The whole issue with SSDs is that their blazing speed gained in this fashion eventually slows down to almost a halt, once the nodes near being full.
I've had one in my laptop for about 8 months and write gigabytes to it every day, particularly suspending VMWare images to disk. It still writes at 140 MB/s sustained (to ext3 filesystem, not just raw write speed). That might be slower than when it was new, I don't remember, but it destroys any laptop harddrive. This drive was expensive though, like $800 IIRC, but it also supports full-disk hardware encryption which was mandated at my workplace.
Before that I had a first-gen X25M. It did slow down more, but still completely blew away hard drives. "Slowing down to almost a halt," no, not even close. Especially for multitasking, which brings HDDs almost to a halt.
As you can see for this newer drive, there is practically no slowdown, and in any case even its slowest results are many times faster than any laptop HDD.
Making an artificial eye work like this would require not just feeding information from the artificial eye to the brain but also a fast feedback mechanism to allow the brain to control the artificial eye and either a camera that could physically more quickly or a very high resoloution camera and some image processing.
I thought we were talking about artificial retinas? They're mounted in your eyeballs, which already have a nice fast feedback mechanism from your brain.
I am really curious what resolution you would need to simulate human vision. Not that many. Our vision is really terrible outside a tiny area (the fovea). We only have 6 or 7 million cones, and those have well under a pixel's worth of information each (they're monochromatic, for one thing, and several might have to fire together to be perceptible - I don't know).
I'm pretty sure you don't need, for example, the 15 megapixels that a modern SLR gives you; the reason you need so many in an image or a monitor is because you can look anywhere in it, so it has to match your maximum resolution everywhere, even though you can only see a tiny bit of it at once. (This is massively wasteful, so you can achieve great compression if you know where people are looking.)
... in military application? Robo-cops, emergency responders, and others of similar categories of future application will most definitely benefit from advanced imaging.
Of course they already do HUDs, monacles, IR goggles, binoculars, eyeglasses.
What improvements are not covered by any of the above?
Ripping out something that works for replacement would be a huge leap,and I don't see sufficient reason to do so. Our eyes already have ample bandwidth to saturate our brains.
Not brushing your teeth can very well lead to additional expenses (if you don't think this way, you probably don't have kids), and building alliances surely is a very important part of how people accrue riches (it's not what you know, it's who you know; alternately, why does that hot babe like that ugly rich guy?)
I do think our society is coming ever-closer to monetizing everything, because that leads to economic efficiency.
However, I do not agree that money is ultimately the only driver, nor even that there is one ultimate driver (unless it is so general as to be almost meaningless, e.g. "positive affect"). We have several different instincts, not just greed, and on top of that a "rational" mind that can lead us to all kinds of crazy conclusions under the right conditions.
There are no "less biased" news spigots, just ones that spurt your favourite flavour of Kool-Aid.
Bull. If you want to argue no paper is 100% "unbiased" (whatever that would mean), then I agree, since it's an impossible standard. But some are much better than others at presenting factual information supporting multiple viewpoints on a wide range of issues.
Unlike the WSJ, which is truly a national/international content provider, the NY Times has a regional quality to it that reflects its liberal, middle-to-upper class urban New York readership.
Ha ha! Your post is mostly sensible, but if you don't think the WSJ is pandering to its readership (particularly its editorial page), then I beg to differ.
However I agree the WSJ is in a relatively strong position to charge for its contents, because the argument can be made it is an investment that will pay off, and its readership can afford it.
The problem is not that "anybody can program any system," because as you said that's not true. The problem is the gatekeepers of salary and status simply cannot tell the difference between those who can and those who cannot. Thus there is not much career progression in programming.
Are you accusing Russia of leveraging its natural resources as economic means to influence geopolitics!? I'm glad our oil suppliers never pull any of that crap.
Counter-cite! "Copenhgen=arrogance of man2think we can change nature's ways.MUST b good stewards of God's earth,but arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature" - Sarah Palin
Being aware of the situation does not mean they can fix it. I'm sure SGI, Cray, and Sun were all aware of their situations, too. I know some people assume that tech companies die because they're too busy milking their existing product line to see past the next quarter's profits, but it's not just that. Life becomes extremely difficult when your core competency is no longer necessary. Essentially you are looking at starting a new business and we all know the odds of succeeding in that.
Solid state drives are sure to displace hard drives before too much longer. Complex mechanical mechanisms inevitably get pushed aside for solid state. In all liklihood WD will be relegated to reselling solid state drives, since they will never beat Intel, Micron etc. at fabbing silicon. I like WD just fine as a company, but they're in the same position as Kodak was in 1996 or so. The writing is on the wall.
Isn't the iPad essentially a netbook of the future?
How so? Even if it weren't restricted to approved applications, it would only be as good as other tablets of the present, which haven't gone anywhere. It's just an overgrown PDA.
Right, instead of going between what google presents as separate "modes" (overhead map, street view, photos, and a new thing... live video) they merged them all into a single seamless first-person perspective. Watching the demo it certainly felt like a leap into the future to me.
Whoever runs all the thousands of security cameras in major cities must be drooling uncontrollably.
What I find most interesting is the way all changes are perfectly synchronized with the exception of entertainment related stuff.
Are you sure that isn't just how the graph looks because it is stacking the data series on each other?
What surprises me is the massive boost in OS profits in Dec 09. Could that really be Windows 7, and if so, how? It costs about the same as XP/Vista, and it's not as if people are buying Windows 7 off store shelves to upgrade older computers (are they?)
Currently the two barriers that will prevent us from finding the truth are those who believe that consensus is equivalent to scientific truth and the snow piled up so high in Washington D.C. that they are being forced to wait to open the office until after the blizzard of 2010 is cleared.
I'm sorry, but anybody who thinks the current amount of snow in DC disproves global warming has absolutely nothing useful to add to the discussion. At this point it's not even worth explaining why. Some people just believe whatever they want to believe.
Actually, no, dissipated energy from power plants or computers is not what causes global warming. They are insignificant compared to the sun. What causes global warming is increased retention of solar energy in the atmosphere due to greenhouse gasses, such as methane and COs. Now, the river just downstream from a nuclear power plant can certainly be warmed thus changing that little bit of the environment quite drastically, but that is not "global" warming.
As for this application specifically, even though it does expel heat into the air, it's much better than most data centers; they all eventually expel the heat into the air, but most of them use additional energy to power air conditioners, and that energy (or more importantly, the greenhouse gasses created producing that energy) go into the air too.
Probably. But I doubt they were studying on the bus before the WiFi anyways, so it's a wash.
That said, within a few years I bet WiFi will be moot anyways since all those devices will have mobile broadband from the cell network anyways. At the conferences and meetings I attend, hunting around for WiFi has become really passe; people have mobile broadband cards for their laptop, or just do everything on their blackberry.
Where I work, I could swear many of printouts are never even looked at. There's always a stack of printouts on the printer, just sitting there. (Incidentally, an awful lot of them do not appear to be work-related).
My house reached $1 million in estimated value at the peak of the bubble. Now it's back down to $800K. If I sell now, I should pay taxes on the $200K I never got?
If property taxes were higher, your mortgage would just be that much less. Why do I say that? Housing prices in California have nothing to do with the price of construction materials and labor; space is limited, so prices rise to whatever people can afford. I have exactly the same beef with making mortgage interest tax deductible; all it does is transfer money from the government into the pockets of whoever owns a home at the time the law is passed, because housing prices jump. But people who buy in after that jump gain nothing, and the government is permanently impoverished. And the homeowners who got this windfall of un-earned free money in California are a curse on the rest of the nation as they move out and drive up prices everywhere.
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Debatable. But there certainly is an evolutionary mechanism for animals to lose 2 legs - simply by standing erect - and many have.
I've had one in my laptop for about 8 months and write gigabytes to it every day, particularly suspending VMWare images to disk. It still writes at 140 MB/s sustained (to ext3 filesystem, not just raw write speed). That might be slower than when it was new, I don't remember, but it destroys any laptop harddrive. This drive was expensive though, like $800 IIRC, but it also supports full-disk hardware encryption which was mandated at my workplace.
Before that I had a first-gen X25M. It did slow down more, but still completely blew away hard drives. "Slowing down to almost a halt," no, not even close. Especially for multitasking, which brings HDDs almost to a halt.
As you can see for this newer drive, there is practically no slowdown, and in any case even its slowest results are many times faster than any laptop HDD.
I thought we were talking about artificial retinas? They're mounted in your eyeballs, which already have a nice fast feedback mechanism from your brain.
I'm pretty sure you don't need, for example, the 15 megapixels that a modern SLR gives you; the reason you need so many in an image or a monitor is because you can look anywhere in it, so it has to match your maximum resolution everywhere, even though you can only see a tiny bit of it at once. (This is massively wasteful, so you can achieve great compression if you know where people are looking.)
Of course they already do HUDs, monacles, IR goggles, binoculars, eyeglasses.
What improvements are not covered by any of the above?
Ripping out something that works for replacement would be a huge leap,and I don't see sufficient reason to do so. Our eyes already have ample bandwidth to saturate our brains.
I do think our society is coming ever-closer to monetizing everything, because that leads to economic efficiency.
However, I do not agree that money is ultimately the only driver, nor even that there is one ultimate driver (unless it is so general as to be almost meaningless, e.g. "positive affect"). We have several different instincts, not just greed, and on top of that a "rational" mind that can lead us to all kinds of crazy conclusions under the right conditions.
Bull. If you want to argue no paper is 100% "unbiased" (whatever that would mean), then I agree, since it's an impossible standard. But some are much better than others at presenting factual information supporting multiple viewpoints on a wide range of issues.
Ha ha! Your post is mostly sensible, but if you don't think the WSJ is pandering to its readership (particularly its editorial page), then I beg to differ.
However I agree the WSJ is in a relatively strong position to charge for its contents, because the argument can be made it is an investment that will pay off, and its readership can afford it.
The problem is not that "anybody can program any system," because as you said that's not true. The problem is the gatekeepers of salary and status simply cannot tell the difference between those who can and those who cannot. Thus there is not much career progression in programming.
Gigabit lan, on the other hand, doesn't really offer 1000 mbits.
Are you accusing Russia of leveraging its natural resources as economic means to influence geopolitics!? I'm glad our oil suppliers never pull any of that crap.
You don't want to be "arrogant&naive" do you?
Being aware of the situation does not mean they can fix it. I'm sure SGI, Cray, and Sun were all aware of their situations, too. I know some people assume that tech companies die because they're too busy milking their existing product line to see past the next quarter's profits, but it's not just that. Life becomes extremely difficult when your core competency is no longer necessary. Essentially you are looking at starting a new business and we all know the odds of succeeding in that.
Solid state drives are sure to displace hard drives before too much longer. Complex mechanical mechanisms inevitably get pushed aside for solid state. In all liklihood WD will be relegated to reselling solid state drives, since they will never beat Intel, Micron etc. at fabbing silicon. I like WD just fine as a company, but they're in the same position as Kodak was in 1996 or so. The writing is on the wall.
This was on The Office too! Remember "Dunder Mifflin Infinity," the brainfart of "whiz-kid" Ryan?
How so? Even if it weren't restricted to approved applications, it would only be as good as other tablets of the present, which haven't gone anywhere. It's just an overgrown PDA.
Whoever runs all the thousands of security cameras in major cities must be drooling uncontrollably.
Are you sure that isn't just how the graph looks because it is stacking the data series on each other?
What surprises me is the massive boost in OS profits in Dec 09. Could that really be Windows 7, and if so, how? It costs about the same as XP/Vista, and it's not as if people are buying Windows 7 off store shelves to upgrade older computers (are they?)
I'm sorry, but anybody who thinks the current amount of snow in DC disproves global warming has absolutely nothing useful to add to the discussion. At this point it's not even worth explaining why. Some people just believe whatever they want to believe.
As for this application specifically, even though it does expel heat into the air, it's much better than most data centers; they all eventually expel the heat into the air, but most of them use additional energy to power air conditioners, and that energy (or more importantly, the greenhouse gasses created producing that energy) go into the air too.
That said, within a few years I bet WiFi will be moot anyways since all those devices will have mobile broadband from the cell network anyways. At the conferences and meetings I attend, hunting around for WiFi has become really passe; people have mobile broadband cards for their laptop, or just do everything on their blackberry.
That doesn't sound like something a 30-person company could pull off. Or are you just incredibly competent?
Where I work, I could swear many of printouts are never even looked at. There's always a stack of printouts on the printer, just sitting there. (Incidentally, an awful lot of them do not appear to be work-related).
Hear, hear. I'm holding out for a perpetual motion printer that consumes no energy to do its work.
If property taxes were higher, your mortgage would just be that much less. Why do I say that? Housing prices in California have nothing to do with the price of construction materials and labor; space is limited, so prices rise to whatever people can afford. I have exactly the same beef with making mortgage interest tax deductible; all it does is transfer money from the government into the pockets of whoever owns a home at the time the law is passed, because housing prices jump. But people who buy in after that jump gain nothing, and the government is permanently impoverished. And the homeowners who got this windfall of un-earned free money in California are a curse on the rest of the nation as they move out and drive up prices everywhere.