They need the 2nd offense to be punished by chemical castration, as in the pourig of the gentals in caustic chemicals.
Totally wrong attitude. What is needed is not vicious punishments, but certainty of getting caught. If you could prove quickly and cheaply that 1) This is spam, and 2) He sent it, you wouldn't need massive punishments. $1000 fine, or maybe a week in gaol, would do fine. Spammers spam for money, not for fun. If you make spamming financially unviable, it will end.
What we need is a good way of letting honest, opt-in, mass mailers prove their honesty, at low cost. I enjoy quite a few mail-lists which use the fact that email is near zero cost to tell me things about things I am interested in.
Suppose we have a mechanism whereby bona-fide newsletter senders can cheaply (say no more than $50) register themselves. Then we can say of any other bulk emailer "He sent to more than 1000 recipients. Book him, Danno".
Certainty of punishment is much more effective than magnitude of punishment.
The virtue of this is that it tells you which way you are facing as well. Many intersections consist of four streets which are, to the lost tourist, identical. This scheme can tell you to take the street to the left of the one you are facing, or to turn around, or...
When I get lost in cities, it is usually becasue I have become disoriented. As long as I keep sight of which way is north, I can usually find my way pretty well. But go through an underpass with more twists than I expected, and lose North, and my chances of getting very lost increase dramatically.
Mind, the only reason for this is that GPS can fail in built-up areas. Given the tumbling cost of GPS receivers, how long before the put GPS pseudolites in the cells. If you can get the phone, you can get the GPS: problem solved.
There are some schemes where you, in distant country, place a call to a machine in the US, which immediately hangs up then calls you back giving you a US dial tone. Calls in the US then cost your standard 5c/min, calls to other countries perhaps twice that (once into US and same again out). I have had calls from Hungary routed to me in the UK like this.
The data has 100% overhead from being in ascii, not hex. You can halve the data storage by converting it to binary immediately. You don't need to store \n - that is implicit in the fixed structure. The first field will generally be simply countin, so you can omit it completely if you can inser an extra code for skipped samples. What coherence is there between successive samples? If sampling rate is high, most samples will be quite similar to their predecessors, and can probably be mor compactly coded with a delta code not an absolute.
I would have thought that you could cut the data to be stored by a factor of 10 by some thoughtdul, but not very complex, coding. Normally, I would advise againse excessive attempts at compression. But this is eactly the kind of bulk data application where compression works.
You obviously have the ability and willingness to do a number of different kinds of jobs. What is the fallback situation? If you go for the higher paid, but risky, job, how long will it take to get another bartender job?
Round here, tech jobs are pretty specialised and don't come up all that often. If you lose your tech job, it may be months, or an enormous commute, before another comes up. But bartender jobs come up all the time. There is a high turnover, and a lot of places where the skills needeed are essentially the same. New bars etc. seem to be opening every month or so. Nobody with a respectable level of experience in the catering industry need go without a job - of sorts - for more than a couple of weeks.
Likewise your mainframe job. Sounds quite specialised. What is the turnover? If you leave politely, explaining why it is a good career move, higher pay etc., arrange that they have you phone number for any "I forgot" queries, what is the chance they would take you back within a finite time?
Basically, what is the worst downside of losing the risky job? Of course it isn't nice losing any job - but if all that happens is you and up back at your current position after a couple of weeks, go for it.
Far more wasteful a consumer of water is agriculture with "grandfather rights" to water supplies. Large areas of agriculture, particularly in the south west, are using vast quantities of water for high water consumption, relatively low added value crops such as alfalfa and rice. Tis water is delivered at prices set in the 1930s and guaranteed for ever. Those same water supplies would be fare better spent for the food of the community on providing for urban inhabitants, including - if they will - watering their laws.
If Mass is in trouble, watch out Arizona. Pheonix (I think it is) is taking most of its water from an aquifer which is about 40,000 years old, and dropping at 2 metres per year. It is going to run out. Then there is going to be Trouble.
The steam in turbines is closed cycle - condensed then fed back into the heat exchangers. To extend the life of your turbines, you want really, realy clean water.
But modern desalination plants don't use heat, they use pressure. Forcing the water through membranes through which the salt cannot pass. Heat has nothing to do with it.
And the water vapour in the stack smoke is certainly there - but probably pretty polluted. To make clean water, I'd rather start from ocean than power station exhaust.
The problem came about when they switched the brakes to using disk brakes rather than clamping the outer edge of the wheel. The clamping action would help scrape the leaf mulch off the wheels so the wheels were clean to grip the track. The leaf mulch couldn't be cleaned off when the disk brakes were used.
That disagrees with the pamphlet the railway company put out, saying the problem was that the pressure of the train pounded the leaves into graphite on the line. So the problem had to be solved by cleaning the line not the wheels. And it arose because in the "old days", they cut back any trees to about 5 yards away from the line, so relatively fewl leaves get onto the line. Since privatisation, they only cut back the trees enough to let the trains through, so the leaves fall on the line.
As for the wrong kind of snow, it's more that the de-icer was sprayed on the tracks - then the temperature rose and it started raining and washed off the de-icer - then the temperature dropped and the rain froze on the tracks. Odd circumstances, but you can easily understand how it happens!
Wrong again, as I heard. The snow was too fine and powdery and got into the air circulation slots on the side of the electric motors on some trains. They had assumed that water would run off, and bigh snow would stay on the outside and get shaken off. Fine, powdery snow (not common in lowland UK) caked inside the cooling vents not outside, so didn't fall off and could not be knocked off.
Shouldn't we as consumers clamor to have overbooking information too? I would think that if a flight is overbooked than I should see the statistics to determine if I want to buy the ticket.
With budget airlins such as Ryanair and easyJet, you already do, in a way. Prices vary accirding to load. As the flight fills up, prices rise. As the flight date apporaches with lots of empty seats, the price falls. They are using the price carrot to get the max income from those who gotta go when they gotta go, but to suck in price sensitive travellers to fill otherwise empty seats.
Also on the flight loads, if I really (read it twice) want that information, I could have a bunch of apprentices sit outside the loading gates and count the people that boarded having them record the plane and route. Viola - got your information legally.
At a mind-boggling price. It's not the information on one flight from one airport that is valuable, it is lots of flights from lots of airports. Employing apprentices may be cheap - but not that cheap, compared to sucking it out of a database.
Wait a sec... you're saying that after Darl gives up the charade, there's gonna be assets left in SCO?
Fire sale assets: desks, chairs, servers, leases on buildings, IP rights on SCO unix, a residual support business. Basically, when SCO nosedives, the creditors will want cash now. The various assets SCO does have left will be sold off for cash up front. There will be opportuinities there for canny buyers to get hold of bits of the SCO operation at serioulsy below long-term value.
SCOX will be bust hollow. But the people doing useful work in that organisation, wh have nothing to do with the Intellectual Property landgrab, will still be a working team. For somebody looking to expand, a finctioning programming team would be an asset worth buying (and you would have to give the team reason to stay).
The nature article quoted said that the moon was not really much help for astronomy compared with free space. It offers dirt and gravity. Dirt is a resource but also dirties lensed. Gravity helps thing stay in place but bends mirrors and wears bearings.
That assumes the moon is "on the way" to Mars. That is not intuitively obvious to me.
Bt all means go to the moon if it si scientifically worthwhile. It would take someone with more knowledge than me to judge the cost/benefit of it, but a case could be made.
But dun't go to the moon in order to go to Mars unless you have a roadmap (bad metaphor, in context) worked out that says goinf via the moon is cheaper than going straight to Mars.
And the idea of mining lunar water for propellant does not strike me as good. There isn't that much of it up there - just a goodish lakefull was reported some time back, and you certainly won't min all of it (ask the oilmen). So (a) you are using a very exhaustibe resource, and (b) we could have lots of uses for that water on the moon. It wouldn't be a good idea to set up a Mars colony and then have to abandon it because the water supply on the Moon ran out.
Yes, I read the article. And it seems to me that none of the things that Google is proposing to do breach them if I give my informed consent in advance. I often give out personal information for a purpose and there is no bar the person I gave it to using it for the purpose I gave it.
You cant "opt-in" to slavery. But you can opt-in to employment, medical treatment, loans with repayment terms, all of which involve you exchanging some rights in return for some benefits. If the trade clear in advance, there is no harm in it.
What EU privacy laws are breached by people using information I have allowed them to collect for the purposes for which I allowed them to collect it. I think the claim by these people is simply wrong - privided that Google does what it says it will do.
Rotational latency is now longer than average seek. With escalator seeking (as mentioned throughout this thread), most seeks are short anyway. Some large disks used to have multiple heads (I used some on 14 in Fujitsu monsters) but the cost benefits are the wrong way round on current disks.
Head switching time is quite long - about a 1/10 of a worst case seek on one drive I have seen - but not long enough to come into this equation.
No - and they should not use your search terms until you have explictly agreed. This you would have to do when you accepted the GMail terms and conditions. They don't have to keep the two services chinese-walled: accepting GMail would mean accepting a whole package governing your relationship with Google. But, until you have accepted that, I agrre that your search terms should be private.
It would be interesting to see the reaction on/. if this had been a Microsoft service.
I don't think most people would have a problem, as long as it was not useable only from Windows, or only with MSIE, or other lock-in strategy.
Hotmail doesn't work with Opera: I wonder why. Accidental "We cannot possible test with every browser"? Or deliberate "We don't want to encourage browsers other than ours"? Or between "Opera compatability is bottom of the list"? It looks to me as if M$ is trying to use Hotmail as a lever against any competitor. If Google shows a sniff of such an attude, I will criticise it - but not till then.
But the DPA prevents usage of personal information for purposes other than that for which it was collected. If anybody explains why they are collecting information about you, and receives your OK to do so (opt-in, not opt-out), it does not seem to me that they are breaking the DPA. Google is very open. If they put all this clearly (as they do) in their Terms and Conditions, and then keep to their word, I don't see that the DPA being involved.
This seems to me to be very much a knee-jerk reaction. Provided that Google is up-fromt will all this, why shouldn't I be given the opportunity to opt-in to such a service? I entirely agree that this should not be done secretly - but Google is very upfront. Surely it is not an invasion of privacy if I explicitly accept that Google will scan my mail as part of paying for the service.
I like Google Adwords. Given that advertising is an endemic part of life, and is not going to go away, Adwords is the way I want it. Let Google take all the advertising revenue with Adwords, and may the popup merchants go broke. If Google want to offer a paid-for non-Adwords service, I shall think about it - and probably not buy it.
As to keeping some of your email when you delete it - I don't think this is intentional. AFAICS Google has a "weak delete" policy - they try to recover deleted space, but if they don't recover it all, too bad - disks are cheap. So there may well be old copies of your emails hanging round. What the hell - they are not indexed, so it will take a deep search to find it. Do Yahoo, Hotmail & Co guarantee a destructive overwrite when they delete your mail? I doubt it - in which case they might have an old copy lying round on their disks.
So, privacy people, don't spoil what looks like it might (subject to confirmation, of course) be a useful, opt-in service because of arcane potential privacy problems.
No, this is not the elevator algorithm. This is an anticipatory algorithm that pre-queues reads that it expects the application to do in the future. Linux already has the elevator algorithm - had it before Windows, I believe.
Effectively Scsi does I/O speedups. Firmware, not hardware, but so is everything. And the speedups by giving Scsi a lot to do and letting it do it in its preferred order can be significant. But Scsi cannot "see" processes - nor file systems. The OS can work out that a process is reading a file and read the next bit of the file - where Scsi would read the next bit of the disk, if it did so at all. The OS can see when you ahve reached EOF, or closed the file, and there is no point prereading.
You don't mean multiple heads on an arm. Multiple heads on an arm would all move together, and you couldn't use two at the same time - the feedback servo which keeps it on track can only respond to one track. What you mean, I think, is two groups of arms (all the arms move together). Manufacturers have looked at that but decided against it.
The arms and associated actuators are some of the most expensive parts of the drive. If you are going to double this cost, why not throw in a few more platters andd an enclosure and have twice the capacity - and twice the throughput.
Putting two actuators in the drive increases power consumption a lot, and heat as well. Both are real problems for current drives. And a "specialist" drive doesn't have the economies of scale, and could cost more than twice as much as two simple drives - which, together, have the same number of heads and twice the capacity.
The real killer is turbulence. If you have two arms on the same surface, each is flying in the wake of the other. And, unlike its own wak, the other alters dynamically, so that seeking arm 1 can perturb arm 2.
Google has it right - lots of dumb hardware, lots of clever software. What we need id filesystems whos allocation patterns are "Raid aware". Particularly Raid 0, I can see file system allocation patterns which could (in conjunction with the otimisations mentioned here) greatly improve performance.
"sometimes by 1,000 percent or more, [more] often by 2x"
Nice mixed units - why not have 10x/2x or 1000%/200%?
Actually, we have a serious missed opportunity here: where is our folksy comparison unit? We have football pitches for length, African Elephants for weight, Libraries of Congress for volume and/or data. Where is a nice "just folks" ratio? Politicians promises (10x delivery)? Admans truths (100x reality), real virgins (1/1000000 of a porn site)?/. insight (1/1000 of words)?
As I understand it, these ships are basically a Faraday Cage to start with. Because of the possibility of NBC warfare, the ships are basically competely sealed. Note that the steering picture only shows computer screens, not windows. There are no portholes, and donly the minimum number of external walkways for mooring etc. All doors are RFI tight. So all you need to do is make all the (many) cable ports EMP proof (not easy, but feasible) asnd the ship is EMP tolerant. You need spares for all the bits outside the shell (CCTV cameras, Antenna amplifiers), but inside the shell, lofe (and war) continues as usual.
EMP is not now a new threat. You can bet the Navy have thought of it.
Finally!!!!! A military carreer for the overweight masses of X-box, Nintendo and PlayStation owning couch-potatos.
Not so far out as you might think. This may be Urban Legend (tell me if so), but there is a tale of exactly this.
About 20 years ago, in the days of Pac-Man and similar, when computer games were only available in bars and arcades, the people building the North Sea oil rigs were having trouble: the Remote Operated Vehicles they used for deep-water inspection and minor repairs were too difficult for the operators to control. So they sent out recruiters to hire the top players in the arcades of Aberdeen. And, allegedly, it worked: the arcade warriors were much better ROV operators than the serious engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
They need the 2nd offense to be punished by chemical castration, as in the pourig of the gentals in caustic chemicals.
Totally wrong attitude. What is needed is not vicious punishments, but certainty of getting caught. If you could prove quickly and cheaply that 1) This is spam, and 2) He sent it, you wouldn't need massive punishments. $1000 fine, or maybe a week in gaol, would do fine. Spammers spam for money, not for fun. If you make spamming financially unviable, it will end.
What we need is a good way of letting honest, opt-in, mass mailers prove their honesty, at low cost. I enjoy quite a few mail-lists which use the fact that email is near zero cost to tell me things about things I am interested in.
Suppose we have a mechanism whereby bona-fide newsletter senders can cheaply (say no more than $50) register themselves. Then we can say of any other bulk emailer "He sent to more than 1000 recipients. Book him, Danno".
Certainty of punishment is much more effective than magnitude of punishment.
The virtue of this is that it tells you which way you are facing as well. Many intersections consist of four streets which are, to the lost tourist, identical. This scheme can tell you to take the street to the left of the one you are facing, or to turn around, or...
When I get lost in cities, it is usually becasue I have become disoriented. As long as I keep sight of which way is north, I can usually find my way pretty well. But go through an underpass with more twists than I expected, and lose North, and my chances of getting very lost increase dramatically.
Mind, the only reason for this is that GPS can fail in built-up areas. Given the tumbling cost of GPS receivers, how long before the put GPS pseudolites in the cells. If you can get the phone, you can get the GPS: problem solved.
There are some schemes where you, in distant country, place a call to a machine in the US, which immediately hangs up then calls you back giving you a US dial tone. Calls in the US then cost your standard 5c/min, calls to other countries perhaps twice that (once into US and same again out). I have had calls from Hungary routed to me in the UK like this.
Or have what is essentially a Y-shaped magnet, with one big South pole and two spatially separated North poles, or vice-versa.
The data has 100% overhead from being in ascii, not hex. You can halve the data storage by converting it to binary immediately. You don't need to store \n - that is implicit in the fixed structure. The first field will generally be simply countin, so you can omit it completely if you can inser an extra code for skipped samples. What coherence is there between successive samples? If sampling rate is high, most samples will be quite similar to their predecessors, and can probably be mor compactly coded with a delta code not an absolute.
I would have thought that you could cut the data to be stored by a factor of 10 by some thoughtdul, but not very complex, coding. Normally, I would advise againse excessive attempts at compression. But this is eactly the kind of bulk data application where compression works.
You obviously have the ability and willingness to do a number of different kinds of jobs. What is the fallback situation? If you go for the higher paid, but risky, job, how long will it take to get another bartender job?
Round here, tech jobs are pretty specialised and don't come up all that often. If you lose your tech job, it may be months, or an enormous commute, before another comes up. But bartender jobs come up all the time. There is a high turnover, and a lot of places where the skills needeed are essentially the same. New bars etc. seem to be opening every month or so. Nobody with a respectable level of experience in the catering industry need go without a job - of sorts - for more than a couple of weeks.
Likewise your mainframe job. Sounds quite specialised. What is the turnover? If you leave politely, explaining why it is a good career move, higher pay etc., arrange that they have you phone number for any "I forgot" queries, what is the chance they would take you back within a finite time?
Basically, what is the worst downside of losing the risky job? Of course it isn't nice losing any job - but if all that happens is you and up back at your current position after a couple of weeks, go for it.
Far more wasteful a consumer of water is agriculture with "grandfather rights" to water supplies. Large areas of agriculture, particularly in the south west, are using vast quantities of water for high water consumption, relatively low added value crops such as alfalfa and rice. Tis water is delivered at prices set in the 1930s and guaranteed for ever. Those same water supplies would be fare better spent for the food of the community on providing for urban inhabitants, including - if they will - watering their laws.
If Mass is in trouble, watch out Arizona. Pheonix (I think it is) is taking most of its water from an aquifer which is about 40,000 years old, and dropping at 2 metres per year. It is going to run out. Then there is going to be Trouble.
The steam in turbines is closed cycle - condensed then fed back into the heat exchangers. To extend the life of your turbines, you want really, realy clean water.
But modern desalination plants don't use heat, they use pressure. Forcing the water through membranes through which the salt cannot pass. Heat has nothing to do with it.
And the water vapour in the stack smoke is certainly there - but probably pretty polluted. To make clean water, I'd rather start from ocean than power station exhaust.
The problem came about when they switched the brakes to using disk brakes rather than clamping the outer edge of the wheel. The clamping action would help scrape the leaf mulch off the wheels so the wheels were clean to grip the track. The leaf mulch couldn't be cleaned off when the disk brakes were used.
That disagrees with the pamphlet the railway company put out, saying the problem was that the pressure of the train pounded the leaves into graphite on the line. So the problem had to be solved by cleaning the line not the wheels. And it arose because in the "old days", they cut back any trees to about 5 yards away from the line, so relatively fewl leaves get onto the line. Since privatisation, they only cut back the trees enough to let the trains through, so the leaves fall on the line.
As for the wrong kind of snow, it's more that the de-icer was sprayed on the tracks - then the temperature rose and it started raining and washed off the de-icer - then the temperature dropped and the rain froze on the tracks. Odd circumstances, but you can easily understand how it happens!
Wrong again, as I heard. The snow was too fine and powdery and got into the air circulation slots on the side of the electric motors on some trains. They had assumed that water would run off, and bigh snow would stay on the outside and get shaken off. Fine, powdery snow (not common in lowland UK) caked inside the cooling vents not outside, so didn't fall off and could not be knocked off.
Shouldn't we as consumers clamor to have overbooking information too? I would think that if a flight is overbooked than I should see the statistics to determine if I want to buy the ticket.
With budget airlins such as Ryanair and easyJet, you already do, in a way. Prices vary accirding to load. As the flight fills up, prices rise. As the flight date apporaches with lots of empty seats, the price falls. They are using the price carrot to get the max income from those who gotta go when they gotta go, but to suck in price sensitive travellers to fill otherwise empty seats.
Also on the flight loads, if I really (read it twice) want that information, I could have a bunch of apprentices sit outside the loading gates and count the people that boarded having them record the plane and route. Viola - got your information legally.
At a mind-boggling price. It's not the information on one flight from one airport that is valuable, it is lots of flights from lots of airports. Employing apprentices may be cheap - but not that cheap, compared to sucking it out of a database.
Wait a sec... you're saying that after Darl gives up the charade, there's gonna be assets left in SCO?
Fire sale assets: desks, chairs, servers, leases on buildings, IP rights on SCO unix, a residual support business. Basically, when SCO nosedives, the creditors will want cash now. The various assets SCO does have left will be sold off for cash up front. There will be opportuinities there for canny buyers to get hold of bits of the SCO operation at serioulsy below long-term value.
SCOX will be bust hollow. But the people doing useful work in that organisation, wh have nothing to do with the Intellectual Property landgrab, will still be a working team. For somebody looking to expand, a finctioning programming team would be an asset worth buying (and you would have to give the team reason to stay).
The nature article quoted said that the moon was not really much help for astronomy compared with free space. It offers dirt and gravity. Dirt is a resource but also dirties lensed. Gravity helps thing stay in place but bends mirrors and wears bearings.
That assumes the moon is "on the way" to Mars. That is not intuitively obvious to me.
Bt all means go to the moon if it si scientifically worthwhile. It would take someone with more knowledge than me to judge the cost/benefit of it, but a case could be made.
But dun't go to the moon in order to go to Mars unless you have a roadmap (bad metaphor, in context) worked out that says goinf via the moon is cheaper than going straight to Mars.
And the idea of mining lunar water for propellant does not strike me as good. There isn't that much of it up there - just a goodish lakefull was reported some time back, and you certainly won't min all of it (ask the oilmen). So (a) you are using a very exhaustibe resource, and (b) we could have lots of uses for that water on the moon. It wouldn't be a good idea to set up a Mars colony and then have to abandon it because the water supply on the Moon ran out.
Yes, I read the article. And it seems to me that none of the things that Google is proposing to do breach them if I give my informed consent in advance. I often give out personal information for a purpose and there is no bar the person I gave it to using it for the purpose I gave it.
You cant "opt-in" to slavery. But you can opt-in to employment, medical treatment, loans with repayment terms, all of which involve you exchanging some rights in return for some benefits. If the trade clear in advance, there is no harm in it.
What EU privacy laws are breached by people using information I have allowed them to collect for the purposes for which I allowed them to collect it. I think the claim by these people is simply wrong - privided that Google does what it says it will do.
Rotational latency is now longer than average seek. With escalator seeking (as mentioned throughout this thread), most seeks are short anyway. Some large disks used to have multiple heads (I used some on 14 in Fujitsu monsters) but the cost benefits are the wrong way round on current disks.
Head switching time is quite long - about a 1/10 of a worst case seek on one drive I have seen - but not long enough to come into this equation.
No - and they should not use your search terms until you have explictly agreed. This you would have to do when you accepted the GMail terms and conditions. They don't have to keep the two services chinese-walled: accepting GMail would mean accepting a whole package governing your relationship with Google. But, until you have accepted that, I agrre that your search terms should be private.
It would be interesting to see the reaction on /. if this had been a Microsoft service.
I don't think most people would have a problem, as long as it was not useable only from Windows, or only with MSIE, or other lock-in strategy.
Hotmail doesn't work with Opera: I wonder why. Accidental "We cannot possible test with every browser"? Or deliberate "We don't want to encourage browsers other than ours"? Or between "Opera compatability is bottom of the list"? It looks to me as if M$ is trying to use Hotmail as a lever against any competitor. If Google shows a sniff of such an attude, I will criticise it - but not till then.
But the DPA prevents usage of personal information for purposes other than that for which it was collected. If anybody explains why they are collecting information about you, and receives your OK to do so (opt-in, not opt-out), it does not seem to me that they are breaking the DPA. Google is very open. If they put all this clearly (as they do) in their Terms and Conditions, and then keep to their word, I don't see that the DPA being involved.
This seems to me to be very much a knee-jerk reaction. Provided that Google is up-fromt will all this, why shouldn't I be given the opportunity to opt-in to such a service? I entirely agree that this should not be done secretly - but Google is very upfront. Surely it is not an invasion of privacy if I explicitly accept that Google will scan my mail as part of paying for the service.
I like Google Adwords. Given that advertising is an endemic part of life, and is not going to go away, Adwords is the way I want it. Let Google take all the advertising revenue with Adwords, and may the popup merchants go broke. If Google want to offer a paid-for non-Adwords service, I shall think about it - and probably not buy it.
As to keeping some of your email when you delete it - I don't think this is intentional. AFAICS Google has a "weak delete" policy - they try to recover deleted space, but if they don't recover it all, too bad - disks are cheap. So there may well be old copies of your emails hanging round. What the hell - they are not indexed, so it will take a deep search to find it. Do Yahoo, Hotmail & Co guarantee a destructive overwrite when they delete your mail? I doubt it - in which case they might have an old copy lying round on their disks.
So, privacy people, don't spoil what looks like it might (subject to confirmation, of course) be a useful, opt-in service because of arcane potential privacy problems.
No, this is not the elevator algorithm. This is an anticipatory algorithm that pre-queues reads that it expects the application to do in the future. Linux already has the elevator algorithm - had it before Windows, I believe.
Effectively Scsi does I/O speedups. Firmware, not hardware, but so is everything. And the speedups by giving Scsi a lot to do and letting it do it in its preferred order can be significant. But Scsi cannot "see" processes - nor file systems. The OS can work out that a process is reading a file and read the next bit of the file - where Scsi would read the next bit of the disk, if it did so at all. The OS can see when you ahve reached EOF, or closed the file, and there is no point prereading.
You don't mean multiple heads on an arm. Multiple heads on an arm would all move together, and you couldn't use two at the same time - the feedback servo which keeps it on track can only respond to one track. What you mean, I think, is two groups of arms (all the arms move together). Manufacturers have looked at that but decided against it.
The arms and associated actuators are some of the most expensive parts of the drive. If you are going to double this cost, why not throw in a few more platters andd an enclosure and have twice the capacity - and twice the throughput.
Putting two actuators in the drive increases power consumption a lot, and heat as well. Both are real problems for current drives. And a "specialist" drive doesn't have the economies of scale, and could cost more than twice as much as two simple drives - which, together, have the same number of heads and twice the capacity.
The real killer is turbulence. If you have two arms on the same surface, each is flying in the wake of the other. And, unlike its own wak, the other alters dynamically, so that seeking arm 1 can perturb arm 2.
Google has it right - lots of dumb hardware, lots of clever software. What we need id filesystems whos allocation patterns are "Raid aware". Particularly Raid 0, I can see file system allocation patterns which could (in conjunction with the otimisations mentioned here) greatly improve performance.
"sometimes by 1,000 percent or more, [more] often by 2x"
/. insight (1/1000 of words)?
Nice mixed units - why not have 10x/2x or 1000%/200%?
Actually, we have a serious missed opportunity here: where is our folksy comparison unit? We have football pitches for length, African Elephants for weight, Libraries of Congress for volume and/or data. Where is a nice "just folks" ratio? Politicians promises (10x delivery)? Admans truths (100x reality), real virgins (1/1000000 of a porn site)?
As I understand it, these ships are basically a Faraday Cage to start with. Because of the possibility of NBC warfare, the ships are basically competely sealed. Note that the steering picture only shows computer screens, not windows. There are no portholes, and donly the minimum number of external walkways for mooring etc. All doors are RFI tight. So all you need to do is make all the (many) cable ports EMP proof (not easy, but feasible) asnd the ship is EMP tolerant. You need spares for all the bits outside the shell (CCTV cameras, Antenna amplifiers), but inside the shell, lofe (and war) continues as usual.
EMP is not now a new threat. You can bet the Navy have thought of it.
Finally!!!!! A military carreer for the overweight masses of X-box, Nintendo and PlayStation owning couch-potatos.
Not so far out as you might think. This may be Urban Legend (tell me if so), but there is a tale of exactly this.
About 20 years ago, in the days of Pac-Man and similar, when computer games were only available in bars and arcades, the people building the North Sea oil rigs were having trouble: the Remote Operated Vehicles they used for deep-water inspection and minor repairs were too difficult for the operators to control. So they sent out recruiters to hire the top players in the arcades of Aberdeen. And, allegedly, it worked: the arcade warriors were much better ROV operators than the serious engineers.