Don't you think it might depend on whether the interruption is caused by outside forces or not? I doubt too many of our ancestors had beepers (or whatever you use now).
When I backpack I rarely sleep uninterrupted. Around 2-3am I'll wake partially and then sleep lightly from then on. I feel fine the next day.
I wonder if the outdoors experience in our ancestral past is the source of the two-sleep periods TFA mentions.
After all, somebody had to get up and feed the fire, and maybe re-heat another chunk of the prior-day's catch for a snack, take a pee in the bushes, throw rocks at the Hyaenas, and before you know it the whole camp is awake. Military traditions from the first organized armies carried this forward with the changing of the guard, more peeing in more bushes, fire tending, debauching the POWs, and checking the horses. Flock tending, crop guarding, bush watering, and debauchery over the ages tend to train our brain to this two-sleep pattern.
The history and quality of beds over the ages suggests some of this waking up and walking around was just to shake off a few bugs that were feasting, or re-arrange the straw for more comfort.
Now as for backpacking, sleeping on the hard ground after a day schlepping a pack up hill and over dale might just cause a lot of sore muscles and compressed flesh due to that rock underneath the foam pad. Not big enough to get up and move it, but just big enough to keep you awake. And that bladder which, while filling, has not yet reached emergency stage yet also keeps the bushes coming to mind.
You could get up, water the bushes, move the rock, and take a ibuprofen, but then you would sleep so soundly that you would be eaten by wolves before you awoke again.
Your mom is going to root her android phone, or buy one not even sold in this country to avoid the Microsoft Tax?
Face it, you are arguing absurdities. Microsoft OWNS SD card space. Period. How do you get your camera to read/write ext3? Just stop please, you've already made an idiot of yourself. Anything further would be pointless.
Your own quote pretty much admits there is a standard. Accepted by the manufacturing association, documented on wiki, and yet you hold out because the word "standard" followed by some random digits does not appear?
What makes a standard? An act of law? A UN declaration? Or simply because people start acting like it exists? Your Clue: Its the latter.
You will note I said "its a standard by any useful definition". Which it is. Precisely because of the situation you've documented.
Lets face it, Microsoft has stolen a march on the entire SD card industry, by getting them to accept exFat and previously Fat32, and pre-format every card sold with one of those formats, and refusing to ship of any ext2/3/4 drivers in windows machines. With every cellphone and tablet only accepting fat32/exfat, you are pretty much forced to use it.
Who else needs to bless it before it becomes a standard in your eyes? The Pope?
The beautiful thing about standards is there is so many to choose from.
The exFAT file system used for SDXC is available on Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP (SP1 or later) with exFAT file system update (KB955704) available from the Microsoft Download Center.
Any SD card / MicroSD card over 32gig requires SDXC, which is exFat. So an entire line of hardware is tied to a Microsoft Patent. An ENTIRE LINE OF STORAGE DEVICES!!!
There are a lot of things for which MS has patents (allegedly, since every settlement is under NDA) and are using them to demand the $7.50 from B&N and all other Android devices. Standards that MS forced onto the industry, like Fat32, ExFat, MTP. The list goes on and on.
Being a standard doesn't mean much when MS patent prices are argued. So why should it mean anything now?
If you can't see thru this blatant attempt to sway public opinion while at the same time hiding its double dealing via holding foreign companies, and playing divide and conqueror together with Apple, then you learned nothing at all about Microsoft in the last two decades.
And which MS trolls modded GP to zero, when it is clearly directly on point?
Two Million is chump change for any Government Agency in California. They have that much slop in just about every department.
Nobody will notice this except the lawyers who got bitch-slapped by the Supreme Court. They may be more cautious next time the governor or the legislature decides to pass something like this, if for no other reason than protecting their good reputation.
Wait, they are lawyers, what the hell was I thinking. Where's my meds.
I don't know why but this concept gives me the creeps because we don't really understand all there is to know about genetics.
And this is different in what why when compared to meat from Cattle or Pigs, or Lettuce, or tomatoes? We really don't know all there is to know about ANYTHING, and we never will. Yet I bet you eat these things with impunity.
Interestingly enough, Tomatoes are one of the first bio-engineered foods. Originally no bigger than a berry, it had already been engineered by indigenous farmers in South America to be about the size of a large grape when the Spanish arrived. Only after it was spread to Europe was it widely cultivated, crossbred, and selected until it reached its current size. Every once in a while someone decides to make tea out of tomato leaves. Bad Idea. And we don't know All there is to Know about tomatoes yet, but we eat them by the ton.
This "We don't know all there is to know" is just another version of the rallying cry There are some things science can't explain! which is thrown out by the "back to the earth" crowd any time anything challenging is presented.
I haven't decided if this an example of the Fallacy of False Dilemma, or the Fallacy of the Appeal to Ignorance, but its pretty annoying in any case.
On a continent that goes apeshit over Genetically Modified and other Bioengineered Crops, it seems unlikely this will gain any traction in the commercial market place, at least not in the EU. On the other hand, the EU may take the stance that since this work was pioneered in the EU, it can't possibly be bad.
Now on Mars, or long space voyages this might have some appeal, especially Mars, where there is a possibility of finding water, thereby eliminating one of the heaviest component of any food product. Although unless making and transporting the necessary equipment and media takes up less room and less weight than a freezer full of hamburger this seems unlikely there as well. Chances are the growth media can be shipped dry as well, and reconstituted with distilled water from any source.
Even if the cost per pound could be brought in line with animal sources, it seems unlikely to be a rational method of food production here on earth, simply because significant portions of the meat supply would be put at risk by a simple power failure, or contaminant in the growth media.
The rest of this story will no doubt be filled with hand wringing posts over the amount of CO2 that cattle produce (something never attributed to Wildebeest herds), and how this will save the earth. The whole concept creates an intellectual conundrum for the Peta crowd. They would love to get animals off the farm, and this method presents a way forward, but having to embrace those huge corporations, and bio-engineering is probably more than they could stomach.
Essentially a throttle, but more likely a demand based system, such that non-busy processors can run at the lowest possible speed and voltage, and when work stacks up, it ramps up.
Great for the smart phone in your pocket which has nothing to do for hours at a time other than check the email and listen for calls. Since its screen is off, you really don't care how fast it does those things as long as they are just barely fast enough.
There is a great deal of "stare time" that happens when people look at computers, and the processors are spinning away all the time while you are reading this. They could just as well drop to an extremely low power state, and wait for a mouse move, finger tap, or something else.
This much we've been doing all along, for the last 20 years. But power consumption still remained high, because even simple tasks like checking the clock to see if its time to increment that digital time read out took processing power, and historically any use of the processor kept it awake at something like full power for that task.
Now, those tasks can be performed at extremely low power, without ramping up the speed. Only when the processor can't meet the demand would the system increase the voltage and speed up the chip.
Yes Intel did demo a solar cell powering a Pentium, but that was merely to make a point about the inefficiencies of near-threshold voltage (NTV) CPUs. They have no particular focus on Solar powered processors.
Near-threshold voltage (NTV) CPUs are the focus of Intel's research here. NTV transistors can switch at voltages just the threshold for the device's powered state, and CPUs made of these can idle along at extremely low voltage doing real work (slower) or they can ramp up the power and work much faster.
The idea is to have devices run at low voltages and power consumption rates that would be akin to a sleep mode in today's chips. And NTV techniques are not just limited to processors used in hand-held devices like smartphones and tablets, but to everything all the way up to exascale supercomputers, says Rattner. The important thing is that NTV techniques allow a chip's performance and power to scale as voltage scales up and down, and to do so across a wide dynamic range.
Marketing spin aside, the "near-threshold voltage" chip is quite an achievement. Intel first revealed in March 2010 that it had a prototype chip running at such low voltages, but Claremont's creators took that technology and baked it into a full IA architecture processor. Based on a Pentium core, Claremont can not only be throttled down to "within a couple of hundred millivolts of the threshold voltage of the transistors," said Intel engineer Sriram Vangal, who demoed the chip during Rattner's turn, but – equally important – it also has a high dynamic range that allows it to be cranked up to deliver ten times the low-power performance by increasing the voltage.
Once again, the Register does a better job of reporting than Techworld.
What does the number of comments have to do with modding +5?
You do realize that modders can't comment, don't you? There are many who prefer to mod over chirping in with a pointless comment.
And finally, why worry about mods on a thread that has no comments yet. All that indicates is SOME people with mod points are using them as new stories come out. There are heavy anti-google and heavy pro apple modders on/. that have dozens of accounts, and who jump quickly to mod stories and posts that fit their agenda. Give it some time and the true mod value will be attached as the rest of the community weighs in.
Personally, I would have modded it troll, because its based on total ignorance and hate, but that's just me.
writing smaller applications? Maybe, you know, stick to one thing and master it instead of spewing forth so many.
An interesting comment, but not the focus of the linked article.
Its not about the size of applications. Large reads into memory of big applications is not the problem, as this happens with sequential reads, which are very fast on the media type they were looking at.
Its the small RANDOM read/write units that cause the problem, the small sqlite database updates to databases stored on the MicroSD card that are the problem. The recommendations for placing often used sqlite databases in RAMdisk yielded a tremendous performance increase because it eliminates tons of little random read and write operations that tend to be scattered all over the microSD card. This is buried in page 10 of the Actual Research document, but pretty much glossed over in the linked article. This would require a bit of an OS re-engineering, on the part of smartphone OS designers, such as offering APIs to do much of the routine data storage that these apps all end up using. That storage would be in ram, backed up to MicroSD in a more efficient manor.
Programmers tend to heavily use the general-purpose “all-synchronous” SQLite interface for its ease of use but end up suffering from performance shortcomings. We posit that a data-oriented I/O interface would be one that enables the programmer to specify the I/O requirements n terms of its reliability, consistency, and the property of he data, i.e., temporary, permanent, or cache data, with- out worrying about how its stored underneath.
Yes, ramdisk can go away on a un-planned phone reboot, but if the RAMdisk was used as a cache, and occasionally written to disk performance would be much better, because you find these little sqlite databases used all over Android and IOS.
Now go to street view. I bet you can count 200 signaled stop lights in those same maps. Lets face it. Traffic circles are only used in a tiny percentage of all intersections,
Yeah, that works at like 3% of intersections in most big cities. The older the city, the less likely it is that you will find this. They may have the loops, but that doesn't always mean they will alter the clock for you. I've sat on loops with ZERO traffic coming from any direction and had the signals march thru their normal pattern. In many places the loops actually do nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you think it might depend on whether the interruption is caused by outside forces or not? I doubt too many of our ancestors had beepers (or whatever you use now).
All of our ancestors had bladders.
When I backpack I rarely sleep uninterrupted. Around 2-3am I'll wake partially and then sleep lightly from then on. I feel fine the next day.
I wonder if the outdoors experience in our ancestral past is the source of the two-sleep periods TFA mentions.
After all, somebody had to get up and feed the fire, and maybe re-heat another chunk of the prior-day's catch for a snack, take a pee in the bushes, throw rocks at the Hyaenas, and before you know it the whole camp is awake. Military traditions from the first organized armies carried this forward with the changing of the guard, more peeing in more bushes, fire tending, debauching the POWs, and checking the horses. Flock tending, crop guarding, bush watering, and debauchery over the ages tend to train our brain to this two-sleep pattern.
The history and quality of beds over the ages suggests some of this waking up and walking around was just to shake off a few bugs that were feasting, or re-arrange the straw for more comfort.
Now as for backpacking, sleeping on the hard ground after a day schlepping a pack up hill and over dale might just cause a lot of sore muscles and compressed flesh due to that rock underneath the foam pad. Not big enough to get up and move it, but just big enough to keep you awake. And that bladder which, while filling, has not yet reached emergency stage yet also keeps the bushes coming to mind.
You could get up, water the bushes, move the rock, and take a ibuprofen, but then you would sleep so soundly that you would be eaten by wolves before you awoke again.
Oh please stop being such a troll.
Your mom is going to root her android phone, or buy one not even sold in this country to avoid the Microsoft Tax?
Face it, you are arguing absurdities. Microsoft OWNS SD card space. Period.
How do you get your camera to read/write ext3?
Just stop please, you've already made an idiot of yourself. Anything further would be pointless.
And then what? Put that in your Cellphone/mp3 player and you get nothing!
Some Android devices will handle NTFS, but that puts us right back in Microsoft's pocket.
The entire line of SD products are, by one means or another, tied to microsoft patents. Simply hand waiving it away doesn't make it so.
What?
Your own quote pretty much admits there is a standard. Accepted by the manufacturing association, documented on wiki, and yet you hold out because the word "standard" followed by some random digits does not appear?
What makes a standard? An act of law? A UN declaration? Or simply because people start acting like it exists?
Your Clue: Its the latter.
You will note I said "its a standard by any useful definition". Which it is. Precisely because of the situation you've documented.
Lets face it, Microsoft has stolen a march on the entire SD card industry, by getting them to accept exFat and previously Fat32, and pre-format every card sold with one of those formats, and refusing to ship of any ext2/3/4 drivers in windows machines. With every cellphone and tablet only accepting fat32/exfat, you are pretty much forced to use it.
Who else needs to bless it before it becomes a standard in your eyes? The Pope?
The beautiful thing about standards is there is so many to choose from.
Sorry, but once the SD association adopted Fat32 and exFat, its a standard by any useful definition.
https://www.sdcard.org/consumers/sdxc_capabilities/using_sdxc
The exFAT file system used for SDXC is available on Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP (SP1 or later) with exFAT file system update (KB955704) available from the Microsoft Download Center.
Any SD card / MicroSD card over 32gig requires SDXC, which is exFat. So an entire line of hardware is tied to a Microsoft Patent. An ENTIRE LINE OF STORAGE DEVICES!!!
There are a lot of things for which MS has patents (allegedly, since every settlement is under NDA) and are using them to demand the $7.50 from B&N and all other Android devices. Standards that MS forced onto the industry, like Fat32, ExFat, MTP. The list goes on and on.
Being a standard doesn't mean much when MS patent prices are argued. So why should it mean anything now?
If you can't see thru this blatant attempt to sway public opinion while at the same time hiding its double dealing via holding foreign companies, and playing divide and conqueror together with Apple, then you learned nothing at all about Microsoft in the last two decades.
And which MS trolls modded GP to zero, when it is clearly directly on point?
Probably just bury them in the stationary budget. I imagine the scanners themselves are already in a tsa warehouse somewhere.
Anyone putting any stock in the actual content of a federal agency's budget is not a serious person.
Two Million is chump change for any Government Agency in California. They have that much slop in just about every department.
Nobody will notice this except the lawyers who got bitch-slapped by the Supreme Court. They may be more cautious next time the governor or the legislature decides to pass something like this, if for no other reason than protecting their good reputation.
Wait, they are lawyers, what the hell was I thinking. Where's my meds.
Been there, done that.
I like mine rare, thank you.
Seriously, grow up.
I don't know why but this concept gives me the creeps because we don't really understand all there is to know about genetics.
And this is different in what why when compared to meat from Cattle or Pigs, or Lettuce, or tomatoes? We really don't know all there is to know about ANYTHING, and we never will. Yet I bet you eat these things with impunity.
Interestingly enough, Tomatoes are one of the first bio-engineered foods. Originally no bigger than a berry, it had already been engineered by indigenous farmers in South America to be about the size of a large grape when the Spanish arrived. Only after it was spread to Europe was it widely cultivated, crossbred, and selected until it reached its current size. Every once in a while someone decides to make tea out of tomato leaves. Bad Idea. And we don't know All there is to Know about tomatoes yet, but we eat them by the ton.
This "We don't know all there is to know" is just another version of the rallying cry There are some things science can't explain! which is thrown out by the "back to the earth" crowd any time anything challenging is presented.
I haven't decided if this an example of the Fallacy of False Dilemma, or the Fallacy of the Appeal to Ignorance, but its pretty annoying in any case.
On a continent that goes apeshit over Genetically Modified and other Bioengineered Crops, it seems unlikely this will gain any traction in the commercial market place, at least not in the EU. On the other hand, the EU may take the stance that since this work was pioneered in the EU, it can't possibly be bad.
Now on Mars, or long space voyages this might have some appeal, especially Mars, where there is a possibility of finding water, thereby eliminating one of the heaviest component of any food product. Although unless making and transporting the necessary equipment and media takes up less room and less weight than a freezer full of hamburger this seems unlikely there as well. Chances are the growth media can be shipped dry as well, and reconstituted with distilled water from any source.
Even if the cost per pound could be brought in line with animal sources, it seems unlikely to be a rational method of food production here on earth, simply because significant portions of the meat supply would be put at risk by a simple power failure, or contaminant in the growth media.
The rest of this story will no doubt be filled with hand wringing posts over the amount of CO2 that cattle produce (something never attributed to Wildebeest herds), and how this will save the earth. The whole concept creates an intellectual conundrum for the Peta crowd. They would love to get animals off the farm, and this method presents a way forward, but having to embrace those huge corporations, and bio-engineering is probably more than they could stomach.
Essentially a throttle, but more likely a demand based system, such that non-busy processors can run at the lowest possible speed and voltage, and when work stacks up, it ramps up.
Great for the smart phone in your pocket which has nothing to do for hours at a time other than check the email and listen for calls.
Since its screen is off, you really don't care how fast it does those things as long as they are just barely fast enough.
There is a great deal of "stare time" that happens when people look at computers, and the processors are spinning away all the time while you are reading this. They could just as well drop to an extremely low power state, and wait for a mouse move, finger tap, or something else.
This much we've been doing all along, for the last 20 years. But power consumption still remained high, because even simple tasks like checking the clock to see if its time to increment that digital time read out took processing power, and historically any use of the processor kept it awake at something like full power for that task.
Now, those tasks can be performed at extremely low power, without ramping up the speed. Only when the processor can't meet the demand would the system increase the voltage and speed up the chip.
Yes Intel did demo a solar cell powering a Pentium, but that was merely to make a point about the inefficiencies of near-threshold voltage (NTV) CPUs. They have no particular focus on Solar powered processors.
Near-threshold voltage (NTV) CPUs are the focus of Intel's research here.
NTV transistors can switch at voltages just the threshold for the device's powered state, and CPUs made of these can idle along at extremely low voltage doing real work (slower) or they can ramp up the power and work much faster.
The Register has a much better explanation of this technology than the linked article.
The idea is to have devices run at low voltages and power consumption rates that would be akin to a sleep mode in today's chips. And NTV techniques are not just limited to processors used in hand-held devices like smartphones and tablets, but to everything all the way up to exascale supercomputers, says Rattner. The important thing is that NTV techniques allow a chip's performance and power to scale as voltage scales up and down, and to do so across a wide dynamic range.
Also a good summary here:
Marketing spin aside, the "near-threshold voltage" chip is quite an achievement. Intel first revealed in March 2010 that it had a prototype chip running at such low voltages, but Claremont's creators took that technology and baked it into a full IA architecture processor. Based on a Pentium core, Claremont can not only be throttled down to "within a couple of hundred millivolts of the threshold voltage of the transistors," said Intel engineer Sriram Vangal, who demoed the chip during Rattner's turn, but – equally important – it also has a high dynamic range that allows it to be cranked up to deliver ten times the low-power performance by increasing the voltage.
Once again, the Register does a better job of reporting than Techworld.
Even Google Execs don't use google +
http://mashable.com/2011/10/04/google-needs-to-use-google-plus/
One has to wonder just how serious your employer is about this.
grab the Diaspora source and host your own internally.
Grab your coat, and exit the building.
There are tons of collaboration packages, and even Google Docs, without the need to join a social network.
Other than Facebook itself, and Google, has anyone actually been asked to join a Social Network by their employer?
(No, Gmail does not count).
I've heard of people being asked to follow twitter, but that's hardly a social network, and its far from bidirectional.
One is enough to mod.
You are supposed to mod a comment based on its content, not score them on a curve like in grade school.
What does the number of comments have to do with modding +5?
You do realize that modders can't comment, don't you? There are many who prefer to mod over chirping in with a pointless comment.
And finally, why worry about mods on a thread that has no comments yet. All that indicates is SOME people with mod points are using them as new stories come out. There are heavy anti-google and heavy pro apple modders on /. that have dozens of accounts, and who jump quickly to mod stories and posts that fit their agenda. Give it some time and the true mod value will be attached as the rest of the community weighs in.
Personally, I would have modded it troll, because its based on total ignorance and hate, but that's just me.
One source says there are less then 1200 roundabouts in the UK.
Another source says there are more than 25000 traffic lights in the UK.
writing smaller applications? Maybe, you know, stick to one thing and master it instead of spewing forth so many .
An interesting comment, but not the focus of the linked article.
Its not about the size of applications. Large reads into memory of big applications is not the problem, as this happens with sequential reads, which are very fast on the media type they were looking at.
Its the small RANDOM read/write units that cause the problem, the small sqlite database updates to databases stored on the MicroSD card that are the problem.
The recommendations for placing often used sqlite databases in RAMdisk yielded a tremendous performance increase because it eliminates tons of little random read and write operations that tend to be scattered all over the microSD card. This is buried in page 10 of the Actual Research document, but pretty much glossed over in the linked article. This would require a bit of an OS re-engineering, on the part of smartphone OS designers, such as offering APIs to do much of the routine data storage that these apps all end up using. That storage would be in ram, backed up to MicroSD in a more efficient manor.
Programmers tend to heavily use the general-purpose
“all-synchronous” SQLite interface for its ease of use but
end up suffering from performance shortcomings. We
posit that a data-oriented I/O interface would be one that
enables the programmer to specify the I/O requirements
n terms of its reliability, consistency, and the property of
he data, i.e., temporary, permanent, or cache data, with-
out worrying about how its stored underneath.
Yes, ramdisk can go away on a un-planned phone reboot, but if the RAMdisk was used as a cache, and occasionally written to disk performance would be much better, because you find these little sqlite databases used all over Android and IOS.
"Rare" is by definition a relative term.
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/rare
Now go to street view. I bet you can count 200 signaled stop lights in those same maps.
Lets face it. Traffic circles are only used in a tiny percentage of all intersections,
Compared to Stop Signaled intersections? Check your facts.
Yeah, that works at like 3% of intersections in most big cities. The older the city, the less likely it is that you will find this. They may have the loops, but that doesn't always mean they will alter the clock for you. I've sat on loops with ZERO traffic coming from any direction and had the signals march thru their normal pattern. In many places the loops actually do nothing.