The clock is certainly ticking, but it's got a long time to wind down. The largest barrier to the death of mechanical storage is the looming halt in NAND geometry shrinks, as processes get so small that it goes from being merely crap to wholly unreliable.
Seeing as how we've got 2TB in single disks now, and that capacity will likely continue to rise, I suspect we'll see capacity increases for SSDs slow for a while as new NVM tech comes online. Instead, prices will simply fall and you'll (hopefully) see some more consumer-oriented hybrid solutions where frequently accessed bits are stored in NAND and large, infrequently files will be out on your (hopefully RAID-6 protected) mechanical storage.
They are what Ubisoft, EA, Activision, et. al. want the gaming world to become. No hard distribution channels, no consoles, no PCs, no DRM to fight with.
You go, buy a box, pay a monthly fee for the service and for the games. They retain 100% control and can fuck with you at will, since you have no recourse. Now you can hack the game. Now you can get a killer deal on the predecessor to the latest HOT SEQUEL and find out it probably sucks (or is awesome, but who cares about -good games-). And best of all, your copy of $GAME can go inactive (like we all expect Assassins Creed II to) right before its sequel hits! They hate having informed consumers who can control how and when they play.
I suspect that rentals will be allowed on the publisher's schedule, preceded by many months of full retail (or maybe slightly discounted, to lure you in) prices on the games. No discounts, no control. So you might say my view on OnLive is that of complete and total pessimism, and I hope it goes down in flames.
"Questionable ads" in that context are ones masked as stories. Generally those result in two things:
- Editorial compromise - Invasive advertising that can't be blocked.
All I can think of is that people bitch constantly when others get tired of working for free and decide they actually need revenues. Two solutions: suffer advertising, or buy a subscription.
By that hyperbole, the OpenMoko Freerunner was also closed and thus no better than an iPhone.
Extremism will get you nowhere except ignored. You know there's a huge difference between "closed because the vendor wants it closed" and "closed because the vendors hands are legally tied."
I suggest pursuing the option you have, and getting the laws changed.
I really don't get why Apple is trying so hard to alienate developers.
Because they have a massive, dedicated user base and a store like no other. Generally, they can count on the developers sucking it up and coming back, or someone taking their place.
Anything that would get either is getting MeeGo, and the Maemo and Moblin communities are moving in with force. The N900 is already marked as a target device for the core, which means an effort to bring an actual MeeGo install will not be an uphill battle.
The N900 is getting Qt libraries as part of the base OS, however, so it will be compatible with MeeGo applications.
I doubt it will last long without a carrying case. And once you have a case, you haven't really saved any space or convenience over a keyboard.
I suppose selective interpretation of reality is a Slashdot specialty.
Apple and their 3rd party accessory suppliers will have legion types and styles of slipcover available on release day. The difference between a slipcover and a netbook, however, is that the panel covering the screen is significantly thinner and can be folded behind the device.
No appreciable increase in thickness and it can be moved out of the way when not in use. Sure, convertible tablet netbooks can do the same, but you're still stuck with the thickness of the unit as a whole (and a mechanical hinge.)
Is it also me, or has their "elegantly efficient"-edge evolved to a "minimalistic yet not really that appealing in use"-approach?
It's you and the distinct minority who understand what's going on below the pretty interface. The vast majority who don't understand computers as a whole and just want to do things like surf the web, send e-mails, view music and play games (maybe?) on the go will probably snap this up.
You're making the same mistake as the rest of the industry, in supposing that the features you list actually matter to the majority of the consumer base.
1. If Apple can replicate it closely enough with an onscreen keyboard, then most people won't care. It won't suffice for many (which is why my phone has a physical keyboard) but it may for most.
2. Someone who would reasonably debate an iPad vs a netbook would likely not make this a consideration. 3. Same as 2. 4. Considering that nearly every netbook is the same, often with varying (and low) build quality, yes they can be had for cheap. 5. Apple's selling that slipcover thingy, I suspect they'll have huge sellthrough on it. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't also a pile of 3rd party covers available on release day too.
As I stated in a previous post it likely won't catch on among more technical audiences, but it has a fair chance (especially considering Apple puts thought into the UI unlike every netbook vendor) among the "I just want it to work" audience, which is far, far larger.
So many people treat computers like a black box that I wouldn't be surprised if this does give netbooks a run for their money. It's doubtful that it will take hold in the more technically oriented community (closed as it is,) but in the "I don't care I just want it to work" arena it may do quite well.
As for what the hell the magic is, above and beyond being a giant iPod/iPhone, I do not know.
It should be trivial to make them many thousands of times faster.
Not really. You're limited to the speed of the individual chips and the number of parallel storage lanes. They also target the 2.5" SATA market because it gives them an immediate in. Directly into new desktops and systems without consuming a slot the high performance people who would buy these are likely shoving an excess of games into. The high end is already using those slots for storage.
Believe me, the industry -is- looking into ways of getting SSDs on to faster buses, but it takes time and some significant rearchitecture. Also, NAND sucks ass, with high block failure rates fresh out of the fab outweighed by sheer density. And it's only going to get worse as lithography gets smaller.
The controller chip has a heat sink, because it's designed for performance, not power efficiency!
No, it's because the thing's running an Xilinx Virtex5 FPGA. It also costs a ton as it's using 96GB of SLC NAND, and is part of a fairly modular design that is reused in the io-drive Duo and io-drive Quad.
Today, we still have SSDs that are slower that mechanical drives at some tasks
If you're referring to the older JMicron drives that failed utterly at 4K random reads/writes, then you're mistaken. That was the case of a shit controller being exposed. Even the Indilinx controllers, which paled next to the Intel chip, outclassed mechanical drives at the same task.
on the other hand we have FusionIO, a company with technically great products that decided to try to target the consumer market by releasing a tiny 80GB drive for a jaw-dropping $1500. I mean.. seriously... what?
If you think that's bad, consider that the Virtex5 they're using on it costs on the order of $500 for the chip itself. You linked the "pro" model, which supports multiple devices in the same system in some fashion. You want this one, which is only $900. Both models use MLC NAND, and neither are really intended for mass-market buyers (you can't boot from them, after all.)
so, 3-4 years later... what's happened because of this talk?
Comcast initiated RST attacks on users and denied it for ages. Bandwidth caps began applying, except to the streaming services provided by the carriers themselves. But if you're willing to trust a corporation not to fuck you over, well, that's your own game of russian roulette.
in some cases, there's a monopoly on high speed internet. that's not really a monopoly though, because there's other alternatives.
So it's a monopoly, but not a monopoly. Because there are other, often inferior, alternatives to a monopoly granted by the municipality. You're saying that because dialup is available in the area, they have carte blanche to abuse their customers, am I right?
besides making it harder for someone else to get into the industry
You act like it's easy as it is. No, it's hard. The incumbents love how difficult it is now, they just don't like it when people get sick of their shit and apply legal pressure.
Why is it that, the largely unregulated internet has gone on in mainstream for over a decade now, with no major problems, and we want to heap on regulations.
Because in 2006 AT&T's CEO opened his mouth and basically stated he wanted to hold his customers hostage from Google in exchange for more money. He plainly stated that he wanted to charge both his direct customers AND people who were incidentally coming across the lines. It was made plainly obvious that corporations can and would abuse their services and their customers for the sake of making a profit, especially when they had a monopoly position in areas.
My personal preference would be to force common carrier status on all data providers.
what's so wrong with the internet as it currently stands that you think needs protection?
A bunch of regional monopolies serve as the only reasonably modern gateway to the most important technology of the late 20th/early 21st century, and they're more than willing to destroy what makes it unique.
The carriers should be forcibly struck blind. They've already been caught fucking with connections, and are more than willing to host and affect their networks (and customers) with conflicts of interest that serve only themselves.
It's one thing to build on the works of others, and another thing to take parts of their work and claim them as your own. I don't think it's ever been acceptable to do that, only it's gotten significantly easier.
What was acceptable for Mozart (republishing work by others as his own)
But was it acceptable? He was the patron of royalty, who would likely not have entertained those who questioned him on such a subject. Would they have even know his works were lifted from others?
Most of Shakespeare's plots and characters are not original.
To be fair to Shakespeare, while his plots and characters were not original his plays and settings were.
Consider how people are proclaiming this girl to be prodigy, but she is being questioned now that bits of her work are found to have been lifted. Were the ability to compare information on the level we can achieve today available in Mozart's time, would he have gotten away with what he did?
And at what point does an inclusion become so obvious that "this is not my work" need not be said? I doubt even Beethoven could lay claim to "God save the King," and used it because of its cultural ubiquity.
Your comment about Disney is disingenuous, as Treasure Island is in the public domain while Toy Story is not.
And if the controversy hadn't broken and no one had uncovered that she lifted the text, would those sales still have been generated or would people just have assumed that page, like (most of?) the rest, were her words?
No one cared about XP because everyone who used it went for the VLK editions that did not require activation, and never installed the WGA crap. And people were quite righteously indignant about activation.
If you're worried that the possibility someone is going to perform an MITM attack on you is greater than infinitesimal, then there are far more important things for you to worry about than whether or not to leave your SSH sessions connected.
I'd be more concerned about security on the end points, particularly on the Windows XP machine. Not hard, but far more pressing than someone finding you interesting enough to insert themselves into your communication.
Unless you -are-, in which case you should manually perform the key exchange and never actually send the passwords in the first place.
Sure, but neither the Oracle or IBM chips will be available for less than several grand, and never in consumer level equipment (I can't exactly order one off Newegg.) And there's no telling how long it will be until the AMD chip trickles down from Opteron class to Phenom class, while it will probably be short order for the Core i9 to appear in stores.
I suspect that AMD will drop the 6-core version as an X6 pretty soon, but it will likely be outperformed (possibly significantly) by the Gulftown.
Slashdot Mirror
Nokia, 2005 - 2010: C! C++! Shell Scripts! Python! Perl!
I'm just sad that Maemo wasn't on more phones until the N900 came out.
The clock is certainly ticking, but it's got a long time to wind down. The largest barrier to the death of mechanical storage is the looming halt in NAND geometry shrinks, as processes get so small that it goes from being merely crap to wholly unreliable.
Seeing as how we've got 2TB in single disks now, and that capacity will likely continue to rise, I suspect we'll see capacity increases for SSDs slow for a while as new NVM tech comes online. Instead, prices will simply fall and you'll (hopefully) see some more consumer-oriented hybrid solutions where frequently accessed bits are stored in NAND and large, infrequently files will be out on your (hopefully RAID-6 protected) mechanical storage.
And people keep mistakenly calling Android tablets "Linux tablets." Most of the time, there's nothing Linux about them except the kernel.
If you want a Linux device, get something you can put Moblin/Maemo (MeeGo) on. -That's- a distro designed around mobile and touch interfaces.
They are what Ubisoft, EA, Activision, et. al. want the gaming world to become. No hard distribution channels, no consoles, no PCs, no DRM to fight with.
You go, buy a box, pay a monthly fee for the service and for the games. They retain 100% control and can fuck with you at will, since you have no recourse. Now you can hack the game. Now you can get a killer deal on the predecessor to the latest HOT SEQUEL and find out it probably sucks (or is awesome, but who cares about -good games-). And best of all, your copy of $GAME can go inactive (like we all expect Assassins Creed II to) right before its sequel hits! They hate having informed consumers who can control how and when they play.
I suspect that rentals will be allowed on the publisher's schedule, preceded by many months of full retail (or maybe slightly discounted, to lure you in) prices on the games. No discounts, no control. So you might say my view on OnLive is that of complete and total pessimism, and I hope it goes down in flames.
"Questionable ads" in that context are ones masked as stories. Generally those result in two things:
- Editorial compromise
- Invasive advertising that can't be blocked.
All I can think of is that people bitch constantly when others get tired of working for free and decide they actually need revenues. Two solutions: suffer advertising, or buy a subscription.
By that hyperbole, the OpenMoko Freerunner was also closed and thus no better than an iPhone.
Extremism will get you nowhere except ignored. You know there's a huge difference between "closed because the vendor wants it closed" and "closed because the vendors hands are legally tied."
I suggest pursuing the option you have, and getting the laws changed.
Because they have a massive, dedicated user base and a store like no other. Generally, they can count on the developers sucking it up and coming back, or someone taking their place.
Moblin is dead too, effectively.
Anything that would get either is getting MeeGo, and the Maemo and Moblin communities are moving in with force. The N900 is already marked as a target device for the core, which means an effort to bring an actual MeeGo install will not be an uphill battle.
The N900 is getting Qt libraries as part of the base OS, however, so it will be compatible with MeeGo applications.
It does?
Can you point out the binary only 3rd party module?
I suppose selective interpretation of reality is a Slashdot specialty.
Apple and their 3rd party accessory suppliers will have legion types and styles of slipcover available on release day. The difference between a slipcover and a netbook, however, is that the panel covering the screen is significantly thinner and can be folded behind the device.
No appreciable increase in thickness and it can be moved out of the way when not in use. Sure, convertible tablet netbooks can do the same, but you're still stuck with the thickness of the unit as a whole (and a mechanical hinge.)
It's you and the distinct minority who understand what's going on below the pretty interface. The vast majority who don't understand computers as a whole and just want to do things like surf the web, send e-mails, view music and play games (maybe?) on the go will probably snap this up.
You're making the same mistake as the rest of the industry, in supposing that the features you list actually matter to the majority of the consumer base.
1. If Apple can replicate it closely enough with an onscreen keyboard, then most people won't care. It won't suffice for many (which is why my phone has a physical keyboard) but it may for most.
2. Someone who would reasonably debate an iPad vs a netbook would likely not make this a consideration.
3. Same as 2.
4. Considering that nearly every netbook is the same, often with varying (and low) build quality, yes they can be had for cheap.
5. Apple's selling that slipcover thingy, I suspect they'll have huge sellthrough on it. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't also a pile of 3rd party covers available on release day too.
As I stated in a previous post it likely won't catch on among more technical audiences, but it has a fair chance (especially considering Apple puts thought into the UI unlike every netbook vendor) among the "I just want it to work" audience, which is far, far larger.
So many people treat computers like a black box that I wouldn't be surprised if this does give netbooks a run for their money. It's doubtful that it will take hold in the more technically oriented community (closed as it is,) but in the "I don't care I just want it to work" arena it may do quite well.
As for what the hell the magic is, above and beyond being a giant iPod/iPhone, I do not know.
Not really. You're limited to the speed of the individual chips and the number of parallel storage lanes. They also target the 2.5" SATA market because it gives them an immediate in. Directly into new desktops and systems without consuming a slot the high performance people who would buy these are likely shoving an excess of games into. The high end is already using those slots for storage.
Believe me, the industry -is- looking into ways of getting SSDs on to faster buses, but it takes time and some significant rearchitecture. Also, NAND sucks ass, with high block failure rates fresh out of the fab outweighed by sheer density. And it's only going to get worse as lithography gets smaller.
No, it's because the thing's running an Xilinx Virtex5 FPGA. It also costs a ton as it's using 96GB of SLC NAND, and is part of a fairly modular design that is reused in the io-drive Duo and io-drive Quad.
If you're referring to the older JMicron drives that failed utterly at 4K random reads/writes, then you're mistaken. That was the case of a shit controller being exposed. Even the Indilinx controllers, which paled next to the Intel chip, outclassed mechanical drives at the same task.
If you think that's bad, consider that the Virtex5 they're using on it costs on the order of $500 for the chip itself. You linked the "pro" model, which supports multiple devices in the same system in some fashion. You want this one, which is only $900. Both models use MLC NAND, and neither are really intended for mass-market buyers (you can't boot from them, after all.)
Comcast initiated RST attacks on users and denied it for ages. Bandwidth caps began applying, except to the streaming services provided by the carriers themselves. But if you're willing to trust a corporation not to fuck you over, well, that's your own game of russian roulette.
So it's a monopoly, but not a monopoly. Because there are other, often inferior, alternatives to a monopoly granted by the municipality. You're saying that because dialup is available in the area, they have carte blanche to abuse their customers, am I right?
You act like it's easy as it is. No, it's hard. The incumbents love how difficult it is now, they just don't like it when people get sick of their shit and apply legal pressure.
Because in 2006 AT&T's CEO opened his mouth and basically stated he wanted to hold his customers hostage from Google in exchange for more money. He plainly stated that he wanted to charge both his direct customers AND people who were incidentally coming across the lines. It was made plainly obvious that corporations can and would abuse their services and their customers for the sake of making a profit, especially when they had a monopoly position in areas.
My personal preference would be to force common carrier status on all data providers.
A bunch of regional monopolies serve as the only reasonably modern gateway to the most important technology of the late 20th/early 21st century, and they're more than willing to destroy what makes it unique.
The carriers should be forcibly struck blind. They've already been caught fucking with connections, and are more than willing to host and affect their networks (and customers) with conflicts of interest that serve only themselves.
It's one thing to build on the works of others, and another thing to take parts of their work and claim them as your own. I don't think it's ever been acceptable to do that, only it's gotten significantly easier.
But was it acceptable? He was the patron of royalty, who would likely not have entertained those who questioned him on such a subject. Would they have even know his works were lifted from others?
To be fair to Shakespeare, while his plots and characters were not original his plays and settings were.
Consider how people are proclaiming this girl to be prodigy, but she is being questioned now that bits of her work are found to have been lifted. Were the ability to compare information on the level we can achieve today available in Mozart's time, would he have gotten away with what he did?
And at what point does an inclusion become so obvious that "this is not my work" need not be said? I doubt even Beethoven could lay claim to "God save the King," and used it because of its cultural ubiquity.
Your comment about Disney is disingenuous, as Treasure Island is in the public domain while Toy Story is not.
And if the controversy hadn't broken and no one had uncovered that she lifted the text, would those sales still have been generated or would people just have assumed that page, like (most of?) the rest, were her words?
No one cared about XP because everyone who used it went for the VLK editions that did not require activation, and never installed the WGA crap. And people were quite righteously indignant about activation.
That might be a plausible explanation were it Verizon's DSL/FIOS service, but Verizon Wireless?
As I inquired with another user, check the following:
- You are on 3G via Verizon and not on a local Wifi AP.
- You are going to an actual board and not just poking around the front page.
Most reports of successful access turn to failure when those two conditions are met.
Make sure WiFi isn't connected, many people were reporting successes until they realized their DROID shifted over to a known WiFi connection...
What the summary fails to note is that this -only- affects users of Verizon Wireless, namely DROID owners.
If you're worried that the possibility someone is going to perform an MITM attack on you is greater than infinitesimal, then there are far more important things for you to worry about than whether or not to leave your SSH sessions connected.
I'd be more concerned about security on the end points, particularly on the Windows XP machine. Not hard, but far more pressing than someone finding you interesting enough to insert themselves into your communication.
Unless you -are-, in which case you should manually perform the key exchange and never actually send the passwords in the first place.
Sure, but neither the Oracle or IBM chips will be available for less than several grand, and never in consumer level equipment (I can't exactly order one off Newegg.) And there's no telling how long it will be until the AMD chip trickles down from Opteron class to Phenom class, while it will probably be short order for the Core i9 to appear in stores.
I suspect that AMD will drop the 6-core version as an X6 pretty soon, but it will likely be outperformed (possibly significantly) by the Gulftown.