Many comments say something like: "DRM prevents you from doing what you want to do with your stuff..."
When you buy a CD, you DO NOT buy the album. It is NOT yours to duplicate and sell, or broadcast. So, what DID you buy? You bought a licence to do specific things like "listen to the album in a private setting". The problem here is that this licence has never really been written down anywhere. Courts have decided on issues like "fair use", so consumers should now have a reasonable idea about what they can and cannot do with a CD.
DRM is the actual owner of the copyrighted work trying to prevent you from doing illegal things with their work using technical measures. This is completely reasonable.
The problem with DRM is that it usually also prevents things that we've grown to consider "fair use".
There are a bunch of technical explanations here. Let me make a simple analogy.
If you have a lock on your door, which has only 100 different keys, a thief could take 100 keys along, and break in. Suppose you find this "100 keys" too easy, and install a second (100-key) lock.
There are now 10000 combinations of key1 and key2.
Do you expect the next thief to take along 10000 keyrings, each keyring having two keys one for the first lock, one for the second lock, or does he come in with 200 keys?
In the mechanical world, you would have to make a locking mechanism such that you cannot test the validity of either key without the other key being correct. The same goes in cryptography. This is not simple.
In practise it's easy to say: There are so many combinations to try. But the smart guys try to find ways not to have to try all of them, and in cryptography, it is difficult to devise schemes that actually succeed in preventing the bad guys in doing just that.
Does the loss of the original property invalidate the legality of the backups?
This one is simple to answer: Of course not! However, when challenged in court, it might be difficult to prove.
This issue starts with: "What do you actually BUY when you pay for a CD in a shop?".
You surely buy a round item, a plastic case, and some paper.
You also get the right to put the round item into an electronic device, which can play the sounds encoded on said round item. This however, is a limited right: The copyright owner seems to have the right to tell you that this can't be a public performance of his/her work.
The copyright owners would probably very much like to tell you: NO, you're not allowed to make backups of my copyrighted work.
However, it seems that courts have ruled "fair use" of copyrigthed work, and that this allows making backups.
It would be useful, if someone would write down what rights I actually buy when I buy a licence to use the copyrighted work on a CD.
- check out the waste-chemicals of a plant. - evaluate what might be of use. - offer to dispose of the interesting chemicals, cheaper than the normal waste-processing of those chemicals would cost. - Sell the chemicals where someone else needs them!
They would get money on both ends: both getting the goods, as well as getting rid of them. There might be a refining step in the middle, usually cheap enough not to spoil the fun....
First, even if your program allows you to fill in an arbitrary number for frame rate, it is not a number, but a binary choice. You have the option for 25 in Europe, or 30 in America. Your TV cannot do anything but 30 FPS, so will have to double-display one frame per second if your source material claims to be 29. This is visible. Your movie should shorten to about 87 minutes. Sorry. (the same is done for movies on TV in Europe: They play on TV at 25 FPS instead of the 24 FPS in the theatre, shortening them by 4%).
Secondly your Audio is uncompressed. DVD specifies that audio can/should be mpeg compressed like the video. The bitrate you claim is more than full CD uncompressed audio. You should mpeg-encode the audio to about 192 to 320 kbps. This should keep the quality very reasonable, while reducing your filesize by almost 800Mb.
There are several things. First: flash chips are easy to make in such a way that some cells have a much longer longlivety. So many flash chips come with say 10k max writes, but a specific 1% of the chip is specified to last at least 10 times longer.
Secondly, things go bad if you write the same spot repeatedly. Don't do that then. This is much easier to implement for a harddisk-write-cache than for an USB stick. In the write-cache write something like: "write-ID 1234, sector 4567, data:..."// write-ID 1235, sector 9876, data" etc. When the disk powers up, you just start writing at the lowest write-ID. All flash-sectors get used equally. No need to do balancing (which they have to do for the USB sticks to prevent say the FAT from wearing out before the rest does).
Thirdly, you could think a bit about what goes into the cache and what doesn't. If the disk is spinning, just write to the disk. Suppose you have a 100Mbyte flash backup, you will need to write a total of 1 terabyte of data to the flash before it wears out (at 10k cycles per cell). Take into account that this is for power-saving on laptops. On that laptop you'll install an OS, and never touch that region of the harddrive again. That's static data. When you work on the laptop, your work will be saved occasionally, but how long untill that adds up to a terabyte? Suppose you save a gigabyte a day: the terabyte will last you three years! So even IF you don't get smart about bypassing the cache if possible, the lifetime of the flash is easily comparable to that of the drive.
Last, if you keep count of how many times you've used the flash you can fallback to "the old way" if your count (or the number of ECC-fixups required) indicates that the flash might be nearing the end of it's life. You shouldn't lose any data.
A car left idling with the door open advertises itself. Stealing it would still be wrong.
The car being "taken" seriously impairs the original owners intentions for said car.
If you use (but not overload) someone's open wireless network, chances are they won't even notice. I find that using an open wireless network compares more closely to using the car's shade when it's sunny outside.
Two things. First they didn't hook up all 70M french, just part of the paris region. If they manage to spend $12bn on just that, they might well go under....
Secondly, they way you portray things, they would be doing things similar to what happened the MCI scandal, but the other way around. (here you're claiming they make the books look bad once to make them look better next year MCI wanted the opposite, so made the reverse accounting error")
If they account things correctly, they might borrow 50bn somewhere, use 10bn of their revenue to invest 60bn, with a 5 year writeoff (expected earn-back-time). In that case the 12bn they claim are costs, are actually costs.
Analysing big companies or governments from public sources is hard-to-impossible.
You're not supposed to (or allowed to!) copy the whole book. Buy the book! But half a chapter at 10 pages for $0.60 (plus maybe $0.40 for the copier machine?) is usually a good deal compared to the whole book.
Under copyright law, it is illegal to copy a page from e.g. a book. If it's for personal study reasons, it's "fair use", but in a company it is always illegal.
So here in Holland they legalized it: If you pay a reasonable fee (about $0.06 per page), you can have your copy. They appointed an organization to collect those payments. Fine.
So they send you an invoice: Research has shown that your company size in your branch copies about 5500 pages per year, of which 13.4% is copyrighted. We'll cut you a deal and only charge you for 11.4% so you only pay us $37.62.
Oh yeah. They say they have a deal with some branch organizations, and that those agree that the deal is reasonable.
The options they give you are: A) Pay in full, then protest. B) Indicate you're no longer in business or C) You don't have a copier.
I don't want to lie, so B and C are out. The catch is: Their "terms and conditions" say that once you pay in full, you have a contract with them. And that contract probably says they are allowed to use those averages etc etc.
I've made ONE copy of a copyrighted page while this law was in effect. So I owe them EUR 0.045. I paid them one euro, and told them it would be enough for a bunch of years. They send a new invoice the next year with the same conditions.
I'm now spending about 10 times more money on fighting these guys in postage stamps than the amount that I legally owe them. I'm spending over 100 times more in lost productivity.
Research shows that, just surfing around for an hour or maybe a little more will infect a normal windows PC with several spyware and virusses.
I expect this "research" to more or less stay on the paved road. You start at CNN, slashdot and the microsoft home page click on the links, and avoid clicking the obviously pornographic adds.
So, if you do that, obviously some "straight" sites somehow still infect those MS Windows machines.... Either they buy an add with a bigger add-distribution club, or they have a contract themselves with the "legit" site.
I'd think it's impossible to detect the infecting sites beforehand, because the web changes so quickly. Moreover if say slashdot ran an add for a car brand that happend to have a marketing company hired that uses the spyware trick to get even more revenue, slashdot would quickly stop the add from running, right? Especially after getting on this blacklist. The only thing you can do is to detect, and prevent infections.
If you want to implement the windows API, you start with the important functions. The docs state pretty clearly what they are supposed to do. However, there simply is SO MUCH API that it takes a lot of time to implement. Moreover, Microsoft isn't perfect. So there are bugs. Some of them don't cause a crash, but just cause the API to do something unexpected for someone who only read the specs and/or has worked with the function. Among the large set of applications for windows, there is bound to be a couple where a programmer found: Hey, this is useful, I can use this. So, you have to implement the bugs as well.
Then, microsoft doesn't like to throw away old APIs. So, you have to implement 30 years of APIs....
All in all this project is much more complex than for instance building a good wordprocessor from scratch.
If we add in a second read-write head assembly, you have to also add a second preamplifier, read-channel chip, voice coil driver etc etc. Quite a lot of electronics also needs duplicating. This would substantially increase the cost for the drive. With the lower sales-volume of these special high-performance drives, the end-user price would more than double. And then people would buy two cheaper drives, instead of one expensive one. If you put them in RAID0 (striping) configuration, you have almost the performance of the suggested two-head unit, and twice the capacity.
The one thing that the two-head unit is better in is the average rotational latency: Only 2.1 ms. However, in real life, the average seek time of 8ms also should be factored in: You have only a 20% increase in performance (12.1ms -> 10.1ms), and not the factor-of-two you would have hoped for.
What MIGHT one day happen, however is that the read channel and preamp electronics become cheap enough that they can add two for almost the same price. In that case, you can have multiple heads on one arm provide data at once. Wether this is feasable with respect to alignment, I don't know.
The outside didn't change much. But inside, some things have changed. The inductive read-head has been replaced by a GMR head: better bandwidth, better sensitivity. And nowadays everybody is changing to perpendicular recording.
It won't matter what format a disc is recorded in because it will play anywhere.
This could become true. Or maybe not. It strongly depends on a technical point: Can the hardware to do both be integrated into one apparatus cheaply? Apparently for DVD-R vs DVD+R the answer is yes.
The author of the article mis-interpreted Seagate's latency figure. Seagate means: "Average rotational latency". This can be calculated from: 60 seconds/minute / 7200 RPM / 2 = 0.00416 s = 4.16ms.
Oficially you should add in the controller overhead, and most likely the time to read a sector (it's unlikely they pass-through the sector: in theory you can start to send the sector to the host before you've read it completely, but this complicates things as when the CRC doesn't match, you have to cancel the data sent to the host!), but if you do the math, these are negligable compared to the 4.16 ms.
I don't expect anything "special" to happen in the "seek times" area. They will be within 10% from the slightly older drives. Either up to 10% better because they did find a way to improve seek times a bit. Or up to 10% worse because the higher density requires a longer settling time, but this is less likely than a small improvement.
Fully agreed: The theoretical bandwidth of optical links is unbelievably high compared to electrical links (Note that 100MHz plus electrical busses on motherboards were thought impossible about a decade ago).
We still live in a 3D space. Moore predicts exponential growth. We'll hit the limit that 3D space imposes within the next century or so.
Visible light can handle a bandwidth of up to about 600 thousand gigagherz. If you can handle that optically, fine. However currently we need to generate the information stream for a communications link electrically, and we're still limited by the electronics.
Sure, Optical computers have been proven in the labs. But have they been scaled to practical sizes? In electronics we can handle about 10^8 gates on something the size of 2cm^2. Can you point me to an optical computer having more than 10^3 gates? 10^4? 10^5? Sure, Optical routers exist. But that's just switching. Not really computing. So, for something that's optical already, having a couple of optical gates comes in handy. But for computing it has yet to become useful.
But we're wandering off the topic. In the end, the 3D space, and its associated minimum latencies are going to kill Moore's law.
Terribly sorry to rain on your parade, but the fact that we live in a 3D world with a speedlimit limits computing speed eventually.
Electrical signals in wires travel (according to rough measurements I did about two decades ago) at about 0.3c (a third of the lightspeed). Light travels at 0.6c (in glass).
So you win about a factor of two by moving to light, provided you use fibreglass to channel the communications to the right place.
If you Aim lasers through normal air, you can win a factor of three. Wow. That might extend Moore another 2 years, but it does not solve the fact that physics limits Moore eventually.
In theory, "computing nodes" can be connected using for example hypercubes. 4 nodes form a square with max communications distance of 2, 8 nodes form a cube, with max distance of 3. And so on.
Wether these "computing nodes" are complete computers, elements of a parallel system, or just elements of a CPU, doesn't matter.
As the dimension of the hypercube increases, the physical placement of the nodes in 3D-space means that the communications links between the nodes starts to increase. The Lightspeed limits theoretical computation speed to what you might expect of a 3D structure.
Here in the Netherlands, there has been a series of cases where sensitive information has leaked through stolen/lost hardware, and every time some official was breaking the rules.
The rules were unworkable: DO NOT TAKE YOUR WORK HOME.
So, no reading of a report on the train, no after-dinner report writing. Nothing. Ambitious people break the rules to perform better. So they take stuff home anyway. As long as the hardware doesn't get stolen, nothing is noticed. Big publicity when sensitive information makes it to the press.
But if they were to start policing the policy, a lot of the ambitious people would eventually give in to the rules, and simply watch tv after dinner, and read the newspaper on the train. Results? Productivity drop.
The '98%' was his way of saying "comes a long way in the right direction". In practise, if bzip2 gets you an additional 10%, the shannon limit might be 20% from gzip, or 10% from bzip2.
Of course, gzip and bzip work on a byte-level. Suppose the data is much more regular on a 9bits-per-word level. In that case, any reasonable compression program will fall a factor of 8 short of the theoretical limit. Recompile gzip for 9bit words, and voila!
There is a field of science called information theory. It studies "information content" and things around that like datatransmission and ECC codes.
If I have a 10Mbyte file, it usually contains way less than 80 million bits of information. So, compression programs like "zip" and "gzip" can make the file smaller.
The theoretical limit however is the actual information content. Suppose an information theorist analyses your file and conlcudes that your file contains 40 million bits, then gzip or any other compression program will have a hard time compressing the file beyond that. (unless the compression program "cheats" and compresses the file as: "Rogers 10Mb file #1", and has the original file elsewhere)
Now, in practise I have a 440Mb spam-archive which compresses to 108Mb. This is only a factor of 4. If you realize that most spams are delivered tens of times, it must be possible to do a lot better. So if someone claims to be able to compress my spam mailbox a lot better, I can believe them.
Information content in mp3's and images is near 100%. If anybody claims to be able to compress more than 20% out of one of these, they are full of crap on theoretical grounds.
If you copy a font, and try to register the bit-by-bit copy, you're in for trouble. Everybody knows that.
So when you copy(steal) a font, you need to change a couple of things before you claim it as original work. And, I think that if you go in, change the 1, 8, and a couple of letters, this should not be considered proof of original work.
Now, I think that "some ratios" being the same is not valid "proof" of the fonts being identical. I could decide that I like some of the proportions in frutiger, and use those for my font. If I design the letters myself that should not prove I copied it.
Slashdot Mirror
Many comments say something like: "DRM prevents you from doing what you want to do with your stuff..."
When you buy a CD, you DO NOT buy the album. It is NOT yours to duplicate and sell, or broadcast. So, what DID you buy? You bought a licence to do specific things like "listen to the album in a private setting". The problem here is that this licence has never really been written down anywhere. Courts have decided on issues like "fair use", so consumers should now have a reasonable idea about what they can and cannot do with a CD.
DRM is the actual owner of the copyrighted work trying to prevent you from doing illegal things with their work using technical measures. This is completely reasonable.
The problem with DRM is that it usually also prevents things that we've grown to consider "fair use".
There are a bunch of technical explanations here. Let me make a simple analogy.
If you have a lock on your door, which has only 100 different keys, a thief could take 100 keys along, and break in. Suppose you find this "100 keys" too easy, and install a second (100-key) lock.
There are now 10000 combinations of key1 and key2.
Do you expect the next thief to take along 10000 keyrings, each keyring having two keys one for the first lock, one for the second lock, or does he come in with 200 keys?
In the mechanical world, you would have to make a locking mechanism such that you cannot test the validity of either key without the other key being correct. The same goes in cryptography. This is not simple.
In practise it's easy to say: There are so many combinations to try. But the smart guys try to find ways not to have to try all of them, and in cryptography, it is difficult to devise schemes that actually succeed in preventing the bad guys in doing just that.
Does the loss of the original property invalidate the legality of the backups?
This one is simple to answer: Of course not! However, when challenged in court, it might be difficult to prove.
This issue starts with: "What do you actually BUY when you pay for a CD in a shop?".
You surely buy a round item, a plastic case, and some paper.
You also get the right to put the round item into an electronic device, which can play the sounds encoded on said round item. This however, is a limited right: The copyright owner seems to have the right to tell you that this can't be a public performance of his/her work.
The copyright owners would probably very much like to tell you: NO, you're not allowed to make backups of my copyrighted work.
However, it seems that courts have ruled "fair use" of copyrigthed work, and that this allows making backups.
It would be useful, if someone would write down what rights I actually buy when I buy a licence to use the copyrighted work on a CD.
My brother used to work for a company that would:
- check out the waste-chemicals of a plant.
- evaluate what might be of use.
- offer to dispose of the interesting chemicals, cheaper than the normal waste-processing of those chemicals would cost.
- Sell the chemicals where someone else needs them!
They would get money on both ends: both getting the goods, as well as getting rid of them. There might be a refining step in the middle, usually cheap enough not to spoil the fun....
Two things:
First, even if your program allows you to fill in an arbitrary number for frame rate, it is not a number, but a binary choice. You have the option for 25 in Europe, or 30 in America. Your TV cannot do anything but 30 FPS, so will have to double-display one frame per second if your source material claims to be 29. This is visible. Your movie should shorten to about 87 minutes. Sorry. (the same is done for movies on TV in Europe: They play on TV at 25 FPS instead of the 24 FPS in the theatre, shortening them by 4%).
Secondly your Audio is uncompressed. DVD specifies that audio can/should be mpeg compressed like the video. The bitrate you claim is more than full CD uncompressed audio. You should mpeg-encode the audio to about 192 to 320 kbps. This should keep the quality very reasonable, while reducing your filesize by almost 800Mb.
There are several things. First: flash chips are easy to make in such a way that some cells have a much longer longlivety. So many flash chips come with say 10k max writes, but a specific 1% of the chip is specified to last at least 10 times longer.
// write-ID 1235, sector 9876, data" etc. When the disk powers up, you just start writing at the lowest write-ID. All flash-sectors get used equally. No need to do balancing (which they have to do for the USB sticks to prevent say the FAT from wearing out before the rest does).
Secondly, things go bad if you write the same spot repeatedly. Don't do that then. This is much easier to implement for a harddisk-write-cache than for an USB stick. In the write-cache write something like: "write-ID 1234, sector 4567, data:..."
Thirdly, you could think a bit about what goes into the cache and what doesn't. If the disk is spinning, just write to the disk. Suppose you have a 100Mbyte flash backup, you will need to write a total of 1 terabyte of data to the flash before it wears out (at 10k cycles per cell). Take into account that this is for power-saving on laptops. On that laptop you'll install an OS, and never touch that region of the harddrive again. That's static data. When you work on the laptop, your work will be saved occasionally, but how long untill that adds up to a terabyte? Suppose you save a gigabyte a day: the terabyte will last you three years! So even IF you don't get smart about bypassing the cache if possible, the lifetime of the flash is easily comparable to that of the drive.
Last, if you keep count of how many times you've used the flash you can fallback to "the old way" if your count (or the number of ECC-fixups required) indicates that the flash might be nearing the end of it's life. You shouldn't lose any data.
A car left idling with the door open advertises itself. Stealing it would still be wrong.
The car being "taken" seriously impairs the original owners intentions for said car.
If you use (but not overload) someone's open wireless network, chances are they won't even notice. I find that using an open wireless network compares more closely to using the car's shade when it's sunny outside.
Two things. First they didn't hook up all 70M french, just part of the paris region. If they manage to spend $12bn on just that, they might well go under....
Secondly, they way you portray things, they would be doing things similar to what happened the MCI scandal, but the other way around. (here you're claiming they make the books look bad once to make them look better next year MCI wanted the opposite, so made the reverse accounting error")
If they account things correctly, they might borrow 50bn somewhere, use 10bn of their revenue to invest 60bn, with a 5 year writeoff (expected earn-back-time). In that case the 12bn they claim are costs, are actually costs.
Analysing big companies or governments from public sources is hard-to-impossible.
Disclaimer: I'm an egineer, not an accountant.
You're not supposed to (or allowed to!) copy the whole book. Buy the book! But half a chapter at 10 pages for $0.60 (plus maybe $0.40 for the copier machine?) is usually a good deal compared to the whole book.
Under copyright law, it is illegal to copy a page from e.g. a book. If it's for personal study reasons, it's "fair use", but in a company it is always illegal.
So here in Holland they legalized it: If you pay a reasonable fee (about $0.06 per page), you can have your copy. They appointed an organization to collect those payments. Fine.
So they send you an invoice: Research has shown that your company size in your branch copies about 5500 pages per year, of which 13.4% is copyrighted. We'll cut you a deal and only charge you for 11.4% so you only pay us $37.62.
Oh yeah. They say they have a deal with some branch organizations, and that those agree that the deal is reasonable.
The options they give you are: A) Pay in full, then protest. B) Indicate you're no longer in business or C) You don't have a copier.
I don't want to lie, so B and C are out. The catch is: Their "terms and conditions" say that once you pay in full, you have a contract with them. And that contract probably says they are allowed to use those averages etc etc.
I've made ONE copy of a copyrighted page while this law was in effect. So I owe them EUR 0.045. I paid them one euro, and told them it would be enough for a bunch of years. They send a new invoice the next year with the same conditions.
I'm now spending about 10 times more money on fighting these guys in postage stamps than the amount that I legally owe them. I'm spending over 100 times more in lost productivity.
Research shows that, just surfing around for an hour or maybe a little more will infect a normal windows PC with several spyware and virusses.
I expect this "research" to more or less stay on the paved road. You start at CNN, slashdot and the microsoft home page click on the links, and avoid clicking the obviously pornographic adds.
So, if you do that, obviously some "straight" sites somehow still infect those MS Windows machines.... Either they buy an add with a bigger add-distribution club, or they have a contract themselves with the "legit" site.
I'd think it's impossible to detect the infecting sites beforehand, because the web changes so quickly. Moreover if say slashdot ran an add for a car brand that happend to have a marketing company hired that uses the spyware trick to get even more revenue, slashdot would quickly stop the add from running, right? Especially after getting on this blacklist. The only thing you can do is to detect, and prevent infections.
do some asynchronous juggling to be efficient.
Ehhhm. This is exactly the complexity that you're trying to avoid in a microkernel.
You want central services to take the complexity out of the different drivers.
Whenever I can, I always make an image-copy of their harddisk, the way it was.
You say I wrecked it? OK. I'll put it back the way it was.
Roger.
If you want to implement the windows API, you start with the important functions. The docs state pretty clearly what they are supposed to do. However, there simply is SO MUCH API that it takes a lot of time to implement. Moreover, Microsoft isn't perfect. So there are bugs. Some of them don't cause a crash, but just cause the API to do something unexpected for someone who only read the specs and/or has worked with the function. Among the large set of applications for windows, there is bound to be a couple where a programmer found: Hey, this is useful, I can use this. So, you have to implement the bugs as well.
Then, microsoft doesn't like to throw away old APIs. So, you have to implement 30 years of APIs....
All in all this project is much more complex than for instance building a good wordprocessor from scratch.
Why, yes I do.. :-)
If we add in a second read-write head assembly, you have to also add a second preamplifier, read-channel chip, voice coil driver etc etc. Quite a lot of electronics also needs duplicating. This would substantially increase the cost for the drive. With the lower sales-volume of these special high-performance drives, the end-user price would more than double. And then people would buy two cheaper drives, instead of one expensive one. If you put them in RAID0 (striping) configuration, you have almost the performance of the suggested two-head unit, and twice the capacity.
The one thing that the two-head unit is better in is the average rotational latency: Only 2.1 ms. However, in real life, the average seek time of 8ms also should be factored in: You have only a 20% increase in performance (12.1ms -> 10.1ms), and not the factor-of-two you would have hoped for.
What MIGHT one day happen, however is that the read channel and preamp electronics become cheap enough that they can add two for almost the same price. In that case, you can have multiple heads on one arm provide data at once. Wether this is feasable with respect to alignment, I don't know.
The outside didn't change much. But inside, some things have changed. The inductive read-head has been replaced by a GMR head: better bandwidth, better sensitivity. And nowadays everybody is changing to perpendicular recording.
It won't matter what format a disc is recorded in because it will play anywhere.
This could become true. Or maybe not. It strongly depends on a technical point: Can the hardware to do both be integrated into one apparatus cheaply? Apparently for DVD-R vs DVD+R the answer is yes.
The author of the article mis-interpreted Seagate's latency figure. Seagate means: "Average rotational latency". This can be calculated from: 60 seconds/minute / 7200 RPM / 2 = 0.00416 s = 4.16ms.
Oficially you should add in the controller overhead, and most likely the time to read a sector (it's unlikely they pass-through the sector: in theory you can start to send the sector to the host before you've read it completely, but this complicates things as when the CRC doesn't match, you have to cancel the data sent to the host!), but if you do the math, these are negligable compared to the 4.16 ms.
I don't expect anything "special" to happen in the "seek times" area. They will be within 10% from the slightly older drives. Either up to 10% better because they did find a way to improve seek times a bit. Or up to 10% worse because the higher density requires a longer settling time, but this is less likely than a small improvement.
FYI, I checked one of the patents and it is the same as claimed on the web page.
The date is also correct: 1935. This means that the patent expired in or before 1955, and everybody is now free to use it.
Fully agreed: The theoretical bandwidth of optical links is unbelievably high compared to electrical links (Note that 100MHz plus electrical busses on motherboards were thought impossible about a decade ago).
We still live in a 3D space. Moore predicts exponential growth. We'll hit the limit that 3D space imposes within the next century or so.
Visible light can handle a bandwidth of up to about 600 thousand gigagherz. If you can handle that optically, fine. However currently we need to generate the information stream for a communications link electrically, and we're still limited by the electronics.
Sure, Optical computers have been proven in the labs. But have they been scaled to practical sizes? In electronics we can handle about 10^8 gates on something the size of 2cm^2. Can you point me to an optical computer having more than 10^3 gates? 10^4? 10^5? Sure, Optical routers exist. But that's just switching. Not really computing. So, for something that's optical already, having a couple of optical gates comes in handy. But for computing it has yet to become useful.
But we're wandering off the topic. In the end, the 3D space, and its associated minimum latencies are going to kill Moore's law.
[i]the interconnect barrier threatens Moore's law[/i]
Terribly sorry to rain on your parade, but the fact that we live in a 3D world with a speedlimit limits computing speed eventually.
Electrical signals in wires travel (according to rough measurements I did about two decades ago) at about 0.3c (a third of the lightspeed). Light travels at 0.6c (in glass).
So you win about a factor of two by moving to light, provided you use fibreglass to channel the communications to the right place.
If you Aim lasers through normal air, you can win a factor of three. Wow. That might extend Moore another 2 years, but it does not solve the fact that physics limits Moore eventually.
In theory, "computing nodes" can be connected using for example hypercubes. 4 nodes form a square with max communications distance of 2, 8 nodes form a cube, with max distance of 3. And so on.
Wether these "computing nodes" are complete computers, elements of a parallel system, or just elements of a CPU, doesn't matter.
As the dimension of the hypercube increases, the physical placement of the nodes in 3D-space means that the communications links between the nodes starts to increase. The Lightspeed limits theoretical computation speed to what you might expect of a 3D structure.
Why and when are rules ignored?
Here in the Netherlands, there has been a series of cases where sensitive information has leaked through stolen/lost hardware, and every time some official was breaking the rules.
The rules were unworkable: DO NOT TAKE YOUR WORK HOME.
So, no reading of a report on the train, no after-dinner report writing. Nothing. Ambitious people break the rules to perform better. So they take stuff home anyway. As long as the hardware doesn't get stolen, nothing is noticed. Big publicity when sensitive information makes it to the press.
But if they were to start policing the policy, a lot of the ambitious people would eventually give in to the rules, and simply watch tv after dinner, and read the newspaper on the train. Results? Productivity drop.
Philips was thinking about this back in '90. (As in guys in the lab assigned to the project, results in a year, maybe two).
Phew. Finally....
The '98%' was his way of saying "comes a long way in the right direction". In practise, if bzip2 gets you an additional 10%, the shannon limit might be 20% from gzip, or 10% from bzip2.
Of course, gzip and bzip work on a byte-level. Suppose the data is much more regular on a 9bits-per-word level. In that case, any reasonable compression program will fall a factor of 8 short of the theoretical limit. Recompile gzip for 9bit words, and voila!
There is a field of science called information theory. It studies "information content" and things around that like datatransmission and ECC codes.
If I have a 10Mbyte file, it usually contains way less than 80 million bits of information. So, compression programs like "zip" and "gzip" can make the file smaller.
The theoretical limit however is the actual information content. Suppose an information theorist analyses your file and conlcudes that your file contains 40 million bits, then gzip or any other compression program will have a hard time compressing the file beyond that. (unless the compression program "cheats" and compresses the file as: "Rogers 10Mb file #1", and has the original file elsewhere)
Now, in practise I have a 440Mb spam-archive which compresses to 108Mb. This is only a factor of 4. If you realize that most spams are delivered tens of times, it must be possible to do a lot better. So if someone claims to be able to compress my spam mailbox a lot better, I can believe them.
Information content in mp3's and images is near 100%. If anybody claims to be able to compress more than 20% out of one of these, they are full of crap on theoretical grounds.
If you copy a font, and try to register the bit-by-bit copy, you're in for trouble. Everybody knows that.
So when you copy(steal) a font, you need to change a couple of things before you claim it as original work. And, I think that if you go in, change the 1, 8, and a couple of letters, this should not be considered proof of original work.
Now, I think that "some ratios" being the same is not valid "proof" of the fonts being identical. I could decide that I like some of the proportions in frutiger, and use those for my font. If I design the letters myself that should not prove I copied it.