You be the judge. I would consider a factor of 80x improvement in IO/s over the best HDD, and 2x your best competitor (yourself) "wicked-fast door blowing screams" if you're looking at transaction processing for a database or other IOPS bound application. This is not the review that's overzealous about a 4% processor speed improvement. Stripe that across 5 or 10 of these bad boys and the upside potential is, um, noticable? If we can't get a little enthusiastic about that what does merit it? A flame paint job and racing stripes? A Ferrari logo? The next step up from here is RAMdisk. Yeah, it's not going to make Vista boot in 4 seconds. Is that the metric that's driving you?
Capacity is still lacking at 32GB, but obviously they could expand it now and 64GB will be available next year. Naturally if they wanted to make a 3.5" form factor they could saturate the bandwidth of the interface and stuff 320GB into a drive with no problem if they wanted to court the folks who can (and most definitely would) pay $10,000 for that premium product (HINT HINT). Obviously the price bites, but they can get it for this, so why not? Naturally for challenging environments (vibration, rotation, dropping under use, space applications, heat) it's a big win all the way around. Isn't SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) due soon?
I think I foresaw some of these improvements here some years ago. I'm glad to see them in use. If I were to look forward again I would say that it might be time to abandon the euphemism of a hard disk drive for flash storage, at least for high end devices. You can already reconfigure these chips in the above mentioned 320GB drive to saturate a PCIe 2.0 x4 link (20Gigatransfers/sec), which makes a nice attach for Infiniband DDR x4. The SATA interface allows a synthetic abstraction that is useful, but the useful part is that it's an abstraction -- you don't need to continue the cylinder/block/sector metaphor once you accept the utility of the abstraction.
Stories that are told that are retold become our culture. If the stories are owned and cannot be retold they might be lucrative, but they can't become culture. Copyright is the theft of culture from the future. Copyright must be abolished because as implemented it prevents the fair use of works long in the public domain.
This is a good place to thank Larry for keeping up the good fight. God Bless you Larry, I hope you win and I'm glad to continue to donate to your cause.
While I'm well educated in the Road to War, I don't think this is it. I think this is merely a military responding to a known threat. They are being attacked by known external entities via seeded USB devices, and that attack is being amplified by ignorance on the part of the rank and file thinking these devices are innocuous or can be made so.
Opsec has been pretty lax. If you read the USB spec, you will get that any device plugged into it can write to arbitrary memory locations. It's wide open. A device that can PWN a milspec computer that allows mounting of USB devices should take more than a few days of idle speculation to design at this point in history.
The military definition of trust: the access you grant another to cause you harm.
Given the above definition and a clear reading of the standard, the availability of USB and Firewire ports on military use computers is an oversight that should have and could have been prevented.
WRT granting Internet access to military computers, I don't know. Intuitively it would be better if the systems used for command and control were electrically and signally separated from the systems that were used for general purposes. It was once thus, back in my day with the military. The Internet and the subset that was once Milnet have grown far more reachable since then. This is handy for some, a screaming disaster for others.
Fortunately for them their development efforts did yield a number of patents which they can exploit for profits when somebody else produces the electric car, without further effort or investment on their part.
This is why patents are evil. They prevent progress.
Limited production '71 electric vehicle. Low miles, no crash damage!!! Stored outdoors in desert climate, never flooded. As is / Where is: Shipping is not available on this item - buyer must pick up within 30 days of auction closing or will be resold as abandoned. Paypal or cashier's check only.
At long last Novell and Sun have the opportunity to kiss and make up over their little Open Solaris argument. Or not.
Will they? Sun paid millions for the right to open Solaris to a company that was suing Novell. That money was rightly Novell's, as the right was theirs to sell and not SCO's. That money prolonged the unjust suit for a long time, costing Novell more than just the lost revenue, but also legal fees for their own lawyers to defend against the very lawyers funded by Sun's investment.
This should be interesting, but we're not going to get the real story - just the announcement. How forgiving is Novell?
Part of the wonderful things about research and exploration is that it pays off fabulously, in unpredictable ways. We cannot be sure that the answers to the "eliminate hunger" and "cure cancer" questions are not to be found on the road to Mars. They might in fact be found in no other way.
We got a lot more from the moon missions than Tang.
Actually, let's get a really big nuke power plant and a bunch of parallel next-gen ion drives. I bet we could push the ISS into Mars orbit. It would be more useful there than as as fireworks display, which is the current plan.
They heyday of VBA viruses is over, though. Even MS Office programs no longer inherently trust VBA code. Unless its stored in a trusted location. And finding out which locations are trusted and putting your code in there is like second level hard.
Before executable compression became the norm a few viruses, some quite large, compressed the infected executable and made it smaller even with the viral payload.
By your metric those viruses would have negative size. Excessive compression was abandoned and subsequent versions compressed just enough or padded to hit the original filesize because file size change was a detection heuristic. There were a few that could do this and pad data bytes to hit a checksum value based on checksum algorithms used by common AV programs. This was a long time ago though. File size change is still a metric, but AV checksums have become more sophisticated.
The smallest virus I've seen reported was trivialow.13, at 13 bytes. I don't have a sample, though.
This is because your SATA drive is supposed to take a nap now and then, for thermal reasons. This was an XP bug they fixed in Vista. Your network card needs frequent naps too obviously. Other than that, and video, Vista just screams - when it's not swapping.
If Vista were actually doing more for the user than XP, then people wouldn't be quite so upset.
Sure they would. As I noted right here even before the thing was released, Vista is necessarily different from XP. If it were not, there would be no reason for people to switch. And any difference, no matter how small, is an issue.
People had a lot of time -- seven years? to pad their XP nests. They bought a lot of software that works with it, some of it to cover its flaws, some of it to do needed work and there's no way even a good fraction of that is going to work on release day. They bought a lot of hardware that works with XP and it's a foregone conclusion that no system that's sufficiently different is going to run all that stuff. A great many neurons expired in achieving mastery of XP, its quirks, its foibles, its methods. Every new way of doing things makes those sacrificed neurons wasted. Most importantly every individual has had enough time to develop a fondness for enough of these things that the certainty they will have to give some of them up is going to induce some resistance to change.
They should have launched something sooner. Even if it was even less good. It would have muddied the waters some.
You and the OP were incredibly insightful. If we create a system that is aware of itself, its needs and that can create wants; if it can interact with us in ways that express to us these needs, these wants, this awareness then really who are we to judge whether or not it's "conscious"?
As has been noted in fiction often, we should take great care when working on such things.
What is the business case for this for Microsoft? Anyone know? This seems like an area where an executive decided it was simply unacceptable for Windows not to play in this space.
That's exactly right. Bragging rights. They get to say their platform can scale, and that 1% of the gee-whiz propeller heads that really know their stuff enough to build the world's most powerful supercomputers recognize the advantages of their platform.
Given the targeted nature of their involvement, a critical eye might look to the methods used to influence those propeller heads. In HPC as in national government the motivation is not perfectly on Total Cost of Ownership and value for price, and even when it truly is there are a few places on Earth where it's permissible to skew that metric a bit by pricing your per-node price seriously into the negative numbers. China might even be such a place. Which would open questions about Microsoft subsidizing high technology in China. Which might invite other questions about what China is actually doing with a computer powerful enough to more perfectly model nuclear explosions. It might be politically sensitive to deny China such a device, but paying for it? That would be... unsavory.
And 1% bragging rights is better than none, right? I've been one of the guilty ones who've pointed out over and again that Windows isn't ready for heavy lifting, as evidenced by its absence from this list.
The amazing story here is that in June 1999 Unix owned 498 of the top500 and Linux is well on its way to hit near that mark in only 10 years. Linux added 12 systems to hit 439 and eating share from every other category. If it gains another 12 in June that's 452. There's a good chance it will do better, but it's not likely to hit 498 next year, or even the year after.
The reasons why antivirus software exists is because Microsoft software security uniformly sucks, almost all software for the platform is pathetically vulnerable to exploitation and people don't patch it - mostly because the patches themselves are often toxic and because the patching system is so archaic every program needs its own update monitor and installer, each with permission to update software on the box and each subject to its own vulnerabilities. People also don't patch because many of them are using pirated windows or other software and are leery of getting the WGA virus, so they don't patch and become a persistent blight on the global network.
Microsoft making an antivirus isn't going to solve any of these problems, and Microsoft making the quality of antivirus software that matches their anti-malicious software effort will make things worse. It will, however, drive yet another category of software partner out of business. It's good to have goals, I guess.
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And neither one is as reliable or has the IOPS of three standard SATA drives that cost 50% of the price for 10x the storage.
Math. It's a wonderful thing. Use it with your salesman.
It's
s/cache/cachet/g
you grammar dweeb. This is slashdot, not CompuServe.
So... this is what it's like to have my own AC troll. It's cute.
SAS has taken over SCSI's role as the drive of choice to sell to customers who are willing to overpay for the cache of owning a premium product.
You could have guessed that from the full name: Serial Attached SCSI. I guess if you can't buy a new media technology from Sony, this'll work.
You be the judge. I would consider a factor of 80x improvement in IO/s over the best HDD, and 2x your best competitor (yourself) "wicked-fast door blowing screams" if you're looking at transaction processing for a database or other IOPS bound application. This is not the review that's overzealous about a 4% processor speed improvement. Stripe that across 5 or 10 of these bad boys and the upside potential is, um, noticable? If we can't get a little enthusiastic about that what does merit it? A flame paint job and racing stripes? A Ferrari logo? The next step up from here is RAMdisk. Yeah, it's not going to make Vista boot in 4 seconds. Is that the metric that's driving you?
Capacity is still lacking at 32GB, but obviously they could expand it now and 64GB will be available next year. Naturally if they wanted to make a 3.5" form factor they could saturate the bandwidth of the interface and stuff 320GB into a drive with no problem if they wanted to court the folks who can (and most definitely would) pay $10,000 for that premium product (HINT HINT). Obviously the price bites, but they can get it for this, so why not? Naturally for challenging environments (vibration, rotation, dropping under use, space applications, heat) it's a big win all the way around. Isn't SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) due soon?
I think I foresaw some of these improvements here some years ago. I'm glad to see them in use. If I were to look forward again I would say that it might be time to abandon the euphemism of a hard disk drive for flash storage, at least for high end devices. You can already reconfigure these chips in the above mentioned 320GB drive to saturate a PCIe 2.0 x4 link (20Gigatransfers/sec), which makes a nice attach for Infiniband DDR x4. The SATA interface allows a synthetic abstraction that is useful, but the useful part is that it's an abstraction -- you don't need to continue the cylinder/block/sector metaphor once you accept the utility of the abstraction.
If you can get these devices distributed throughout Mexico you can crush their feeble electricity distribution infrastructure.
Plan, through, think cunning.
Stories that are told that are retold become our culture. If the stories are owned and cannot be retold they might be lucrative, but they can't become culture. Copyright is the theft of culture from the future. Copyright must be abolished because as implemented it prevents the fair use of works long in the public domain.
This is a good place to thank Larry for keeping up the good fight. God Bless you Larry, I hope you win and I'm glad to continue to donate to your cause.
Four years from now $50M might be a lot of money. Or it might be enough to buy a single sheet of toilet paper.
While I'm well educated in the Road to War, I don't think this is it. I think this is merely a military responding to a known threat. They are being attacked by known external entities via seeded USB devices, and that attack is being amplified by ignorance on the part of the rank and file thinking these devices are innocuous or can be made so.
Opsec has been pretty lax. If you read the USB spec, you will get that any device plugged into it can write to arbitrary memory locations. It's wide open. A device that can PWN a milspec computer that allows mounting of USB devices should take more than a few days of idle speculation to design at this point in history.
The military definition of trust: the access you grant another to cause you harm.
Given the above definition and a clear reading of the standard, the availability of USB and Firewire ports on military use computers is an oversight that should have and could have been prevented.
WRT granting Internet access to military computers, I don't know. Intuitively it would be better if the systems used for command and control were electrically and signally separated from the systems that were used for general purposes. It was once thus, back in my day with the military. The Internet and the subset that was once Milnet have grown far more reachable since then. This is handy for some, a screaming disaster for others.
Fortunately for them their development efforts did yield a number of patents which they can exploit for profits when somebody else produces the electric car, without further effort or investment on their part.
This is why patents are evil. They prevent progress.
Limited production '71 electric vehicle. Low miles, no crash damage!!! Stored outdoors in desert climate, never flooded. As is / Where is: Shipping is not available on this item - buyer must pick up within 30 days of auction closing or will be resold as abandoned. Paypal or cashier's check only.
At long last Novell and Sun have the opportunity to kiss and make up over their little Open Solaris argument. Or not.
Will they? Sun paid millions for the right to open Solaris to a company that was suing Novell. That money was rightly Novell's, as the right was theirs to sell and not SCO's. That money prolonged the unjust suit for a long time, costing Novell more than just the lost revenue, but also legal fees for their own lawyers to defend against the very lawyers funded by Sun's investment.
This should be interesting, but we're not going to get the real story - just the announcement. How forgiving is Novell?
Water ice is a wonderful construction material. Solid as stone and self-sealing at reasonable depths.
Part of the wonderful things about research and exploration is that it pays off fabulously, in unpredictable ways. We cannot be sure that the answers to the "eliminate hunger" and "cure cancer" questions are not to be found on the road to Mars. They might in fact be found in no other way.
We got a lot more from the moon missions than Tang.
Valentine Michael Smith?
Weren't you born there?
No, no. It's right there in the SATA spec, Section 7.3.b: Read/Write head thermal nap interval.
Actually, let's get a really big nuke power plant and a bunch of parallel next-gen ion drives. I bet we could push the ISS into Mars orbit. It would be more useful there than as as fireworks display, which is the current plan.
That's what Detroit wants this year. If we gave it to NASA instead I would consider the money better spent.
And if they threw in the rest of the 350 Billion they haven't stolen yet in the TARP, I could go for that too.
I bet with 400B NASA could come up with an electric car. I doubt Detroit could.
They heyday of VBA viruses is over, though. Even MS Office programs no longer inherently trust VBA code. Unless its stored in a trusted location. And finding out which locations are trusted and putting your code in there is like second level hard.
Before executable compression became the norm a few viruses, some quite large, compressed the infected executable and made it smaller even with the viral payload.
By your metric those viruses would have negative size. Excessive compression was abandoned and subsequent versions compressed just enough or padded to hit the original filesize because file size change was a detection heuristic. There were a few that could do this and pad data bytes to hit a checksum value based on checksum algorithms used by common AV programs. This was a long time ago though. File size change is still a metric, but AV checksums have become more sophisticated.
The smallest virus I've seen reported was trivialow.13, at 13 bytes. I don't have a sample, though.
This is because your SATA drive is supposed to take a nap now and then, for thermal reasons. This was an XP bug they fixed in Vista. Your network card needs frequent naps too obviously. Other than that, and video, Vista just screams - when it's not swapping.
If Vista were actually doing more for the user than XP, then people wouldn't be quite so upset.
Sure they would. As I noted right here even before the thing was released, Vista is necessarily different from XP. If it were not, there would be no reason for people to switch. And any difference, no matter how small, is an issue.
People had a lot of time -- seven years? to pad their XP nests. They bought a lot of software that works with it, some of it to cover its flaws, some of it to do needed work and there's no way even a good fraction of that is going to work on release day. They bought a lot of hardware that works with XP and it's a foregone conclusion that no system that's sufficiently different is going to run all that stuff. A great many neurons expired in achieving mastery of XP, its quirks, its foibles, its methods. Every new way of doing things makes those sacrificed neurons wasted. Most importantly every individual has had enough time to develop a fondness for enough of these things that the certainty they will have to give some of them up is going to induce some resistance to change.
They should have launched something sooner. Even if it was even less good. It would have muddied the waters some.
You and the OP were incredibly insightful. If we create a system that is aware of itself, its needs and that can create wants; if it can interact with us in ways that express to us these needs, these wants, this awareness then really who are we to judge whether or not it's "conscious"?
As has been noted in fiction often, we should take great care when working on such things.
What is the business case for this for Microsoft? Anyone know? This seems like an area where an executive decided it was simply unacceptable for Windows not to play in this space.
That's exactly right. Bragging rights. They get to say their platform can scale, and that 1% of the gee-whiz propeller heads that really know their stuff enough to build the world's most powerful supercomputers recognize the advantages of their platform.
Given the targeted nature of their involvement, a critical eye might look to the methods used to influence those propeller heads. In HPC as in national government the motivation is not perfectly on Total Cost of Ownership and value for price, and even when it truly is there are a few places on Earth where it's permissible to skew that metric a bit by pricing your per-node price seriously into the negative numbers. China might even be such a place. Which would open questions about Microsoft subsidizing high technology in China. Which might invite other questions about what China is actually doing with a computer powerful enough to more perfectly model nuclear explosions. It might be politically sensitive to deny China such a device, but paying for it? That would be... unsavory.
And 1% bragging rights is better than none, right? I've been one of the guilty ones who've pointed out over and again that Windows isn't ready for heavy lifting, as evidenced by its absence from this list.
The amazing story here is that in June 1999 Unix owned 498 of the top500 and Linux is well on its way to hit near that mark in only 10 years. Linux added 12 systems to hit 439 and eating share from every other category. If it gains another 12 in June that's 452. There's a good chance it will do better, but it's not likely to hit 498 next year, or even the year after.
The reasons why antivirus software exists is because Microsoft software security uniformly sucks, almost all software for the platform is pathetically vulnerable to exploitation and people don't patch it - mostly because the patches themselves are often toxic and because the patching system is so archaic every program needs its own update monitor and installer, each with permission to update software on the box and each subject to its own vulnerabilities. People also don't patch because many of them are using pirated windows or other software and are leery of getting the WGA virus, so they don't patch and become a persistent blight on the global network.
Microsoft making an antivirus isn't going to solve any of these problems, and Microsoft making the quality of antivirus software that matches their anti-malicious software effort will make things worse. It will, however, drive yet another category of software partner out of business. It's good to have goals, I guess.
Mr. Obama: "And now Mr. Ballmer, let me show you my fully armed antitrust division."
AV companies: "I can haz bailout?" Paulson: "No can haz. Not yours."
But will there be a Linux version?
Of course it requires WGA. Why wouldn't it require WGA?
Somebody stop me please.