Apple already has patents on a 3.5mm jack that is half as thick by using pogo-pins internally. The thickness requirement is reduced to little more than the diameter of the headphone jack itself plus the top and bottom walls. As a result, it's not yet the bottleneck on device thickness, as the thinnest tablets and smartphones on the market are a few millimetres thicker than the minimum from the new connector style.
It also means that it's now possible to confuse younger folks by calling it the "open-apple" key, since they made room for the "command" or "cmd" text by removing the open apple icon from the key.
I live in an 20-story highrise. There is zero mail or parcel facilities except for the standard "Canada Post employee has keys to building entrance and mailboxes". Nothing at all special is done for packages. And besides that, even a dedicated truck run is going to be at best next-day delivery, not 30 minutes.
OCZ spent years selling SandForce-based products. There was a big gap between the first few drives using Indilinx, and them buying Indilinx and producing their own controllers.
So, how would I 3D print a computer? Or a battery? Or a hard drive? Or a stuffed animal? Or a smartphone?
3D printers are extremely limited in their application, and will continue to be for decades to come. On the other hand, how are you going to get your 3D printing supplies delivered?
The drones are supposed to be autonomous. No pilot, which really cuts down on costs. While the drones aren't necessarily going to be cheap, the delivery costs could potentially be rather affordable.
They said a 16 kilometre (10 mile) range. If you put a fulfillment centre in a major city, that ~16 kilometre radius circle covers roughly 800 square kilometres. In New York City, that's about 8.5 million people served, which isn't too bad.
I suspect that if they built a depot in a few large cities, they could cover a rather large number of people, particularly as battery technology improved and that radius expanded.
Most people in big cities live in highrise condo or apartment buildings. Amazon could provide a basket of some kind to the building to be placed on the roof for deliveries, using that as a target to drop packages into it. Residents could then retrieve their packages from the roof of their building (providing the roof of the building is accessible, like mine is). This isn't quite a private delivery, but at least it's restricted to people living in the building.
I have never managed to successfully receive a package via DHL, having tried twice. The most recent time, I kept calling to redirect the package to a friend who would be home to receive it, but despite continually confirming the redirection, they kept trying to deliver it to me. They tried to deliver it to me, I'm not home because like most people I work during the day, I called to redirect, they confirm, the next day they tried to deliver it to me again, I called back to redirect, the next day they'd try to deliver it to me again, and so on.
Eventually I gave up, and decided the simplest thing was to not buy from stores that don't let me select someone other than DHL. Which sucks, because some stores I like (like NewEgg) fall into this category. NewEgg Canada until a few months ago let you select the shipper (UPS, Purolator). Now they don't let you pick.
There have been occasional incidents, but they usually had specific trigger causes rather than being spontaneous, and they usually manifest themselves shortly after launch. The 8MB bug, for example, was triggered by corruption on power failure, which is generally not something consumer drives are designed to handle anyhow. Also of note was that the 8MB bug affected the 320 series, which used an Intel controller, not a SandForce controller:P
Nobody's SSDs are perfect and completely bug-free, but while there have been occasional issues with Intel's drives, they still have a lower failure rate than anybody else except Samsung.
Indeed it is, but the Office de la protection du consommateur has no jurisdiction over an American company. At best, I'd have to sue Toshiba Canada, and they're located in Ontario. And I'd probably have a hard time showing how an Ontario company is responsible for violations of a Quebec law by an American company...
I'm also an exclusive Intel SSD user (I've got one G1, two G2s, and two 330s), but Samsung does seem to have a consistently lower failure rate in any statistics that I've seen. It's not a terribly big deal since you're talking about failure rates that are a fraction of a percent, but the next time I need to buy an SSD, Samsung is the only company other than Intel that I'd consider.
Crucial and Corsair have OK failure rates, but they're not nearly as low as Intel and Samsung.
Except you're wrong. You reference a single study, where there are multiple data sources showing that OCZ has a substantially higher return rate than other vendors. hardware.fr has data from both 2012 and 2013, and while the 2013 data does show a market improvement, it's showing OCZ going from an 18x higher return rate than Intel to only a 3x higher return rate... despite using the same controllers.
People who buy a $180,000 CT scanner probably get better customer service than people who buy a $2,400 laptop. Or at least considering my personal experience with Toshiba refusing to honour valid warranties, I certainly hope they do...
Speaking of Toshiba and Canada... I live in Canada, and bought a Toshiba laptop in America after being assured by Toshiba (I called them) that the warranty was international and that I should have no problems at all getting it serviced if there was a problem. The text of the warranty also said as much. The only caveat, they said, was that I'd have to pay the shipping costs out of my own pocket, which was expected.
Fast forward a year and a half, and my laptop needs service. I call up Toshiba Canada, and not surprisingly they won't touch the thing because of where it was purchased. So then I call up Toshiba USA, and... they tell me their repair depot will refuse any packages shipped from outside the US. In fact, Toshiba tells me to find an American friend to ship it to and then have them ship it to Toshiba...
Needless to say, my replacement laptop was not a Toshiba.
Note that, depending on the sales period, OCZ's failure rates are up to 18x higher than Intel's despite the fact that both companies use the same controllers for consumer products. One OCZ model had a failure rate of more than 52% within 6 to 12 months...
I don't put too much blame on SandForce for that; the same flexibility that got OCZ their custom firmware that killed reliability got Intel custom firmware with fixes that came about through Intel's far more intensive validation. I think it was the wrong call for SandForce from a marketing perspective, though, because OCZ really damaged their reputation. I'd imagine that LSI's relatively recent acquisition of SandForce should help with that.
Intel uses Sandforce controllers in most of their current consumer SSDs. The 520, 330, 335, 525, 530, and 1500 are all Sandforce drives, with the 335 being Intel's current "mainstream" drive. Apple also uses Sandforce controllers in their Macbook product line, although they dual-source with a Samsung controller I believe. From all indications, neither Intel nor Apple have seen SSD failure rates higher than average. This tells me that most of the bad rep Sandforce got was purely because of OCZ's stupid antics. Insufficient validation and questionable choices (like the one you mentioned) combined with terrible customer service when their products inevitably failed.
In reference to the "ugly hack", you'll likely find ugly hacks in any SSD controller.
benchmarking cars based on how long it takes to fill the gas tank.
Electric cars have made that an extremely relevant benchmark... and marketing stunts involving battery swaps have indeed benchmarked how long it takes to fill a tank.
Compiling millions of lines of code only takes hours if you're using a computer made in the 90s... and that's not even taking partial compiles into account.
Compile time hasn't been a relevant metric for many years. After all, you're only going to compile once, but your code might run millions of times. I'd rather shave 100ms off an execution than 100s of a compile.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple already has patents on a 3.5mm jack that is half as thick by using pogo-pins internally. The thickness requirement is reduced to little more than the diameter of the headphone jack itself plus the top and bottom walls. As a result, it's not yet the bottleneck on device thickness, as the thinnest tablets and smartphones on the market are a few millimetres thicker than the minimum from the new connector style.
And yet one of the reasons that eSATAp never caught on is because the USB-IF refuses to approve any port that isn't pure USB...
It also means that it's now possible to confuse younger folks by calling it the "open-apple" key, since they made room for the "command" or "cmd" text by removing the open apple icon from the key.
I live in an 20-story highrise. There is zero mail or parcel facilities except for the standard "Canada Post employee has keys to building entrance and mailboxes". Nothing at all special is done for packages. And besides that, even a dedicated truck run is going to be at best next-day delivery, not 30 minutes.
OCZ spent years selling SandForce-based products. There was a big gap between the first few drives using Indilinx, and them buying Indilinx and producing their own controllers.
So, how would I 3D print a computer? Or a battery? Or a hard drive? Or a stuffed animal? Or a smartphone?
3D printers are extremely limited in their application, and will continue to be for decades to come. On the other hand, how are you going to get your 3D printing supplies delivered?
The drones are supposed to be autonomous. No pilot, which really cuts down on costs. While the drones aren't necessarily going to be cheap, the delivery costs could potentially be rather affordable.
They said a 16 kilometre (10 mile) range. If you put a fulfillment centre in a major city, that ~16 kilometre radius circle covers roughly 800 square kilometres. In New York City, that's about 8.5 million people served, which isn't too bad.
I suspect that if they built a depot in a few large cities, they could cover a rather large number of people, particularly as battery technology improved and that radius expanded.
So, if an Amazon drone lands on your property for a few seconds to deliver a package to you, you now own the drone? I don't think so.
Most people in big cities live in highrise condo or apartment buildings. Amazon could provide a basket of some kind to the building to be placed on the roof for deliveries, using that as a target to drop packages into it. Residents could then retrieve their packages from the roof of their building (providing the roof of the building is accessible, like mine is). This isn't quite a private delivery, but at least it's restricted to people living in the building.
I have never managed to successfully receive a package via DHL, having tried twice. The most recent time, I kept calling to redirect the package to a friend who would be home to receive it, but despite continually confirming the redirection, they kept trying to deliver it to me. They tried to deliver it to me, I'm not home because like most people I work during the day, I called to redirect, they confirm, the next day they tried to deliver it to me again, I called back to redirect, the next day they'd try to deliver it to me again, and so on.
Eventually I gave up, and decided the simplest thing was to not buy from stores that don't let me select someone other than DHL. Which sucks, because some stores I like (like NewEgg) fall into this category. NewEgg Canada until a few months ago let you select the shipper (UPS, Purolator). Now they don't let you pick.
There have been occasional incidents, but they usually had specific trigger causes rather than being spontaneous, and they usually manifest themselves shortly after launch. The 8MB bug, for example, was triggered by corruption on power failure, which is generally not something consumer drives are designed to handle anyhow. Also of note was that the 8MB bug affected the 320 series, which used an Intel controller, not a SandForce controller :P
Nobody's SSDs are perfect and completely bug-free, but while there have been occasional issues with Intel's drives, they still have a lower failure rate than anybody else except Samsung.
Indeed it is, but the Office de la protection du consommateur has no jurisdiction over an American company. At best, I'd have to sue Toshiba Canada, and they're located in Ontario. And I'd probably have a hard time showing how an Ontario company is responsible for violations of a Quebec law by an American company...
I'm also an exclusive Intel SSD user (I've got one G1, two G2s, and two 330s), but Samsung does seem to have a consistently lower failure rate in any statistics that I've seen. It's not a terribly big deal since you're talking about failure rates that are a fraction of a percent, but the next time I need to buy an SSD, Samsung is the only company other than Intel that I'd consider.
Crucial and Corsair have OK failure rates, but they're not nearly as low as Intel and Samsung.
Except you're wrong. You reference a single study, where there are multiple data sources showing that OCZ has a substantially higher return rate than other vendors. hardware.fr has data from both 2012 and 2013, and while the 2013 data does show a market improvement, it's showing OCZ going from an 18x higher return rate than Intel to only a 3x higher return rate... despite using the same controllers.
For as long as OCZ memory was sold in Canada, Kingston Value Ram was sold in Canada as a far better alternative.
People who buy a $180,000 CT scanner probably get better customer service than people who buy a $2,400 laptop. Or at least considering my personal experience with Toshiba refusing to honour valid warranties, I certainly hope they do...
Speaking of Toshiba and Canada... I live in Canada, and bought a Toshiba laptop in America after being assured by Toshiba (I called them) that the warranty was international and that I should have no problems at all getting it serviced if there was a problem. The text of the warranty also said as much. The only caveat, they said, was that I'd have to pay the shipping costs out of my own pocket, which was expected.
Fast forward a year and a half, and my laptop needs service. I call up Toshiba Canada, and not surprisingly they won't touch the thing because of where it was purchased. So then I call up Toshiba USA, and... they tell me their repair depot will refuse any packages shipped from outside the US. In fact, Toshiba tells me to find an American friend to ship it to and then have them ship it to Toshiba...
Needless to say, my replacement laptop was not a Toshiba.
I'll go ahead and link to this article with detailed failure stats from a large French e-tailer:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/893-7/ssd.html
Note that, depending on the sales period, OCZ's failure rates are up to 18x higher than Intel's despite the fact that both companies use the same controllers for consumer products. One OCZ model had a failure rate of more than 52% within 6 to 12 months...
I don't put too much blame on SandForce for that; the same flexibility that got OCZ their custom firmware that killed reliability got Intel custom firmware with fixes that came about through Intel's far more intensive validation. I think it was the wrong call for SandForce from a marketing perspective, though, because OCZ really damaged their reputation. I'd imagine that LSI's relatively recent acquisition of SandForce should help with that.
Intel uses Sandforce controllers in most of their current consumer SSDs. The 520, 330, 335, 525, 530, and 1500 are all Sandforce drives, with the 335 being Intel's current "mainstream" drive. Apple also uses Sandforce controllers in their Macbook product line, although they dual-source with a Samsung controller I believe. From all indications, neither Intel nor Apple have seen SSD failure rates higher than average. This tells me that most of the bad rep Sandforce got was purely because of OCZ's stupid antics. Insufficient validation and questionable choices (like the one you mentioned) combined with terrible customer service when their products inevitably failed.
In reference to the "ugly hack", you'll likely find ugly hacks in any SSD controller.
And it's $3k. That might sound like a lot, but 1080p televisions of the same size seem to go for about $2k from most vendors anyhow...
And we use continuous integration such that we're always recompiling... but the compile speed is still not a major concern...
Compile speed might batter when you're talking about JavaScript or Java or any other JIT language, but c++? Not so much.
benchmarking cars based on how long it takes to fill the gas tank.
Electric cars have made that an extremely relevant benchmark... and marketing stunts involving battery swaps have indeed benchmarked how long it takes to fill a tank.
Compiling millions of lines of code only takes hours if you're using a computer made in the 90s... and that's not even taking partial compiles into account.
Compile time hasn't been a relevant metric for many years. After all, you're only going to compile once, but your code might run millions of times. I'd rather shave 100ms off an execution than 100s of a compile.