The only problem to this is that I think ultra portable laptops will switch over to NAND flash in 5 years or so.
Doubtful. Firstly, flash has limited amount of write/erase cycles, usually 1,000,000 or so. While that might seem like a lot, if your operating system uses the hard disk for virtual memory (swap) as all current desktop OSes do, you reach that limit a lot faster than you would think, you have no idea how much your system uses swap (especially windows). Exactly how fast it would fail depends on how the system is used, but I would guess that a system in normal use could easily kill a flash drive within a year. You could try to prolong the life of a drive by making the OS rotate the portions of the disk it uses for swap (I think somebody may already have done this even) but that's just a preventative measure and it doesn't even do much good if most of the disk is already filled up with data.
The second reason I don't think it will happen is that 64GB of flash just won't be enough in 5 years. I mean, it's not even a whole lot of space now. In 5 years, a 64GB flash drive will be just as useless for a desktop system as a 2GB flash drive is now. Right now a 2GB flash drive is about the same price as a 160GB hard disk. If both flash and hard disk storage expand at the same rate, that would mean that by the time a 64GB flash drive is the same price as a 2GB drive now, a comparably priced hard disk will be 5,120GB.
But there comes a time after which we actually run out of relevant data to put on it.
I read and responded to this idea already today and I think it's absolutely ridiculous. I think the more data people can store, the more data people will store. Period.
As the price of storage decreases, things that are currently thrown away because they're not worth storin become worth storing. We will stop asking "why should I keep XXXXX" and start asking "why shouldn't I keep XXXXX". I can't imagine how there could ever be a limit to this.
Take for example, system logs, most systems have a log rotators running on them that delete logs once they reach a certain age. At a certain point, storage could get so cheap that you wouldn't need to do this, the amount of space old logs take up would be so trivially small that you just wouldn't care about having them deleted. Also, system logs obviously only log to certain level of detail, they don't log every single event on the system, nor every single detail about events on the system. As storage space becomes cheaper, it becomes practical to have your system keep increasingly more detailed logs (this is assuming that other aspects of the system, i.e. data transfer rates, processor speeds, etc. increase at a similar rate, which so far in history, they have).
It's not like that's a limited case either, the list of situations like it is unending.
It's wishful thinking, admittedly, but the trend seems to point that way.
I don't think so. The more capacity to store data, the more data we seem to create (or save at least), don't t you think? I mean sure, it's possible that we might be able to each have our own copy of the library of congress or some other limited section of information, but I would bet my life that you will never be able to have a complete snapshot of the internet.
The cheaper storage space gets the more information will be stored. There's information that's thrown away today because it doesn't seem valuable enough to justify the cost of storage -- as the price of storage drops, it becomes worth it to store it. Take for example webserver logs, on many servers logs are periodically deleted because old logs take up space and the older logs are, the less worth they hold (how likely is it that you're going to need to check out something from your server's logs in 1998?). If the amount of space server logs take up becomes a trivial portion of the available space, then nobody will bother to have them periodically deleted. Similarly, an administrator might also/instead choose to make their logs more detailed. Maybe before they didn't log certain certain things because they seemed trivial and added size to their logs -- as the price of space decreases, the question of "why save it?" becomes "why not save it?".
It bugs me when I'm reading slashdot and there's a link to an article from the Wall Street Journal because I read the WSJ nearly daily. The fact that they link to it doesn't bother me so much as the fact that because not as much of the Wall Street Journal is online as say, the New York Times, the articles are generally posted at least a week after I've already read them. I wish there were a way for me to filter items on slashdot that are links to WSJ articles because it would save me a lot of time.
On another note, is it just me or does it seem like the hyperlink to the actual article is placed rather randomly amongst the article summary? Not that this is atypical of Slashdot (or many sites on the web) but wouldn't it make more sense to have the link be a phrase like "the question posed by the WSJ"?
And by the way, yes, I would like some cheese with my whine.
the British disagree. Considering they invented the language, it's at least worth listening to their opinion.
and then promptly disregarding it. C'mon, "Colourisation"? It's got a U you don't need and no Z? Why would anybody not want more Zs in their words? Z is the second coolest letter after X.
Lord knows, I'm not a techie, but it *increases* "reliliency" by having the applications located at the data center and not my PC??? And if I can't access the Data Center? Or if the application there becomes corrupt, virus infected, etc.?
Well, it cuts both ways, if you're running all your applications on one server, and that one machine goes down, you're fucked, but you only have to maintain one machine, not the multitudes of machines running your application. In the end, which setup makes the most sense depends on what type of application you're using.
Expect to see speed-limiting implemented such that it only limits the car to just below the speed where your license would be automatically suspended and/or require a mandatory court appearance.
The problem with that though is that the limit is different in every state, so your car has to know what state your car is in, adding a significant cost to the vehicle (unless you've already got GPS... most cars don't). Besides that though, I'm not even sure every state has a law like that.
Hmm... tell me about seatbelts again... (I know... many people are upset with them for this exact reason).
That's exactly true. The fact that wearing seatbelts slightly lessens your abilities in a car is what caused them to not be quickly adopted, whereas when airbags were introduced nobody was bothered by them.
Of course, I'm not trying to argue against seatbelts though, the amount they limit your movement in a car is trivial to the extra safety they afford you (and they were cheap to add too). However, that doesn't mean that everything that sacrifices some capability for more safety is necsessarily worth implementing though.
I thought they already did this. Don't cars have governers on them?
No, most cars have something that governs the speed of the engine (number of RPMs), but that's quite different because it's really to keep you from damaging your engine, rather than to keep you safe. Also, it's beyond the speeds most people would drive, even if they were speeding recklessly, i.e. in my ex-girlfriend's Toyota Echo you'd have to be going nearly 120MPH on flat road to get it to shut off the engine. Although I suppose if you really like to speed while driving uphill or only drive in second gear, you'd be able to get it to shut it off at a lot lower speeds.
It sounds like you're a great driver who knows how to control a car in a skid, so this probably doesn't concern you, but I'm quite sure the thousands of people injured by an encounter with a retard playing Michael Shumaker behind the wheel every year would have loved the car to forcibly keep the driver in check.
This is true, but I can't help but think that a system like this might be crossing a line between technologies that make a car safer by adding a feature and those that make a car safer by removing a feature. What I mean is that airbags and ABS brakes can make a car safer and for the most part it drives the same. Sure, it's arguable that traction control like this only changes the ability of your car by preventing people from doing things that shouldn't really be doing anyways, but what's next, a car that limits people from driving over the speed limit?
Not to be a total American ass, but guess what, Paypal is an American company whose largest section of business is in America, therefore it makes sense that they are most concerned about being competitive with American credit card processing rates, not Isreali rates.
That's not really true, Paypal only charges fees on credit card transactions and the fees they charge are reasonably well in line with what other credit card gateways charge merchants when you purchase something from them with a credit card.
Whether the fees charged by credit card gateways are too much is another matter, and seems like it might be the case. I seem to recall class-action suits being brought against Mastercard by merchants because they felt the fees they charged were unjustified.
The fact of the matter though, is that although as a consumer you generally don't realize it, merchants always take a hit on credit sales and it's not always small. There are plenty of legitimate complaints about paypal and I don't see this as being one.
I don't think anything found on there should be admissable. After all, how hard is it to falsify a myspace account?
It's trivial to falsify a myspace account, but it's not like you can't find reasonable proof that an account is authentic if need be (friends' testimonials, logs of which IPs are used to sign into the account, etc).
Furthermore, in the case of video or photographic evidence (particularly video evidence) it would be difficult to frame somebody. Sure, photos can be altered, but it's not foolproof, i.e. what if the background of the picture is the bedroom of the suspect, editing mistakes (it's not hard to photoshop somebody into a picture so that it looks believable at a glance, but it's more difficult to make it stand up under intense scrutiny), etc. The case is similar for video, but it's even harder to forge it -- photoshopping an image is one thing, but seamlessly photoshopping somebody into a video can be quite another.
They call it "bleeding edge software" for a reason, sometimes you get cut.
Anybody who thinks they can install an operating system without taking proper precautions (i.e. backing up a disk or being otherwise prepared for the consequences of messing up an install) deserves what they get.
I've never had any trouble dual booting windows, provided that you install windows before any other OS you're going to install. Windows will do whatever it damn well pleases with your disk's MBR whereas any installer I've ever used for Linux, FreeBSD or anything else has tread a little more lightly.
Are you insane? The overhead from running it as a VMWare virtual machine would far outweigh any optimizations that could be made. Plus, you have to pay for a VMWare license on top of your Oracle license.
he day someone can successfully implement chatterbots will be the day we can have robot maids asking us what we want for dinner, or asking us if we had problems at the job.
Slashdot Mirror
More irony: That page includes clips of both the Dr. Dre song and Deepnote - an obvious "copyright infringement".
The second reason I don't think it will happen is that 64GB of flash just won't be enough in 5 years. I mean, it's not even a whole lot of space now. In 5 years, a 64GB flash drive will be just as useless for a desktop system as a 2GB flash drive is now. Right now a 2GB flash drive is about the same price as a 160GB hard disk. If both flash and hard disk storage expand at the same rate, that would mean that by the time a 64GB flash drive is the same price as a 2GB drive now, a comparably priced hard disk will be 5,120GB.
As the price of storage decreases, things that are currently thrown away because they're not worth storin become worth storing. We will stop asking "why should I keep XXXXX" and start asking "why shouldn't I keep XXXXX". I can't imagine how there could ever be a limit to this.
Take for example, system logs, most systems have a log rotators running on them that delete logs once they reach a certain age. At a certain point, storage could get so cheap that you wouldn't need to do this, the amount of space old logs take up would be so trivially small that you just wouldn't care about having them deleted. Also, system logs obviously only log to certain level of detail, they don't log every single event on the system, nor every single detail about events on the system. As storage space becomes cheaper, it becomes practical to have your system keep increasingly more detailed logs (this is assuming that other aspects of the system, i.e. data transfer rates, processor speeds, etc. increase at a similar rate, which so far in history, they have).
It's not like that's a limited case either, the list of situations like it is unending.
The cheaper storage space gets the more information will be stored. There's information that's thrown away today because it doesn't seem valuable enough to justify the cost of storage -- as the price of storage drops, it becomes worth it to store it. Take for example webserver logs, on many servers logs are periodically deleted because old logs take up space and the older logs are, the less worth they hold (how likely is it that you're going to need to check out something from your server's logs in 1998?). If the amount of space server logs take up becomes a trivial portion of the available space, then nobody will bother to have them periodically deleted. Similarly, an administrator might also/instead choose to make their logs more detailed. Maybe before they didn't log certain certain things because they seemed trivial and added size to their logs -- as the price of space decreases, the question of "why save it?" becomes "why not save it?".
It bugs me when I'm reading slashdot and there's a link to an article from the Wall Street Journal because I read the WSJ nearly daily. The fact that they link to it doesn't bother me so much as the fact that because not as much of the Wall Street Journal is online as say, the New York Times, the articles are generally posted at least a week after I've already read them. I wish there were a way for me to filter items on slashdot that are links to WSJ articles because it would save me a lot of time.
On another note, is it just me or does it seem like the hyperlink to the actual article is placed rather randomly amongst the article summary? Not that this is atypical of Slashdot (or many sites on the web) but wouldn't it make more sense to have the link be a phrase like "the question posed by the WSJ"?
And by the way, yes, I would like some cheese with my whine.
Of course, I'm not trying to argue against seatbelts though, the amount they limit your movement in a car is trivial to the extra safety they afford you (and they were cheap to add too). However, that doesn't mean that everything that sacrifices some capability for more safety is necsessarily worth implementing though.
This is true, and in my (rather uninformed) opinion, I think that we will see lower rates in the US in the future.
Not to be a total American ass, but guess what, Paypal is an American company whose largest section of business is in America, therefore it makes sense that they are most concerned about being competitive with American credit card processing rates, not Isreali rates.
That's not really true, Paypal only charges fees on credit card transactions and the fees they charge are reasonably well in line with what other credit card gateways charge merchants when you purchase something from them with a credit card.
Whether the fees charged by credit card gateways are too much is another matter, and seems like it might be the case. I seem to recall class-action suits being brought against Mastercard by merchants because they felt the fees they charged were unjustified.
The fact of the matter though, is that although as a consumer you generally don't realize it, merchants always take a hit on credit sales and it's not always small. There are plenty of legitimate complaints about paypal and I don't see this as being one.
Furthermore, in the case of video or photographic evidence (particularly video evidence) it would be difficult to frame somebody. Sure, photos can be altered, but it's not foolproof, i.e. what if the background of the picture is the bedroom of the suspect, editing mistakes (it's not hard to photoshop somebody into a picture so that it looks believable at a glance, but it's more difficult to make it stand up under intense scrutiny), etc. The case is similar for video, but it's even harder to forge it -- photoshopping an image is one thing, but seamlessly photoshopping somebody into a video can be quite another.
They call it "bleeding edge software" for a reason, sometimes you get cut.
Anybody who thinks they can install an operating system without taking proper precautions (i.e. backing up a disk or being otherwise prepared for the consequences of messing up an install) deserves what they get.
I've never had any trouble dual booting windows, provided that you install windows before any other OS you're going to install. Windows will do whatever it damn well pleases with your disk's MBR whereas any installer I've ever used for Linux, FreeBSD or anything else has tread a little more lightly.
Taco Bell = Weapon of Ass Destruction.
Linus has gotten a little chunkier over the years too, so it makes sense.
Are you insane? The overhead from running it as a VMWare virtual machine would far outweigh any optimizations that could be made. Plus, you have to pay for a VMWare license on top of your Oracle license.
Sweet jesus, people, my post above was a joke!