest group of data which you can write on an SSD is a page. However, the smallest group you can erase is a block.
SSDs don't allow you to overwrite a page with your new data. Instead, you must first erase it and then write the new data to it. The problem here is that you have to erase a block at a time, but the rest of the pages in the block could already contain other data. So what happens is that the controller copies all of the pages that you don't want to modify from that block into cache, erases the block, writes back all of the page that are staying the same, and then writes your new block. Now surely you can see the problem here...you've only intended to write to one single page, but you've also used up a write cycle for every single page that you DIDN'T modify.
So how can wear leveling help this? Well, lets say that block consists of 10 pages, and only 9 of those pages are filled. You now want to modify one of those 9 pages. Well, instead of doing an erase, which uses up a write cycle on 9 of the 10 pages, the wear leveling can simply say "OK, I won't erase page 4...instead I'll just remember that I don't care about the data stored there. I'll also write this new data for page 4 into page 10 and remember that the data is now stored there". Thus to make that modification, we only use up a write cycle on a single page instead of 9 of the pages. Now, the next time we go to make a write, we'll have to erase the entire block and write to 9 of those pages. However, we'll once again have an empty page, so on the 3rd write we can do the same thing we did the first time. As a result, instead of a single modification writing to 9 pages each time, it averages 5 page writes each time (alternates between 1 and 9 pages).
Of course the wear leveling can be extended to perform the same type of thing across multiple block. The advantage here would be that, as lots of data gets modified, each page may eventually be migrated out of that block without the block having to be erased. Eventually, we could end up with the block being empty and then we can erase it without rewriting pointlessly to any of the page (or if it's almost empty, we'll only rewrite a few pages).
Other things wear leveling could do is recognize that some blocks never seem to get modified, and then shuffle that data to a different spot on the drive so that you don't end up with certain blocks that suffer almost no write-wear while other blocks are reaching their limit.
I don't know which specific techniques current SSD drives implement, but these are a few possibilities. I'm sure there are others.
Either you misread it or they made some mistake. The reviews by Anand have been pretty positive about the benefits of SSD vs HDD. For example:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=31
I doubt he would have been so positive about SSDs if their benefit was as minimal as you seem to indicate.
That's compared to the first generation X25-M. If you've got one of those, by all means keep it (I plan to). If you DON'T already have an SSD, then getting one is often regarded as one of the most cost effective performance upgrades you can make at this point in time. Of course, that will depend on what you do. If gaming is your thing, then a faster hard drive isn't going to mean much as long as you've got sufficient ram.
Although they aren't yet in stock, zipzoomfly is already listing the price at $223.25 (though you can't preorder).
Actually, for the G1 versions, the enterprise version (X25-E) was almost even with the OCZ vertex on streaming writes. The X25-M model fell behind by about 2-3x. However, one of the reviews (don't recall which site) did some investigation of various scenarios, the drive shows some curious performance stats that strongly indicated the X25-M was intentionally capped at 80GB (presumably to give additional justification for the higher price X25-E). So it's likely not that these drives are slower, but that Intel is betting that the decreased performance for sequential access is not a strong enough selling point for most users to give their competition a significant advantage. That may or may not be true when selling to the average user (who isn't often informed and thus wowed by large numbers), but to someone who is informed I suspect they are correct (most users won't be nearly as affected by the competitions faster sequential access as they will be by Intel's faster random access.
Actually, not true. The 80GB X25-M uses 0.15 watts at load. That's 0.001875 watt/GB. Scaling up to 2TB, you are talking about 3.7 watts total under load. At idle, the X25-M is 0.06 watts. That's 0.00075 watt/GB, or 1.5 watt at for 2TB. I don't know if any magnetic hard drive can match that, much less a 2TB model.
Then again, it's a silly comparison at the moment, since your electric cost per kwh would have to be insane before you'd recover the price difference of the drive itself in any meaningful timeframe.
Well actually, my X25-M drive has no circuitry exposed other than the sata and power connectors. Everything else is completely enclosed, so unless the case is likely to transmit enough of the charge to the circuitry (I have no idea whether or not it would), SSD's should be LESS susceptible to that problem.
And while you are examining the downsides of SSDs, it's also fair to say that data recovery from a damaged SSD is likely to be more problematic. I'm not sure what the feasibility of data recovery is, but at the very least, it's probably fair to say that there are currently fewer companies that can do it, and they surely have a lot less experience.
Again, it is not 25% slower. Most of the tests show 10% at most. Then again, if you are going to compare it to any other drive (you know, other then the drive that was announced only 2 days ago and can't actually be bought from any retailer yet), even the old "slow" model was leaps and bounds above any traditional hard drive on the market for the majority of tasks performed by most users.
Yes, I'm aware of what is in that document (that's how I figured out what the columns were to begin with). That document skips over the first 3 columns of the output for it's numbering (major device number, minor device number, and device name). It considers column 4 to be field 1. Not sure why they wrote the document that way, but PsychiKiller's command above uses awk to print out the 10th column, and that does indeed give you the number of bytes written.
Unless you system is maxed out on ram, I don't see the point. 4GB of extra ram will give you the same ability as a 4GB swap file. I've never had any problems running either windows or linux with no swap as long as you have sufficient ram (under windows, the only downside is that I think it won't be able to give you any debug info if the entire OS crashes, because the swap file is where it dumps the crash log)
I'm not the person you were replying to, but I too bought a X25-M 80GB back in April (though I only payed $300, so I only overpaid by $75). That said:
1) I've enjoyed the increased performance over the last 4 months. I've done a lot of work where I've benefited from the increased performance, so I feel I've gotten at least a good portion of that $75 in the form of the value of increased productivity (I use this computer for work for my business).
2) I've had no performance complaints from the new drive. Compared to my old drive, there are nearly zero times that I'm waiting on disk I/O anymore, so if it might be a little slower (and look at the charts in the article...it's not 25% slower) I'm not really noticing where it could be improved.
3) Obsolete? I do not think that word means what you think it means. My G1 drive is neither "No longer in use" nor "Outmoded in design, style, or construction". It has been surpassed (very slightly) by a newer model, but if that translate to obsolete, then I guess anyone who isn't paying $1000 for a Core i7-975 CPU is also buying obsolete hardware. And of course, anyone who does buy a Core i7-975 for $1000 will promptly be mocked by you when the price drops to $900 or a new model 1/3 GHz faster comes out or something.
This has been covered many times. It's a good number. I can't recall the article, but basically if you write 20GB per day, you'll get more than 5 years out of it thanks to wear leveling and extra space (SSDs actually have more capacity than they make available to you). Now, you might scoff at that but:
1) 20GB/day is a lot for the typical user.
2) People who routinely do more than 20GB/day probably need a lot more storage than SSDs currently provide (you are talking about filling the drive in 4 days) so you probably won't be using an SSD for those purposes anyway
3) People who buy into SSDs at this point in time are typically more on the cutting edge, and are likely no have moved on before the drive wears out.
4) When the drive finally does start having problems, my understanding is that it won't just fail and you'll have lost data. The failure should happen on write, and if it fails to write that will be detectable. If it writes successfully, then it should be readable. If it does fail, I believe that part will just be marked inaccessible and the data will be written somewhere else. The drive should (again, as far as I know) provide details of the failure to SMART and other disk utilities, so the problem can be detected before it progresses to a critical stage. This is much better than magnetic media, where the typical failure is that you go to read data and it is suddenly inaccessible.
Of course, this is all just what I've read about previous generations. I have no data about the 34nm, but I have no reason to suspect it's any worse.
PS. If you want to know how much you currently write to disk and you run a linux system, check out /proc/diskstats. The 10th column should be number of sectors written. Each sector is 512 bytes, so take value*512/1024/1024/1024 and you'll get the number of GB each device has written since bootup.
Uhhhh, yeah sure. That would be nice if they didn't sell the draft-n routers at best buy along with all the ones that are based on final specs and with a sufficiently clear warning about future problems. As it is, they ARE available in the store, and it ISN'T sufficiently clear just what they are buying into, so you end up with people going to the store, looking at the offerings, and saying "I could buy this g-thingy for $x, or I could pay a littler more and get this n-thingy which is faster....I'll buy the better one".
Even if it is there, how many non-techie people are going to know that draft n means "this is an unfinished protocol that most likely will change in the future, possibly rendering this device incompatible with devices based on the finalize protocol".
>>>cover your ass
Thanks for the offer but I'm already wearing Stafford underwear and pants. You can keep your ass-covering.
1) Too much information. I neither need to nor care to know the brand of underwear you wear
2) If you took that as some type of offer, I'm beginning to see how you really DID think that guy was complaining about a base 2 vs base 10 issue. Misreading posts apparently is a common habit of yours. I'm beginning to wonder how you will misread this reply.
Slashdot isn't "Technology news for nerds"...just "News for nerds". And before you jump on that, "nerd" doesn't just mean computer programming or whatever. Nerds have a passion for a variety of topics, and one subject I find they are often passionate about is civil rights/constitutional violations/etc. So open up your nerd horizons. Don't feel the need to be stereotyped into sitting behind your computer with a pocket protector and tape on your glasses. If legal rights isn't your cup of tea, that's fine...we all have our individual interests, so just pass on the story without posting. I promise I'll do the same the next time there's a Firefly story or something.
Huh? The first Wright Brothers flight was 1903. According to wikipedia, "Heavier-than-air aircraft were first used in the military in the Italo-Turkish War", and that war took place in 1911-12.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_aviation
Unless you mean they were unable to build an exactly identical plane from blueprints and get it to function, which wouldn't be a surprise since the blueprints wouldn't account for any variations that were introduced (accidentally or intentionally) when the Wright Brothers built their plane.
I see no indication at all that he beleived 1 MHz == 1024 x 1024 hertz. You made a mistake and misunderstood what his original post was trying to address. No shame in that...many of us have done the same from time to time. However, just admit your mistake instead of making up stuff to cover your ass.
I don't think it would be too difficult to deal with. On the card, in addition to the digits, you would also have 2 reference point. Have the user place the card on the screen and then click on the 2 reference points. By knowing the distance, you could then generate the image in the correct resolution. That could either be done through a java or flash app, or it could be done using an imagemap type of method to gather the coordinates (no javascript needed) and then rescale the image server-side. Yeah, it's a bit less elegant but it still should work alright. I wouldn't be surprised to see some companies buy into this, at least as a trial.
Hey, at least he didn't say "udder moran"
Sure you could, as long as 1) they seal tightly so as to not let wind to flow through, and 2) you had a strong enough shutter on the outside to protect it (go for steel/iron if you please).
It all might not be as inexpensive or (in the case of the buried house I suggested) as asthetically pleasing as you'd like, but you didn't say it was cost prohibitive or too strange...you said there was no way possible.
According to wikipedia, it was an F3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Fort_Worth_tornado
Another website lists it as a strong F2.
http://www.dallassky.com/fwtornado.htm
The skyscraper I was talking about was the 37 story Bank One Tower. As I said, the windows blew out, which resulted in extensive internal (but non-structural) damage. The owners didn't deem it worth repairing or worth demolishing so it sat vacant for several years. They finally decided to demolish it, then changed their mind when it again turned out to be too expensive to do. Finally someone bought it and turned it into condos.
http://www.fortworth-texas-real-estate.com/Downtown-Condos-The-Tower.php
No, none of that stuff. Only a water shortage, which will get much worse if everyone moves there.
No way possible? Really? Without doing any research on the matter, I can think of one way off the top of my head. Tornado shelters are built recessed into the ground and they always seem to withstand tornadoes. So the obvious first way is to construct buildings so they are recessed into the ground (or build them above ground and then bury them), and design all the windows with strong shutters.
Aside from that, if you want something more conventional, I'm sure better materials can do the job for many of the cases. After all, skyscrapers and nuclear reactors have withstood direct hits. There was a skyscraper in Texas that was hit in the last decade. It sustained extensive damage from the fact that the windows blew out, but as I recall it suffered no structural damage. Certainly you can build a smaller building of similar design, and one where it would be practical to be able to shutter closed all the windows quickly so that you can defend against even that.
Granted, there will always be extreme examples that will take out anything, but you can't protect anything, anywhere 100% of the time.
Because otherwise you end up with the case that no one codec works in all browsers, so websites will have to support both formats by encoding all their videos twice. Instead, I suspect most website owners would just say "yeah....OR I could just keep doing it in flash and only worry about 1 format that can work in all browsers."