Something with a good solid thunk when I hit a key
Ah, brings back the memory of my old Teletype ASR33... Now that was a solid keyboard. Keys that popped down about a quarter of an inch with a finger-tingling resistance, each key locking all the other keys mechanically so they could not be depressed at all during the machinery's tenth-of-a-second cycle time - no N-key-rollover needed here!
My own experience with a pair of Intel X25-M SLC 32GB drives: after less than a month of moderate use one began reporting unrecoverable read errors at an increasing rate.
We have RMAed the drive and gotten a replacement, but based on the approximately 1500 hours real-world MTBF we had to that point, instead of the claimed 3 million hours MTBF/1 petabyte write lifetime, and unrecoverable bit read error rate on the order of 1/10^15 which lured us into having to repair the resulting database damage.
ECC isn't an option for any "server" boards running Intel i7 processors now, either. The memory is there, the motherboard circuitry is there - but the 920/940/965 have their own memory controllers and do not support it.
This is going to be a 75,000 year version of Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth" if we're around for that long and haven't come up with cures for cancer. In which case it'd be most likely in a Medieval or worse society where the minor chance of radiation damage wouldn't be statistically significant anyway.
IIRC there was a study that concluded if you took all the reactor waste the USA produces, waited 10 years, then spread it evenly over the whole country, it would probably cause 200 additional cases of cancer a year.
No, in this case it was the failure of a management process which allowed said bean counter to modify the order without review. It is rarely wise to spend more tomorrow than a little bit today. It may be wise to spend more next month than a little bit today.
But not even then, if the entire infrastructure being built was needed to serve customers whose service level agreement could not be met otherwise. It becomes a worse case - loss of income today that will never be made up for.
If you think this is exciting, wait until next month's article on how to turn an ordinary 7-color photo ink jet printer into a $119 DNA sequencing machine.
Of course, throwing out the old one and buying new will turn out to still be cheaper than buying refills for them.
But it is so much fun to explain to the bean counter who ordered twice as many disk drives of half the capacity you specified, because their painstaking research found they were a few percent cheaper per byte, that now they have to add in the cost of twice as many raid card channels or storage servers, rack expenses, et cetra when figuring out how much money they saved the company.
But not with enough emphasis. To the suggested procedure:
1. Throw cheap, faster hardware at the performance problem.
2. If the application now meets your performance goals, stop.
3. Benchmark your code to identify specifically where the performance problems are.
4. Analyze and optimize the areas that you identified in the previous step.
5. If the application now meets your performance goals, stop.
6. Go to step 1.
I would add:
0. If the performance is lower than you can possibly fix with faster hardware, skip to step 3 and find out the real problem first.
Hardware upgrades may be cheaper, but software design problems can make a program orders of magnitude slower. I've seen 6 large, sorted database queries followed by a small one that was the only one that really had any reason to be sorted, for example. Hardware can't perform miracles.
I wish I'd saved the email I got from the minor Nigerian banking official, pleading for my help claiming a $25 million account's funds, lest "by law, they will be transferred to the United Nations Fund to Promote War in Africa and in General".
Note that the HDPE plastic is the material currently most practical for the purpose the article promotes - "grocery bags that can hold a few liters of milk without tearing".
What is with the "cast iron" comparison anyway? Or for that matter, what use are these numbers anyway? can you imagine how fragile an aluminum foil grocery bag would be, if less than a tenth (37/455) as thick as a HDPE plastic grocery bag?
I'm looking at your URL and wondering how well obsidian would shave. Makes ideal scalpels, but manufacturing the blades in quantity might take some new technology. Prehistoric artisanship wouldn't do, but someone pushing a new patent advantage might.
The condensation of the startups is triggured by concentrations of what is called "Dark Money". Should synergistic fusion occur they may eventually explode in a brilliant IPO display.
Four, here; as a possibly relevant note I am running Symantec's AntiVirus 9, not 10 on several corporate servers (also with hardware firewalling and other best practices layering) and their newest 2005/2006 etc on about a dozen workstations (with fairly clueful users).
Now you've got me wanting to create a "hunting slime molds by remote control" website. Like the big game ones that they've banned here and there already, but I suspect even PETA would find it hard to attack hunting a one-celled organism, even if a large and colourful one.
well, at least they don't have to drill into a mammal's brain to do this one. The molds are cool though; a neighbor once panicked when a bright orange one appeared on wood chip mulch in his garden, until I told him what it was. "It's harmless and it eats bacteria" seems to be one of the more reassuring things you can tell someone about a creeping slime.
Let me try to put what this guy is saying as a thought experiment.
visualize someone on a starship, travelling in a direction with a motion component at a fair velocity of c relative to a second observer; e.g. the starship appearing foreshortened and of a higher mass due to relativistic effects, from the second observer's point of view; from the starship's equally valid point of view, their own state being perfectly normal and the observer foreshortened and more massive.
Should the two pass close they must both -- each from their own point of view -- feel the gravitational effects of themselves as the smaller object being influenced by a larger, denser one, or to put it a different way, each would observe the other as having a greater effect on the local geodesic, the warping of space, then they themselves did.
So, in both frames, the objects experience greater gravitational force from objects in the other frame than they observe themselves exerting on the objects in the other frame.
Slashdot Mirror
It can be a revelation.
It was when one happened to me, on one of the two "3 million hour MTBF" SSD drives I purchased approximately a month before.
Something with a good solid thunk when I hit a key
Ah, brings back the memory of my old Teletype ASR33... Now that was a solid keyboard. Keys that popped down about a quarter of an inch with a finger-tingling resistance, each key locking all the other keys mechanically so they could not be depressed at all during the machinery's tenth-of-a-second cycle time - no N-key-rollover needed here!
My own experience with a pair of Intel X25-M SLC 32GB drives: after less than a month of moderate use one began reporting unrecoverable read errors at an increasing rate.
We have RMAed the drive and gotten a replacement, but based on the approximately 1500 hours real-world MTBF we had to that point, instead of the claimed 3 million hours MTBF/1 petabyte write lifetime, and unrecoverable bit read error rate on the order of 1/10^15 which lured us into having to repair the resulting database damage.
ECC isn't an option for any "server" boards running Intel i7 processors now, either. The memory is there, the motherboard circuitry is there - but the 920/940/965 have their own memory controllers and do not support it.
This is going to be a 75,000 year version of Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth" if we're around for that long and haven't come up with cures for cancer. In which case it'd be most likely in a Medieval or worse society where the minor chance of radiation damage wouldn't be statistically significant anyway.
IIRC there was a study that concluded if you took all the reactor waste the USA produces, waited 10 years, then spread it evenly over the whole country, it would probably cause 200 additional cases of cancer a year.
No, in this case it was the failure of a management process which allowed said bean counter to modify the order without review. It is rarely wise to spend more tomorrow than a little bit today. It may be wise to spend more next month than a little bit today.
But not even then, if the entire infrastructure being built was needed to serve customers whose service level agreement could not be met otherwise. It becomes a worse case - loss of income today that will never be made up for.
If you think this is exciting, wait until next month's article on how to turn an ordinary 7-color photo ink jet printer into a $119 DNA sequencing machine.
Of course, throwing out the old one and buying new will turn out to still be cheaper than buying refills for them.
But it is so much fun to explain to the bean counter who ordered twice as many disk drives of half the capacity you specified, because their painstaking research found they were a few percent cheaper per byte, that now they have to add in the cost of twice as many raid card channels or storage servers, rack expenses, et cetra when figuring out how much money they saved the company.
But not with enough emphasis. To the suggested procedure:
1. Throw cheap, faster hardware at the performance problem.
2. If the application now meets your performance goals, stop.
3. Benchmark your code to identify specifically where the performance problems are.
4. Analyze and optimize the areas that you identified in the previous step.
5. If the application now meets your performance goals, stop.
6. Go to step 1.
I would add:
0. If the performance is lower than you can possibly fix with faster hardware, skip to step 3 and find out the real problem first.
Hardware upgrades may be cheaper, but software design problems can make a program orders of magnitude slower. I've seen 6 large, sorted database queries followed by a small one that was the only one that really had any reason to be sorted, for example. Hardware can't perform miracles.
The question is, can your camera focus well enough to see as fine lines as bar codes use.
The pixel size used in 3D codes is simply larger by comparison.
Bar code lines are the same length, which merely has to be wide enough to make a linear scan cross the code easily.
I believe the US Postal service uses a varying length code for mail routing.
It can be hard to yield to a car sitting stopped at the end of the acceleration lane while driving at highway speeds.
I wish I'd saved the email I got from the minor Nigerian banking official, pleading for my help claiming a $25 million account's funds, lest "by law, they will be transferred to the United Nations Fund to Promote War in Africa and in General".
Note that the HDPE plastic is the material currently most practical for the purpose the article promotes - "grocery bags that can hold a few liters of milk without tearing".
What is with the "cast iron" comparison anyway? Or for that matter, what use are these numbers anyway? can you imagine how fragile an aluminum foil grocery bag would be, if less than a tenth (37/455) as thick as a HDPE plastic grocery bag?
There'll also be a version of this stored in veropedia servers scattered about the country at various universities.
You use a modified gopher protocol called wikimunk to connect to them.
I'm looking at your URL and wondering how well obsidian would shave. Makes ideal scalpels, but manufacturing the blades in quantity might take some new technology. Prehistoric artisanship wouldn't do, but someone pushing a new patent advantage might.
I'm looking forward to cow-tipping being classed as a terrorist attack on the energy supply.
The condensation of the startups is triggured by concentrations of what is called "Dark Money". Should synergistic fusion occur they may eventually explode in a brilliant IPO display.
Four, here; as a possibly relevant note I am running Symantec's AntiVirus 9, not 10 on several corporate servers (also with hardware firewalling and other best practices layering) and their newest 2005/2006 etc on about a dozen workstations (with fairly clueful users).
Patriot Act. Well, duh! Better update that info right away!
Only as long as your network stack hasn't been hacked...
Fortunately, human protein tends to come with pointy and/or stout sticks, thrown rocks, and other things making it too dangerous a diet for predators.
Now you've got me wanting to create a "hunting slime molds by remote control" website. Like the big game ones that they've banned here and there already, but I suspect even PETA would find it hard to attack hunting a one-celled organism, even if a large and colourful one.
I was thinking "Gel-packs"?
well, at least they don't have to drill into a mammal's brain to do this one. The molds are cool though; a neighbor once panicked when a bright orange one appeared on wood chip mulch in his garden, until I told him what it was. "It's harmless and it eats bacteria" seems to be one of the more reassuring things you can tell someone about a creeping slime.
Let me try to put what this guy is saying as a thought experiment.
visualize someone on a starship, travelling in a direction with a motion component at a fair velocity of c relative to a second observer; e.g. the starship appearing foreshortened and of a higher mass due to relativistic effects, from the second observer's point of view; from the starship's equally valid point of view, their own state being perfectly normal and the observer foreshortened and more massive.
Should the two pass close they must both -- each from their own point of view -- feel the gravitational effects of themselves as the smaller object being influenced by a larger, denser one, or to put it a different way, each would observe the other as having a greater effect on the local geodesic, the warping of space, then they themselves did.
So, in both frames, the objects experience greater gravitational force from objects in the other frame than they observe themselves exerting on the objects in the other frame.
Ah, relative to other objects of interest, i.e interstellar dust?