In and around NYC, they have flat screen panels in a lot of delis that display advertising as well. However, I don't remember the ones in NYC having sound, so they weren't that annoying and actually rather nifty.
6-10Mb/sec is pretty standard for long term average use (such as decrypting a block of files) on the Promise RAID5 card (ATA/100 drives). I've seen it peak as high as 13-15Mb/sec (doing pure reads). All depends on how sequential/random your data access pattern is (and whether you're weighted more towards reads or writes). The amount of memory in the box also makes a big difference.
My video capture box can push 72Mb/sec doing sequential reads, but real work performance is usually more around 15-20Mb/sec. The video capture box uses the PCI Promise ATA/100 RAID1 card connected to a pair of 7200rpm IBM ATA/100 drives. (Comparable to your Adaptec 1200a in RAID1 mode).
Anyway, the Promise card is a lot better the then old craptastic Adaptec IDE RAID card which allowed you to connect (4) 33Mhz IDE drives. Performance on that (even with max cache memory) was only around 500Kb/sec. Since then, I've been very skeptical of the Adaptec IDE RAID cards.
And to put the numbers in perspective, on our dedicated server down at the server farm, I get 40-55Mb/sec raw sequential reads, with real-world performance down around 20Mb/sec. I'm assuming those drives are 10,000rpm and the drives are setup as RAID1.
All of these values were taken from a 5 minute average (sustained throughput) once the benchmark program had settled down and the cache/buffers were filled.
Hopefully, the standards bodies will settle on a standard way of validating SMTP from fields.
DMP, DRIP, RMX, SMTP+SPF are all ideas that allow destination SMTP servers to gain some assurance that e-mail purporting to be from a particular domain is actually from that domain.
I've seen the cluster of failures as well. When one drive goes in the array, a second one is often sure to follow.
Which means... not only should you be running RAID5, but you should also have either a hot-spare drive in the array, or a ready-to-go drive boxed and ready for installation. (You did opt to install hot-swap bays, such as the ones Promise makes?)
The bigger risk for this yokel, is that he's trying to put (3) 3.5" HDs into (2) 5.25" bays. I actually have a bay cooler that lets me do it (from dirtcheapdrives). However, even with the fan running, I long ago decided that it was a very bad idea to pack those drives that close together. So now I just install (2) drives in that device.
He's almost guaranteed to lose the entire array within (6) months if he's running 7200rpm drives that are packed into a case like sardines. Better luck if he uses 5400rpm drives that run cooler. (5400rpm drives make great USB enclosure drives because they run cooler and air flow in a USB drive enclosure is usually sub-par.)
Promise also makes a (6) wire SATA RAID card that supports RAID0/1/5 as well as hot spares. I have the ATA/100 version of the card with 128Mb cache and I get 6-10 Mbytes/sec of throughput. (Real world usage according to PerfMon with an interval of 120sec.)
Anytime you're doing large arrays like this, you need to have a hot spare and you also need to have some sort of generational backups. (For when the O/S decides to randomly encrypt around 1/4 of the files on your 275Gb file system.)
Promise also makes an (8) drive, external RAID case that holds (8) IDE drives and outputs to a SCSI connector. That lets you get around 1.3-1.5Tb for around $4500 (total cost).
Simpler solution then this (if you have only 1 machine, which is most folks).
(1) USB HD (120Gb are around $200)
(1) license for Second Copy 2000 ($20)
Hook the USB HD up to your system, install SC2000 and configure it to keep 8 versions of files.
If you have an older HD laying around, USB HD enclosures are around $50-75, which might mean that you can do it for under $100.
The personal file server is a nice idea, but unless they're doing RAID1 (preferably with a hot-spare), I can't see it as being any better then leaving the files on the user's machines. (Better 2 small baskets then 1 large basket.)
Getting to your files from outside your firewall sounds good... until you realize that what you can do, a hacker can do twice as easily. Better to carry CD media, DVD media, USB key-fob, USB HD, iPod, or just get a laptop and carry that around.
Funny thing is... crippled copy-protected CDs will actually make me less likely to buy new music.
Why? Because I rip all of my CDs to MP3 to listen to when and where I like. By eliminating ease-of-use in converting my CDs to MP3s, they tilt me towards either not buying new music, or just taping the music off of the radio.
Even better, they sell one with the little pointer nub in the middle of the keyboard. You can also plug a regular PS/2 mouse into a port on the keyboard (allowing you to use both at the same time).
Most of my work is done on a Toshiba Tecra laptop with one of those little nubbies - and for coding and other hands-on-keyboard tasks, it's just enough pointer so that you don't take your fingers off the home row. (I have an external USB mouse hooked up at the same time for instances where the nubby pointer is too limiting.)
Which brings me back to why I bought one of the keyboards with the nubby in the middle. When working on the rest of my systems at home, I find that I've become spoiled by having the ability to manipulate the mouse without taking my hands off the keyboard. (In fact, I'll probably buy another keyboard early next year for my other desktop system.)
The sprint phone looks very sweet... my Kyocera SmartPhone (CDMA/Palm) is starting to get up there in age and I've been starting to worry about what I'm going to replace it with.
I like the design of the Sprint too where the flip-open design takes care of protecting the screen.
(shrug)... but the Kyocera Palm/cell phone that I've used for about 2.5 years only needs charged about every 2-5 days depending on usage.
I'm so not going to be a happy camper when this device bites the dust. Having the cell phone combined with the PDA is just too useful, even if the form factor is larger then just a cell phone.
Hmmm, reminds me of the bad ol' days of early internet dial-up. If you weren't using Windows, you got no support (and sometimes couldn't run the software needed to connect to the network unless you knew the geeky way around).
Frankly, I think the onus lies both on the shoulders of Microsoft and the standards bodies. MS because after 2 years have proven they still don't know how to write secure code. Standards bodies because they like to hem and haw over the little things until the cows get blown away in the tornado.
MSBlaster would have had less of an effect if defaulted to leaving ports closed and turning on the firewall by default.
E-mail worms would have less of an effect if reverse-MX proposals were in place and working. (Sure, the e-mail might have just be routed then through the official outbound SMTP server... but at least then you have a chokepoint that is more likely to be within the control of the admins responsible for the machine spewing out the garbage.)
Fines are a bad idea given the current technology's implementation (trusting model, low authentication).
Server-signing might be a bit over-kill for the spam killing job. (May be too expensive CPU-wise for most servers to implement?)
One attack that I can think of involves stealing the private key and setting up a rogue server. Another would be to just infiltrate the server and turn it into a zombie.
The first attack is more easily thwarted if there is some sort of reverse-MX/DNS lookup system so that you can check whether e-mail from a given IP address (or system) is authorized to send e-mail for that domain. Such a system needs to provide (2) pieces of information: (a) does this domain have a list of which IPs are allowed to send e-mail and (b) is a particular IP authorized.
I agree that digital signing of e-mail between servers is useful, but DNS and source-IP information needs to be part of the equation to make the attacks more difficult.
I just saw an article recently (last week) that pondered the question of whether the EZD system will ever be economically viable.
I'm guessing that (a) EZDs are more expensive to make and (b) the business model assumed pricing of $20-$40 for a regular DVD. The price given was $7 for a EZD (which I'm guessing is the price at which it makes a good profit). The goal was to trade convenience (short life span) by competing on price (1/3 to 1/2 cost of a regular DVD).
Now that regular DVD prices are dropping below the $20 (and $10) marks... it doesn't leave much room for a crippled product to compete based on price. They would have to sell EZDs at around $3 to compete favorably with regular DVDs selling at $10 - and I'm not sure they can price that low. Frankly, I dislike the EZD format from a somewhat-uninformed ecological PoV, so I'm glad to see it squeezed out of the market before it can get off the ground.
I also agree with the poster who says that if the price for a bad movie is $10 or less, people are much more willing to say "eh, we'll give it a watching" rather then go through the effort of pirating a copy. Most people prefer to be aboveboard and legal - unless the requirements for staying legal are onerous. (Artificially high CD/DVD prices.)
It's not so much that they keep it in an outhouse out of preference... the preference is that the phone is not in the main residential building/house. Thus if they have a barn, they're just as likely to put the phone there so long as it's far enough away from the house.
The amish that my family has bought outbuildings from in the past has their phone installed in a barn.
It's also possible that someone heard outbuilding (which is any building not attached to the main house) and confused it with outhouse.
As others have said, Blogger allows you to publish the blog's HTML files to another website via FTP. Where you can then FTP it down to your local machine for archival. (Some of us paranoids go one step farther and copy the HTML files into a CVS system.)
All (4) of those perform pretty much identically, with various trade-offs. The 2 key questions that an SMTP server needs answered are:
- does this domain have reverse-MX information?
- is the origin IP address authorized to send e-mail for the purported origin domain?
And possibly a 3rd question for farther down the road (although this is possibly over-kill):
- has the e-mail been properly signed by the sender of the e-mail
IIRC, NSLookups fail because it makes the assumption that everyone is in control of their reverse IP info and that people don't service multiple domains from a single IP address.
Re: Standby isn't reliable enough
on
MRAM in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
As I mentioned in another post - if standby/hibernate was *reliable* (as in works 99 out of 100 tries) - I think it's possible that more people would use it.
However, my personal experience is that at *least* 1 of 10 times, the system will hang or otherwise fail to come back from standby/hibernate.
At which point I have to waste time waiting for reboot and I may as well just have left the system on with the monitor turned off.
Re:Ooh more vaporware.
on
MRAM in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
While WinXP is much better then Win2000 at giving you the login prompt quickly. (kudos for that) The majority of the wait time is not the O/S - it's the waiting on all of the extra bits that eats up minutes and minutes. (efax, winamp, MSOutlook, Mozilla, SecondCopy, epop, AIM, PGP, Hotsync) That may seem like a lot of apps, but I imagine that most folks run at least half a dozen programs at the same time if they count it up.
On my old Win2000 system, it takes close to 15 minutes before the system has settled down and is ready to work. (Prior to that, it's like trying to get a jumped up kid on caffeine and sugar to sit down and sort pennies.) The WinXP box is better, but it still takes 10 minutes. As a result, I don't reboot more then once a week if possible - or I reboot when I have 15 minutes to spare. A brand new install will indeed boot up in under 2 minutes (but without all of the apps you need to do what you need to do...).
While I find MRAM interesting... I'm not sure that it's going to affect day-to-day computing. I think the reason that it will sell in PCs is if it's truly faster as the article states. (Power gamers will go to great lengths to get an extra 5% speed boost out of their system.) It might give laptops a bit more battery life - 5%? - but not much because the refreshing of DRAM probably isn't that big a percentage of the power budget. I do think it's going to have a bigger effect on the portable-device category (PDAs, cell phones) where the devices need to be able to power down while saving system state.
Why so glum? Because (at least in the Windows world) "standby" doesn't work as well as it's supposed to. Most PCs (and all laptops) have had standby/hibernation features for a few years now. When it works, it's great... but on my laptop, there's a 50-50 chance that the system will not resume from standby properly. Which means I have to wait for the 5-15 minute reboot to get back to work (after say a lunch break). So instead the system remains on while I'm away from my desk.
Most office folks come in at the start of the day, fire up their PC and then go get coffee (or read the paper), and they don't turn the machine off until they're ready to go home at night. -- I don't see MRAM changing this usage pattern, unless waking back up from "sleep mode" is 99% reliable. (Personaly experience is that standby works 50-90% of the time - which is unreliable enough that most people will avoid using it.) Leaving the machine on all the time during the work day is 100% reliable (or darn close). Turning the machine on in the morning is 100% reliable (barring hardware faults). Being paid to twiddle your thumbs for 5-10 minutes while you reboot because you used system standby instead of just wasting a few watts doesn't sit well with the boss usually. (Your time is worth more per hour then the electricity saved by powering down at every chance.)
Home usage patterns *might* be effected by MRAM - but again, reliability has to approach 99-100%.
One advantage of the VHS 2/4/6 hour limit per tape is that you spread your risk over multiple devices. Losing a VHS tape might only result in the loss of 1/10th to 1/100th of your collection.
Losing the 500Gb HD in one of these is going to be a lot more annoying. Two ways to reduce the risk is either RAID or a built-in DVD-R so that you can off-load "keepers".
Variables begining with the letters J-L would be defined as type integer by default. All the others were defined as Real (roughly equiv to float IIRC).
And the basic problem with HashCash is that there is at least 1 order of maginitude in processing power among machines on the market.
So something that would take 30 seconds for machine A will only take 3 seconds for machine B. And 2 years down the road, machine C will do it in 0.3 seconds.
Also, you can't trust the originating machine not to lie about it's CPU power. As a result, honest brokers get burnt, while dishonest brokers get away with abuse (which basically means that everyone will lie even if their original motives were pure).
DRIP / DMP / SMTP+SPF / RMX -- all work of the same basic idea and just vary in details. Allow the domain owners (if they wish) to specify which servers are allowed to send e-mail for that domain. The destinations can then choose whether to accept e-mail that is not from an approved IP for the source domain.
Reasonably simple implementation, and decentralized. It at least takes a large bite out of the forged domain issue and makes whitelisting much more reliable.
Slashdot is not built around the concept of having meaningful discussion... intead, it's more of a soapbox style system where everyone gets up and shouts a few times.
Why do I say that?
- there's no way to keep track of which comments you've read or haven't read
- which means no easy way to quickly find new comments and gloss over comments that you've already seen
- as a result, I imagine that most people read the article comments once and never check back for new ideas/discussions
- you get notified of replies directly to your post, but can't track a thread
- while you can click to see the parent post, there's no link that would allow you to break a thread out to a new window
Not to mention the fact that if you view comments in Nested, Oldest First mode, with a low threshold (0 or +1), long threads that break across multiple pages are incorrectly displayed. (A 3 page thread will repeat the first 1/3 of the thread across the 3 pages, never displaying the other 2/3 of the comments within the thread.)
Slashdot Mirror
In and around NYC, they have flat screen panels in a lot of delis that display advertising as well. However, I don't remember the ones in NYC having sound, so they weren't that annoying and actually rather nifty.
6-10Mb/sec is pretty standard for long term average use (such as decrypting a block of files) on the Promise RAID5 card (ATA/100 drives). I've seen it peak as high as 13-15Mb/sec (doing pure reads). All depends on how sequential/random your data access pattern is (and whether you're weighted more towards reads or writes). The amount of memory in the box also makes a big difference.
My video capture box can push 72Mb/sec doing sequential reads, but real work performance is usually more around 15-20Mb/sec. The video capture box uses the PCI Promise ATA/100 RAID1 card connected to a pair of 7200rpm IBM ATA/100 drives. (Comparable to your Adaptec 1200a in RAID1 mode).
Anyway, the Promise card is a lot better the then old craptastic Adaptec IDE RAID card which allowed you to connect (4) 33Mhz IDE drives. Performance on that (even with max cache memory) was only around 500Kb/sec. Since then, I've been very skeptical of the Adaptec IDE RAID cards.
And to put the numbers in perspective, on our dedicated server down at the server farm, I get 40-55Mb/sec raw sequential reads, with real-world performance down around 20Mb/sec. I'm assuming those drives are 10,000rpm and the drives are setup as RAID1.
All of these values were taken from a 5 minute average (sustained throughput) once the benchmark program had settled down and the cache/buffers were filled.
Hopefully, the standards bodies will settle on a standard way of validating SMTP from fields.
DMP, DRIP, RMX, SMTP+SPF are all ideas that allow destination SMTP servers to gain some assurance that e-mail purporting to be from a particular domain is actually from that domain.
I've seen the cluster of failures as well. When one drive goes in the array, a second one is often sure to follow.
Which means... not only should you be running RAID5, but you should also have either a hot-spare drive in the array, or a ready-to-go drive boxed and ready for installation. (You did opt to install hot-swap bays, such as the ones Promise makes?)
The bigger risk for this yokel, is that he's trying to put (3) 3.5" HDs into (2) 5.25" bays. I actually have a bay cooler that lets me do it (from dirtcheapdrives). However, even with the fan running, I long ago decided that it was a very bad idea to pack those drives that close together. So now I just install (2) drives in that device.
He's almost guaranteed to lose the entire array within (6) months if he's running 7200rpm drives that are packed into a case like sardines. Better luck if he uses 5400rpm drives that run cooler. (5400rpm drives make great USB enclosure drives because they run cooler and air flow in a USB drive enclosure is usually sub-par.)
Promise also makes a (6) wire SATA RAID card that supports RAID0/1/5 as well as hot spares. I have the ATA/100 version of the card with 128Mb cache and I get 6-10 Mbytes/sec of throughput. (Real world usage according to PerfMon with an interval of 120sec.)
Anytime you're doing large arrays like this, you need to have a hot spare and you also need to have some sort of generational backups. (For when the O/S decides to randomly encrypt around 1/4 of the files on your 275Gb file system.)
Promise also makes an (8) drive, external RAID case that holds (8) IDE drives and outputs to a SCSI connector. That lets you get around 1.3-1.5Tb for around $4500 (total cost).
Simpler solution then this (if you have only 1 machine, which is most folks).
(1) USB HD (120Gb are around $200)
(1) license for Second Copy 2000 ($20)
Hook the USB HD up to your system, install SC2000 and configure it to keep 8 versions of files.
If you have an older HD laying around, USB HD enclosures are around $50-75, which might mean that you can do it for under $100.
The personal file server is a nice idea, but unless they're doing RAID1 (preferably with a hot-spare), I can't see it as being any better then leaving the files on the user's machines. (Better 2 small baskets then 1 large basket.)
Getting to your files from outside your firewall sounds good... until you realize that what you can do, a hacker can do twice as easily. Better to carry CD media, DVD media, USB key-fob, USB HD, iPod, or just get a laptop and carry that around.
Funny thing is... crippled copy-protected CDs will actually make me less likely to buy new music.
Why? Because I rip all of my CDs to MP3 to listen to when and where I like. By eliminating ease-of-use in converting my CDs to MP3s, they tilt me towards either not buying new music, or just taping the music off of the radio.
I have one of those... they are good.
Even better, they sell one with the little pointer nub in the middle of the keyboard. You can also plug a regular PS/2 mouse into a port on the keyboard (allowing you to use both at the same time).
Most of my work is done on a Toshiba Tecra laptop with one of those little nubbies - and for coding and other hands-on-keyboard tasks, it's just enough pointer so that you don't take your fingers off the home row. (I have an external USB mouse hooked up at the same time for instances where the nubby pointer is too limiting.)
Which brings me back to why I bought one of the keyboards with the nubby in the middle. When working on the rest of my systems at home, I find that I've become spoiled by having the ability to manipulate the mouse without taking my hands off the keyboard. (In fact, I'll probably buy another keyboard early next year for my other desktop system.)
The sprint phone looks very sweet... my Kyocera SmartPhone (CDMA/Palm) is starting to get up there in age and I've been starting to worry about what I'm going to replace it with.
I like the design of the Sprint too where the flip-open design takes care of protecting the screen.
(shrug)... but the Kyocera Palm/cell phone that I've used for about 2.5 years only needs charged about every 2-5 days depending on usage.
I'm so not going to be a happy camper when this device bites the dust. Having the cell phone combined with the PDA is just too useful, even if the form factor is larger then just a cell phone.
"approved OSs" on ISP networks...
Hmmm, reminds me of the bad ol' days of early internet dial-up. If you weren't using Windows, you got no support (and sometimes couldn't run the software needed to connect to the network unless you knew the geeky way around).
Frankly, I think the onus lies both on the shoulders of Microsoft and the standards bodies. MS because after 2 years have proven they still don't know how to write secure code. Standards bodies because they like to hem and haw over the little things until the cows get blown away in the tornado.
MSBlaster would have had less of an effect if defaulted to leaving ports closed and turning on the firewall by default.
E-mail worms would have less of an effect if reverse-MX proposals were in place and working. (Sure, the e-mail might have just be routed then through the official outbound SMTP server... but at least then you have a chokepoint that is more likely to be within the control of the admins responsible for the machine spewing out the garbage.)
Fines are a bad idea given the current technology's implementation (trusting model, low authentication).
IIRC, it wasn't an EMP device...
It was merely a special light that affected the human element of the equation. (Causing blackouts or seizures)
They used the same device to capture some warlord in Somalia.
Server-signing might be a bit over-kill for the spam killing job. (May be too expensive CPU-wise for most servers to implement?)
One attack that I can think of involves stealing the private key and setting up a rogue server. Another would be to just infiltrate the server and turn it into a zombie.
The first attack is more easily thwarted if there is some sort of reverse-MX/DNS lookup system so that you can check whether e-mail from a given IP address (or system) is authorized to send e-mail for that domain. Such a system needs to provide (2) pieces of information: (a) does this domain have a list of which IPs are allowed to send e-mail and (b) is a particular IP authorized.
I agree that digital signing of e-mail between servers is useful, but DNS and source-IP information needs to be part of the equation to make the attacks more difficult.
I just saw an article recently (last week) that pondered the question of whether the EZD system will ever be economically viable.
I'm guessing that (a) EZDs are more expensive to make and (b) the business model assumed pricing of $20-$40 for a regular DVD. The price given was $7 for a EZD (which I'm guessing is the price at which it makes a good profit). The goal was to trade convenience (short life span) by competing on price (1/3 to 1/2 cost of a regular DVD).
Now that regular DVD prices are dropping below the $20 (and $10) marks... it doesn't leave much room for a crippled product to compete based on price. They would have to sell EZDs at around $3 to compete favorably with regular DVDs selling at $10 - and I'm not sure they can price that low. Frankly, I dislike the EZD format from a somewhat-uninformed ecological PoV, so I'm glad to see it squeezed out of the market before it can get off the ground.
I also agree with the poster who says that if the price for a bad movie is $10 or less, people are much more willing to say "eh, we'll give it a watching" rather then go through the effort of pirating a copy. Most people prefer to be aboveboard and legal - unless the requirements for staying legal are onerous. (Artificially high CD/DVD prices.)
It's not so much that they keep it in an outhouse out of preference... the preference is that the phone is not in the main residential building/house. Thus if they have a barn, they're just as likely to put the phone there so long as it's far enough away from the house.
The amish that my family has bought outbuildings from in the past has their phone installed in a barn.
It's also possible that someone heard outbuilding (which is any building not attached to the main house) and confused it with outhouse.
As others have said, Blogger allows you to publish the blog's HTML files to another website via FTP. Where you can then FTP it down to your local machine for archival. (Some of us paranoids go one step farther and copy the HTML files into a CVS system.)
Here's the current list of the 4 proposals that I know about.
RMX proposal
SMTP+SPF proposal
DMP proposal
DRIP proposal
All (4) of those perform pretty much identically, with various trade-offs. The 2 key questions that an SMTP server needs answered are:
- does this domain have reverse-MX information?
- is the origin IP address authorized to send e-mail for the purported origin domain?
And possibly a 3rd question for farther down the road (although this is possibly over-kill):
- has the e-mail been properly signed by the sender of the e-mail
IIRC, NSLookups fail because it makes the assumption that everyone is in control of their reverse IP info and that people don't service multiple domains from a single IP address.
As I mentioned in another post - if standby/hibernate was *reliable* (as in works 99 out of 100 tries) - I think it's possible that more people would use it.
However, my personal experience is that at *least* 1 of 10 times, the system will hang or otherwise fail to come back from standby/hibernate.
At which point I have to waste time waiting for reboot and I may as well just have left the system on with the monitor turned off.
While WinXP is much better then Win2000 at giving you the login prompt quickly. (kudos for that) The majority of the wait time is not the O/S - it's the waiting on all of the extra bits that eats up minutes and minutes. (efax, winamp, MSOutlook, Mozilla, SecondCopy, epop, AIM, PGP, Hotsync) That may seem like a lot of apps, but I imagine that most folks run at least half a dozen programs at the same time if they count it up.
On my old Win2000 system, it takes close to 15 minutes before the system has settled down and is ready to work. (Prior to that, it's like trying to get a jumped up kid on caffeine and sugar to sit down and sort pennies.) The WinXP box is better, but it still takes 10 minutes. As a result, I don't reboot more then once a week if possible - or I reboot when I have 15 minutes to spare. A brand new install will indeed boot up in under 2 minutes (but without all of the apps you need to do what you need to do...).
While I find MRAM interesting... I'm not sure that it's going to affect day-to-day computing. I think the reason that it will sell in PCs is if it's truly faster as the article states. (Power gamers will go to great lengths to get an extra 5% speed boost out of their system.) It might give laptops a bit more battery life - 5%? - but not much because the refreshing of DRAM probably isn't that big a percentage of the power budget. I do think it's going to have a bigger effect on the portable-device category (PDAs, cell phones) where the devices need to be able to power down while saving system state.
Why so glum? Because (at least in the Windows world) "standby" doesn't work as well as it's supposed to. Most PCs (and all laptops) have had standby/hibernation features for a few years now. When it works, it's great... but on my laptop, there's a 50-50 chance that the system will not resume from standby properly. Which means I have to wait for the 5-15 minute reboot to get back to work (after say a lunch break). So instead the system remains on while I'm away from my desk.
Most office folks come in at the start of the day, fire up their PC and then go get coffee (or read the paper), and they don't turn the machine off until they're ready to go home at night. -- I don't see MRAM changing this usage pattern, unless waking back up from "sleep mode" is 99% reliable. (Personaly experience is that standby works 50-90% of the time - which is unreliable enough that most people will avoid using it.) Leaving the machine on all the time during the work day is 100% reliable (or darn close). Turning the machine on in the morning is 100% reliable (barring hardware faults). Being paid to twiddle your thumbs for 5-10 minutes while you reboot because you used system standby instead of just wasting a few watts doesn't sit well with the boss usually. (Your time is worth more per hour then the electricity saved by powering down at every chance.)
Home usage patterns *might* be effected by MRAM - but again, reliability has to approach 99-100%.
(wonders what happens when the 500Gb HD crashes)
One advantage of the VHS 2/4/6 hour limit per tape is that you spread your risk over multiple devices. Losing a VHS tape might only result in the loss of 1/10th to 1/100th of your collection.
Losing the 500Gb HD in one of these is going to be a lot more annoying. Two ways to reduce the risk is either RAID or a built-in DVD-R so that you can off-load "keepers".
Specifically, an old Fortran quote... default variable types were defined based on the first letter of the variable name.
Variables begining with the letters J-L would be defined as type integer by default. All the others were defined as Real (roughly equiv to float IIRC).
Hence "God" is "Real".
GOD? There's a local trucking firm on the east coast with the company initials of GOD (General Overnight Delivery?).
And the basic problem with HashCash is that there is at least 1 order of maginitude in processing power among machines on the market.
So something that would take 30 seconds for machine A will only take 3 seconds for machine B. And 2 years down the road, machine C will do it in 0.3 seconds.
Also, you can't trust the originating machine not to lie about it's CPU power. As a result, honest brokers get burnt, while dishonest brokers get away with abuse (which basically means that everyone will lie even if their original motives were pure).
DRIP / DMP / SMTP+SPF / RMX -- all work of the same basic idea and just vary in details. Allow the domain owners (if they wish) to specify which servers are allowed to send e-mail for that domain. The destinations can then choose whether to accept e-mail that is not from an approved IP for the source domain. Reasonably simple implementation, and decentralized. It at least takes a large bite out of the forged domain issue and makes whitelisting much more reliable.
Slashdot is not built around the concept of having meaningful discussion... intead, it's more of a soapbox style system where everyone gets up and shouts a few times.
Why do I say that?
- there's no way to keep track of which comments you've read or haven't read
- which means no easy way to quickly find new comments and gloss over comments that you've already seen
- as a result, I imagine that most people read the article comments once and never check back for new ideas/discussions
- you get notified of replies directly to your post, but can't track a thread
- while you can click to see the parent post, there's no link that would allow you to break a thread out to a new window
Not to mention the fact that if you view comments in Nested, Oldest First mode, with a low threshold (0 or +1), long threads that break across multiple pages are incorrectly displayed. (A 3 page thread will repeat the first 1/3 of the thread across the 3 pages, never displaying the other 2/3 of the comments within the thread.)