I like this idea, but I would extend this a little further.
Use broadband over power lines to communicate with the power company. The power company tells the house a current price for electricity, and possibly what the guaranteed price will be over the next 24 hours.
Appliances can decide for themselves the best time to run. For example you tell the dishwasher "I want the dishes cleaned by 8am" and then it finds the lowest-priced time to run.
Of even more benefit to the power companies, you could negotiate with your power company a maximum power usage for your house of X amps. The power company would like to do this because they then know the maximum amount of power they need to plan for when building their infrastructure. Your home-controller would then be responsible for negotiating with your appliances a way to meet this power goal. For example, it may be necessary to shed some unecessary load at peak times (say during a heat wave) and it would be possible for the home controller to turn off whatever appliances are not needed at that time to keep you under your agreed-upon allotment.
If Vista knows about the CF, why does it need to be on the hard disk itself? It sounds like all the heavy lifting is being done by Vista anyways. WOuldn't it make more sense just to use any CF attached to the system for this caching, etc, and use normal hard disks instead? That way adding CF to a PC would improve its performance, no matter what type of hard disks you have attached.
I think the slashdot poster got it wrong. NCQ is generally a good thing. Without NCQ, the only way to get really good random-write speed is to turn on write-back caching, which is unsafe. THere's no good way the raid controller can tell otherwise which block would be best to send to the drive next, based on where the head is - only the drive knows that, and NCQ lets the drive order the writes best.
From what I understand, when writing to ATA drives, you have three options:
- writeback caching on, in which case the raid controller can't really tell whick blocks made it to the drive and which ones are still sitting in the drive's (volatile) RAM.
- No caching - send a block, wait for the drive to write it, send another. Unless the raid controller can really figure out where the head is and time it just right, this will be slow, because the writes will have to wait for the block to move under the head each time.
- NCQ (which is in SATA only). The controller gives the drive a lot of blocks to write, the drive writes them in whatever order it chooses, and sends back acknowledgements for each block after it is written. These acks let the controller mark that block in its cache as clean.
If you compare NCQ and write-back caching, you'll probably find NCQ is slower due to the overhead of acknowledgements. If you don't care about the safety of the writes, then write-back caching is probably the best choice. If you do care about the data integrity, then NCQ is probably the best choice.
Some vendors (apple xserve for example, which doesn't support SATA), say you should use write-back cache but use a UPS to make sure the drive's cache is not lost. THis is not a "mission-critical" solution. Doing this means that you've now introduced single-point (the power connection between the UPS and the drive), where if there is a failure, you can wind up with bad data. Since RAID is usually intended to prevent data loss due to single points of failure, this is not a serious solution.
From what I understand, BPL isn't about providing the broadband, it's mainly about doing real-time metering - allowing the electricity provider to charge different rates at different times of the day, etc. Could even lead to having appliances that watch the current price and reduce their consumption when the price is higher, etc. The end economic effect would be better allocation of power-generating resources.
Re:We're through the looking glass here people.
on
Election Day Discussion
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm tired of this Reagan revisionism fantasy that the GOP likes to propagate. Reagan was an enemy of communism, I'll agree, but people assume this means he was a champion of freedom. He wasn't. His single-mindedeness in opposing communism blinded him to the "bigger picture".
He secretly sold arms to our enemy Iran.
He supported terrorists in Nicaragua, people who attacked civilians in their own country. He continued to support them (with money from the Iranian arms) in violation of a US law explicitly forbidding this.
His policies did not cause the collapse of the Soviet Union. I'm sure he welcomed the collapse, but any direct link between the collapse and his policies is just a GOP fantasy. The Soviet Union collapsed mainly due to Gorbachev's actions, not Reagan's, and Gorbachev was making his own decisions, not just reacting to Reagan's policies.
I use linux software raid5 on seven 200G disks with LVM on top, and have had good results. It's usually going to be much more flexible than hardware raid. If I run out ide buses, I can use firewire, or scsi, or sata or whatever I want. You can also use different sizes of disks (within some limits). With hardware raid, you're stuck with the number and type of ports on that raid card, and that's it.
I make lots of smaller raid5/dev/md partitions, then concatenate them together with LVM into one large partition. When I go to add disks, this allows me to pull one md partition out (if I resize the fs down far enough), and expand that md onto another disk, then add it back into the volume. Raidreconf still doesn't sound reliable enough, so I avoid that for resizing
If you do go wtih hardware raid, make *sure* you can do a resize of the raid without losing your data. A lot of cheap raid controllers don't allow this - you have to wipe out all your data in order to add another disk to your raid, which is usually impractical. And you have to assume you're going to expand it.
Also, make sure to turn off write caching on your drives. It's much slower, but write caching is dangerous, especially in raid configurations.
It means that any system administrator can configure their mail transfer agent to bin any spam pretending to come from aol.com with a 100% success rate
Not true. If a user with a legitimate aol.com email address sends mail to a mailing list or some other forwarded address that isn't "SPF friendly", their mail could be rejected incorrectly by an spf client. I don't think you can claim 100% success yet.
Unless you're interested in geology, this is just dull. This mission is mainly to study rocks. The pictures sent back could be a barren scene from earth - nothing we haven't seen before. I honestly don't get it.
There's no big news here. I think JPL overhypes these missions as "big scientific breakthroughs" to justify their funding. Like that mission that landed on Mars on July 4th a few years back - obviously timed to to inspire nationalism, etc. More JPL hype.
And ignore great cdma phones like samsung. Is there a conspiracy amongst the editors? Do they all live in Europe? AFAIK this phone can't be used on sprint or verizon networks in the US. Maybe on AT&T. How about articles about cool non-GSM phones?
Regarding the costs - of course you'd have to factor in all the overhead. I guess my point is that this sort of edict would be a sort of tax on businesses. If there's a more efficient (maybe more equitable) way, it should be considered. A lot of the time in the US, more efficient alternatives aren't considered.
Regarding the technical issues - I'm thinking of something like VNC and Voice-over-IP. The operator can see what is on the screen of the blind person, and can read it via Voice-over-IP using an audio player on the desktop. It would involve some sort of collaborative tool.
To have the govt set up a service with humans that read web sites to any blind web surfer? Could be linked via a collaboration program so both would be seeing the same site.
Overall, this seems cheaper to the US economy than forcing every business in the US to redesign their web site.
Slashdot Mirror
#define memcpy(s1, s2, n) memcpy_s((s1), (n), (s2), (n))
If Vista knows about the CF, why does it need to be on the hard disk itself? It sounds like all the heavy lifting is being done by Vista anyways. WOuldn't it make more sense just to use any CF attached to the system for this caching, etc, and use normal hard disks instead? That way adding CF to a PC would improve its performance, no matter what type of hard disks you have attached.
I think the slashdot poster got it wrong. NCQ is generally a good thing. Without NCQ, the only way to get really good random-write speed is to turn on write-back caching, which is unsafe. THere's no good way the raid controller can tell otherwise which block would be best to send to the drive next, based on where the head is - only the drive knows that, and NCQ lets the drive order the writes best.
From what I understand, when writing to ATA drives, you have three options:
- writeback caching on, in which case the raid controller can't really tell whick blocks made it to the drive and which ones are still sitting in the drive's (volatile) RAM.
- No caching - send a block, wait for the drive to write it, send another. Unless the raid controller can really figure out where the head is and time it just right, this will be slow, because the writes will have to wait for the block to move under the head each time.
- NCQ (which is in SATA only). The controller gives the drive a lot of blocks to write, the drive writes them in whatever order it chooses, and sends back acknowledgements for each block after it is written. These acks let the controller mark that block in its cache as clean.
If you compare NCQ and write-back caching, you'll probably find NCQ is slower due to the overhead of acknowledgements. If you don't care about the safety of the writes, then write-back caching is probably the best choice. If you do care about the data integrity, then NCQ is probably the best choice.
Some vendors (apple xserve for example, which doesn't support SATA), say you should use write-back cache but use a UPS to make sure the drive's cache is not lost. THis is not a "mission-critical" solution. Doing this means that you've now introduced single-point (the power connection between the UPS and the drive), where if there is a failure, you can wind up with bad data. Since RAID is usually intended to prevent data loss due to single points of failure, this is not a serious solution.
If a company buys enough advertising in their magazine, they'll give their product a nice review regardless of how crappy it is.
From what I understand, BPL isn't about providing the broadband, it's mainly about doing real-time metering - allowing the electricity provider to charge different rates at different times of the day, etc. Could even lead to having appliances that watch the current price and reduce their consumption when the price is higher, etc. The end economic effect would be better allocation of power-generating resources.
I'm tired of this Reagan revisionism fantasy that the GOP likes to propagate. Reagan was an enemy of communism, I'll agree, but people assume this means he was a champion of freedom. He wasn't. His single-mindedeness in opposing communism blinded him to the "bigger picture".
He secretly sold arms to our enemy Iran.
He supported terrorists in Nicaragua, people who attacked civilians in their own country. He continued to support them (with money from the Iranian arms) in violation of a US law explicitly forbidding this.
His policies did not cause the collapse of the Soviet Union. I'm sure he welcomed the collapse, but any direct link between the collapse and his policies is just a GOP fantasy. The Soviet Union collapsed mainly due to Gorbachev's actions, not Reagan's, and Gorbachev was making his own decisions, not just reacting to Reagan's policies.
I use linux software raid5 on seven 200G disks with LVM on top, and have had good results. It's usually going to be much more flexible than hardware raid. If I run out ide buses, I can use firewire, or scsi, or sata or whatever I want. You can also use different sizes of disks (within some limits). With hardware raid, you're stuck with the number and type of ports on that raid card, and that's it.
/dev/md partitions, then concatenate them together with LVM into one large partition. When I go to add disks, this allows me to pull one md partition out (if I resize the fs down far enough), and expand that md onto another disk, then add it back into the volume. Raidreconf still doesn't sound reliable enough, so I avoid that for resizing
I make lots of smaller raid5
If you do go wtih hardware raid, make *sure* you can do a resize of the raid without losing your data. A lot of cheap raid controllers don't allow this - you have to wipe out all your data in order to add another disk to your raid, which is usually impractical. And you have to assume you're going to expand it.
Also, make sure to turn off write caching on your drives. It's much slower, but write caching is dangerous, especially in raid configurations.
Not true. The US Constitution gives only congress the right to declare war. Congress has not done this. Therefore we are not at war.
Our goverment only pays lip service to the rule of law.
Not true. If a user with a legitimate aol.com email address sends mail to a mailing list or some other forwarded address that isn't "SPF friendly", their mail could be rejected incorrectly by an spf client. I don't think you can claim 100% success yet.
Unless you're interested in geology, this is just dull. This mission is mainly to study rocks. The pictures sent back could be a barren scene from earth - nothing we haven't seen before. I honestly don't get it. There's no big news here. I think JPL overhypes these missions as "big scientific breakthroughs" to justify their funding. Like that mission that landed on Mars on July 4th a few years back - obviously timed to to inspire nationalism, etc. More JPL hype.
And ignore great cdma phones like samsung. Is there a conspiracy amongst the editors? Do they all live in Europe? AFAIK this phone can't be used on sprint or verizon networks in the US. Maybe on AT&T. How about articles about cool non-GSM phones?
Regarding the costs - of course you'd have to factor in all the overhead. I guess my point is that this sort of edict would be a sort of tax on businesses. If there's a more efficient (maybe more equitable) way, it should be considered. A lot of the time in the US, more efficient alternatives aren't considered. Regarding the technical issues - I'm thinking of something like VNC and Voice-over-IP. The operator can see what is on the screen of the blind person, and can read it via Voice-over-IP using an audio player on the desktop. It would involve some sort of collaborative tool.
To have the govt set up a service with humans that read web sites to any blind web surfer? Could be linked via a collaboration program so both would be seeing the same site. Overall, this seems cheaper to the US economy than forcing every business in the US to redesign their web site.