FWIW, a larger spare area also increases reliability since there are more free blocks to handle any memory blocks that are bad. Also a larger spare area tends to have an effect on reducing write amplification and reducing redundant data writes during garbage collection -- both of which extends the overall lifetime of the entire drive.
It is not an overclock but the ability to adjust the "spare area". This is the percentage of flash on the drive that is not exposed to the user and is used for garbage collection, write acceleration (by having pre-erased blocks), reduction of write amplification, etc. You can emulate more spare area on drives already if you take SSD and format it to less that it's full capacity.
It's worth noting that the higher performance and enterprise level drives already have much more spare area but that results in a tradeoff of capacity for performance. They are just going to let you set this slider between consumer level (maximum capacity per $$$) and performance level (higher performance but less capcity).
Normal Person: I don't know, don't care and don't think it's possible to prove a damned thing leave me alone... why do the two people above me have weird shit on their heads?
For what it's worth, in demographic studies of Americans, 9 out of 10 answer "yes" when asked if they believe in God. The Atheists and Agnostics make up between 6-10% of the remaining population. People who directly identify themselves as Agnostic (they don't know / don't care / not sure it can be proved) are about 0.9% of the population.
So by your standards, less than 1% of the population are what you'd consider a "Normal Person"... which seems like an odd definition for "Normal Person". In fact, I would call that an "Extraodinary Person" or "Unusual Person"... perhaps even "Rare Person" instead of "Normal Person"...
>> Game studios go to great lengths to protect their IP. But board game designer Daniel Solis doesn't subscribe to that philosophy.
I think you're confusing IP with "ideas." IP is often the successful and repeatable implementation of an idea (e.g., a patent). Furthermore, when game studios license IP, it's often to latch onto an established entertainment brand, like "Batman." The actual games themselves are usually formulaic at best, and their "plot" will be exposed on the Internet anyway as soon as the first public Beta comes around.
I'd disagree that "IP" is the successful and repeatable implementation of an idea. Many new "IP's" are developed which are not repeating previous ideas and hardly all "IP's" are successful -- in fact many new game IP's are financial failures.
However, IP or any content posted on a blog isn't necessarily unprotected. Published writing to blogs is already typically Copyright of the owner (as long as the hosting service doesn't make some outrageous claims on it). Blog entries may include Trademarked names or Characters whose protection does not diminish by a mere mention. And there is nothing to stop the patenting of inventions (i.e. algorithms) that have been posted to a blog assuming the blogger is the inventor.
Another cheap source of protein for cats: eggs. You can get a dozen for just over $1 and cats love raw eggs scrambled with a little milk. If you're worried about salmonella in raw eggs, you can pasteurize (but not cook) the eggs using a crockpot and a dorkfoods sous vide controller -- and the DSV can be used to cook great meals for yourself as well..
And it pisses me off every time I go shopping for cat chow that I have to pay literally twice as much to get cat food that doesn't have 15-25% added carbs in it. Cat food should not have any carbs, except what comes incidental to whatever kind of horse they use as the basic ingredient. And you think you can't go wrong buying tinned more-or-less fresh meat for fluffy? Nope. Many brands even add sugar to that.
Gourmet / Veterinary Cat food costs $2.00 by the can or more. Tuna regularly goes on sale by me for 2 cans for $1 or 3 cans for $2. You can get 3-4 cans of tuna which doesn't have carbs or sugar for the price of one can of veterinary cat food. If you're worried about micronutrients for your cat, add a drop of feline liquid multivitamins to the can of tuna (you can get a 100 serving bottle for around $10 so it adds $0.10 per day).
When 30% of your systems are big-endian and 30% little endian, and 30% some bastardized undocumented middle endian (just making up a worst case, hopefully it's wrong), integration costs are large.
Actually there is a "middle endian" in databases, integers are often stored as BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) for dollar values in addition to integer values (big and little endian) for financial values. However, dollar values are usually stored X 100 (for all three cases) so they can be accurate to 1 cent.
With SDL 1.2, if there was a bug on SDL... or if in need to run the game on the new directfb/wayland/whatever frontend, updating SDL was enough.
With SDL 2 linked statically against some closed game... not so much.
Perhaps this is for iOS / Android? Statically linking allows for dead-stripping of unused code and possibly considerably smaller binaries which is ideal for Mobile Apps that will run on limited platforms -- especially since you can't update a single dynamically linked binary for a mobile app anyhow.
Hybrids are a terrible idea. The SSD has a failure rate, the HD has a failure rate, and by tying them together you get an even worse combined failure rate!
Ummm... citation please??? If you use a smaller amount of flash, you can use much more reliable chips (SLC or eMLC or MLC with 2 bits instead of 3). Also, SSD's almost always fail on write and you can mark lines that fail to write as bad and retry. You can make VERY reliable SSD's if you are not trying to provide the most Pure Flash capacity to consumers at the lowest cost (i.e. Enterprise SSD's that cost $10-20/GB and have at least 2X over-provisioning or underutilization of flash cell bits). A high reliability SSD portion reduces strain on the HDD and extends its life. Also, hybrid drives are typically 5400 RPM rather than 7200 or 10K RPM drives and have slower arm mechanisms which put less stress on the drive mechanics. All these factors extend the life of the HDD.
Consumers would be much better off getting a small SSD, and a large HD, and having software (like Apple's Fusion Drive) do the same block level management. ZFS can do this with an L2ARC. They can then purchase best of breed, best of price solutions for both, and replace them independently.
Now you are actually talking about combining the failure rate of two consumer devices... probably a consumer SSD with as much cheap flash on it as possible for the price (rather than a small amount of higher reliability flash) and a higher RPM hard drive with a shorter lifespan. Plus they use more electricity between the two combined. If you cache writes to the SSD, failure of either device screws you over royally.
Your argument for reliability makes no sense at all.
There is another benefit to hybrids vs two drives with a software solution. You can yank out the hybrid and put it in another machine or even a portable drive bay and it should be still valid data to another computer.
The games I download from Steam are around 5GB each. So if I try playing two games in one day, only the first one will load quickly?
As someone who works in games professionally, I can tell you that even though a game may have 5GB of data, you are highly unlikely to access that entire data in one single short gameplay session. Most Games Designers target at least 40-60 hours of gameplay for a AAA title (the ones that have 5GB of content) to access a majority of the content.
In large open world games, you may only see a fraction of the game (a couple levels) if you are playing for a few hours before switching to another game.
The fastest way to burn through loading data off disc in our game (MK) is to play the story mode straight through. That includes just over 2GB of movie files that represent a 1.5 hour movie. Hopefully though, an intelligent hybrid drive would notice that the movies are read as large contiguous reads (and generally only read once) and don't require SSD caching that smaller more randomly accessed files that are accessed more often would benefit from.
BTW, the price difference is 50X right now. Price has been dropping on SSD's by about a factor of 2 per year (although the price dropping has actually been slowing lately and even going up a little recently due to FLASH shortages). This implies that we still have at least 5.6 years before the price of Pure SSD's match HDD's.
And that also assumes that HDD technology remains static and doesn't have increases in storage per $$$ (but aside from the big price bump from flooding in Thailand, HDD capacity per dollar has been falling as well).
Given the fact that HDD capacity for dollar continues to increase, mathematically we are probably looking at around 10-15 years before the current curves meet.
I agree Seagate should pursue SSD, but given a projected 10 year window of significant price disparity between HDD and SSD, Hybrids do make sense.
Unless something disruptive happens like 1TB MRAM replaces flash but even that will probably take 5 years of more to hit the market.
Hybrids aren't that bad an idea. You can get a 3TB drive for just over $100. HD Data is $0.03-$0.05 / GB. SSD's are still in the $0.80-$1.50 / GB range. That's a factor of 50X more expensive. You can't even buy a single 3TB consumer SSD and three 1TB SSD's will cost you around $2000 plus eat up half your SATA ports.
Although I do disagree on one point -- if a consumer uses ~10GB of data a day, I would overshoot and put in 16GB rather than 8GB in a Hybrid Drive -- it's better to slightly overprovision and almost never hit the platter part of the storage than to under provision and force yourself to the slower backstore. Plus the difference should only be less than $10 more for the drive.
One problem though with hybrid drives is they aren't necessarily faster than intelligent software caching to SSD's or of using a hardware controller (with possible software assist) that supports caching data from a HDD to a SSD (such as Intel Smart Response SSD Caching which has been on Motherboards since 2011).
I care because I travel and I like to use other sims when traveling. That's why it may in fact matter even to the average US consumer. Especially true as the population grows older, more people retire - and travel.
Yup agree with you that the whole thing bits of crunchy exoskeleton stuck in your teeth is annoying. I've had fried insects as a snack in Thailand and the taste was fine but the texture similar was like eating shrimp shells and then getting popcorn kernels stuck in your teeth.
It's like the whole thing where slashdot complained about "open" MP3's vs iTunes DRM. But consumers will pick whatever is better and easier.
For cell phones, if the the data rate is slow or service sucks they will leave as soon as their 2 year contract is up. If service and data are awesome, they will stay.
It has very little to do with iPhones being locked. How many people want to use a 3 year old iPhone when you're at least 2 models behind and a 3rd is about to be released?
While slashdot users may like to complain about carrier locking, your average US consumer doesn't really care. Why?
Because they typically get a discounted or free phone that locks them into a 2 year contract anyhow. And by the time 2 years are up, they want a new phone anyhow.
How the hell did we get to the point that the average 4" Smart Phone Screen now has more pixels than most consumber 21" Monitors? Or that a 10" Table Screen has a higher resolution than the most of the top of the line 32" displays?
The statue of liberty didn't originally have that inscription, that was added later and itself had nothing to do with the symbolism of Libertas.
The poem was written in 1883 and read at the Opening of the Statue of Liberty to the public in 1886. While it took almost 20 years before a plaque was added to memorialize the poem in 1903, it was very much in the original spirit of the the Freedom the Statue represents.
It was not like the addition of "In God We Trust" on our money, or "Under God" to the Pledge during the McCarthy era of rampant fears of God-less communism.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, a larger spare area also increases reliability since there are more free blocks to handle any memory blocks that are bad. Also a larger spare area tends to have an effect on reducing write amplification and reducing redundant data writes during garbage collection -- both of which extends the overall lifetime of the entire drive.
It is not an overclock but the ability to adjust the "spare area". This is the percentage of flash on the drive that is not exposed to the user and is used for garbage collection, write acceleration (by having pre-erased blocks), reduction of write amplification, etc. You can emulate more spare area on drives already if you take SSD and format it to less that it's full capacity.
This is the SSD equivalent to short stroking a hard drive.
It's worth noting that the higher performance and enterprise level drives already have much more spare area but that results in a tradeoff of capacity for performance. They are just going to let you set this slider between consumer level (maximum capacity per $$$) and performance level (higher performance but less capcity).
Normal Person: I don't know, don't care and don't think it's possible to prove a damned thing leave me alone... why do the two people above me have weird shit on their heads?
For what it's worth, in demographic studies of Americans, 9 out of 10 answer "yes" when asked if they believe in God. The Atheists and Agnostics make up between 6-10% of the remaining population. People who directly identify themselves as Agnostic (they don't know / don't care / not sure it can be proved) are about 0.9% of the population.
So by your standards, less than 1% of the population are what you'd consider a "Normal Person"... which seems like an odd definition for "Normal Person". In fact, I would call that an "Extraodinary Person" or "Unusual Person"... perhaps even "Rare Person" instead of "Normal Person"...
Things are not always bigger in Texas.
1162 measles cases in the Netherlands in unvaccinated religious folk living in the Dutch Bible Belt.
>> Game studios go to great lengths to protect their IP. But board game designer Daniel Solis doesn't subscribe to that philosophy.
I think you're confusing IP with "ideas." IP is often the successful and repeatable implementation of an idea (e.g., a patent). Furthermore, when game studios license IP, it's often to latch onto an established entertainment brand, like "Batman." The actual games themselves are usually formulaic at best, and their "plot" will be exposed on the Internet anyway as soon as the first public Beta comes around.
I'd disagree that "IP" is the successful and repeatable implementation of an idea. Many new "IP's" are developed which are not repeating previous ideas and hardly all "IP's" are successful -- in fact many new game IP's are financial failures.
However, IP or any content posted on a blog isn't necessarily unprotected. Published writing to blogs is already typically Copyright of the owner (as long as the hosting service doesn't make some outrageous claims on it). Blog entries may include Trademarked names or Characters whose protection does not diminish by a mere mention. And there is nothing to stop the patenting of inventions (i.e. algorithms) that have been posted to a blog assuming the blogger is the inventor.
Another cheap source of protein for cats: eggs. You can get a dozen for just over $1 and cats love raw eggs scrambled with a little milk. If you're worried about salmonella in raw eggs, you can pasteurize (but not cook) the eggs using a crockpot and a dorkfoods sous vide controller -- and the DSV can be used to cook great meals for yourself as well..
And it pisses me off every time I go shopping for cat chow that I have to pay literally twice as much to get cat food that doesn't have 15-25% added carbs in it. Cat food should not have any carbs, except what comes incidental to whatever kind of horse they use as the basic ingredient. And you think you can't go wrong buying tinned more-or-less fresh meat for fluffy? Nope. Many brands even add sugar to that.
Gourmet / Veterinary Cat food costs $2.00 by the can or more. Tuna regularly goes on sale by me for 2 cans for $1 or 3 cans for $2. You can get 3-4 cans of tuna which doesn't have carbs or sugar for the price of one can of veterinary cat food. If you're worried about micronutrients for your cat, add a drop of feline liquid multivitamins to the can of tuna (you can get a 100 serving bottle for around $10 so it adds $0.10 per day).
When 30% of your systems are big-endian and 30% little endian, and 30% some bastardized undocumented middle endian (just making up a worst case, hopefully it's wrong), integration costs are large.
Actually there is a "middle endian" in databases, integers are often stored as BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) for dollar values in addition to integer values (big and little endian) for financial values. However, dollar values are usually stored X 100 (for all three cases) so they can be accurate to 1 cent.
With SDL 1.2, if there was a bug on SDL... or if in need to run the game on the new directfb/wayland/whatever frontend, updating SDL was enough.
With SDL 2 linked statically against some closed game... not so much.
Perhaps this is for iOS / Android? Statically linking allows for dead-stripping of unused code and possibly considerably smaller binaries which is ideal for Mobile Apps that will run on limited platforms -- especially since you can't update a single dynamically linked binary for a mobile app anyhow.
Hybrids are a terrible idea. The SSD has a failure rate, the HD has a failure rate, and by tying them together you get an even worse combined failure rate!
Ummm... citation please??? If you use a smaller amount of flash, you can use much more reliable chips (SLC or eMLC or MLC with 2 bits instead of 3). Also, SSD's almost always fail on write and you can mark lines that fail to write as bad and retry. You can make VERY reliable SSD's if you are not trying to provide the most Pure Flash capacity to consumers at the lowest cost (i.e. Enterprise SSD's that cost $10-20/GB and have at least 2X over-provisioning or underutilization of flash cell bits). A high reliability SSD portion reduces strain on the HDD and extends its life. Also, hybrid drives are typically 5400 RPM rather than 7200 or 10K RPM drives and have slower arm mechanisms which put less stress on the drive mechanics. All these factors extend the life of the HDD.
Consumers would be much better off getting a small SSD, and a large HD, and having software (like Apple's Fusion Drive) do the same block level management. ZFS can do this with an L2ARC. They can then purchase best of breed, best of price solutions for both, and replace them independently.
Now you are actually talking about combining the failure rate of two consumer devices... probably a consumer SSD with as much cheap flash on it as possible for the price (rather than a small amount of higher reliability flash) and a higher RPM hard drive with a shorter lifespan. Plus they use more electricity between the two combined. If you cache writes to the SSD, failure of either device screws you over royally.
Your argument for reliability makes no sense at all.
There is another benefit to hybrids vs two drives with a software solution. You can yank out the hybrid and put it in another machine or even a portable drive bay and it should be still valid data to another computer.
Also... other "intangibles" like faster swap file writes and lowered HD contention can still make load speeds faster even for uncached data.
The games I download from Steam are around 5GB each. So if I try playing two games in one day, only the first one will load quickly?
As someone who works in games professionally, I can tell you that even though a game may have 5GB of data, you are highly unlikely to access that entire data in one single short gameplay session. Most Games Designers target at least 40-60 hours of gameplay for a AAA title (the ones that have 5GB of content) to access a majority of the content.
In large open world games, you may only see a fraction of the game (a couple levels) if you are playing for a few hours before switching to another game.
The fastest way to burn through loading data off disc in our game (MK) is to play the story mode straight through. That includes just over 2GB of movie files that represent a 1.5 hour movie. Hopefully though, an intelligent hybrid drive would notice that the movies are read as large contiguous reads (and generally only read once) and don't require SSD caching that smaller more randomly accessed files that are accessed more often would benefit from.
capacity per dollar has been falling as well
Sorry, this is a typo... I meant the price per capacity has been falling.
BTW, the price difference is 50X right now. Price has been dropping on SSD's by about a factor of 2 per year (although the price dropping has actually been slowing lately and even going up a little recently due to FLASH shortages). This implies that we still have at least 5.6 years before the price of Pure SSD's match HDD's.
And that also assumes that HDD technology remains static and doesn't have increases in storage per $$$ (but aside from the big price bump from flooding in Thailand, HDD capacity per dollar has been falling as well).
Given the fact that HDD capacity for dollar continues to increase, mathematically we are probably looking at around 10-15 years before the current curves meet.
I agree Seagate should pursue SSD, but given a projected 10 year window of significant price disparity between HDD and SSD, Hybrids do make sense.
Unless something disruptive happens like 1TB MRAM replaces flash but even that will probably take 5 years of more to hit the market.
Hybrids aren't that bad an idea. You can get a 3TB drive for just over $100. HD Data is $0.03-$0.05 / GB. SSD's are still in the $0.80-$1.50 / GB range. That's a factor of 50X more expensive. You can't even buy a single 3TB consumer SSD and three 1TB SSD's will cost you around $2000 plus eat up half your SATA ports.
Although I do disagree on one point -- if a consumer uses ~10GB of data a day, I would overshoot and put in 16GB rather than 8GB in a Hybrid Drive -- it's better to slightly overprovision and almost never hit the platter part of the storage than to under provision and force yourself to the slower backstore. Plus the difference should only be less than $10 more for the drive.
One problem though with hybrid drives is they aren't necessarily faster than intelligent software caching to SSD's or of using a hardware controller (with possible software assist) that supports caching data from a HDD to a SSD (such as Intel Smart Response SSD Caching which has been on Motherboards since 2011).
I care because I travel and I like to use other sims when traveling. That's why it may in fact matter even to the average US consumer. Especially true as the population grows older, more people retire - and travel.
If you are traveling, call Sprint's International Department at 888-226-7212 and Sprint will unlock your phone in about 5 minutes.
Also worth noting... most carriers will unlock your phone after the 2 year contract period for the subsidized phone expires.
For example here is AT&T Unlock Support
. If you search the websites or call sutomer service, the other major carriers do the same.
Yup agree with you that the whole thing bits of crunchy exoskeleton stuck in your teeth is annoying. I've had fried insects as a snack in Thailand and the taste was fine but the texture similar was like eating shrimp shells and then getting popcorn kernels stuck in your teeth.
It's like the whole thing where slashdot complained about "open" MP3's vs iTunes DRM. But consumers will pick whatever is better and easier.
For cell phones, if the the data rate is slow or service sucks they will leave as soon as their 2 year contract is up. If service and data are awesome, they will stay.
It has very little to do with iPhones being locked. How many people want to use a 3 year old iPhone when you're at least 2 models behind and a 3rd is about to be released?
While slashdot users may like to complain about carrier locking, your average US consumer doesn't really care. Why?
Because they typically get a discounted or free phone that locks them into a 2 year contract anyhow. And by the time 2 years are up, they want a new phone anyhow.
Tablet screen, not Table Screen... sorry for the typo.
2004: 2560 x 1600
2013: 2560x1080
How the hell did we get to the point that the average 4" Smart Phone Screen now has more pixels than most consumber 21" Monitors? Or that a 10" Table Screen has a higher resolution than the most of the top of the line 32" displays?
The statue of liberty didn't originally have that inscription, that was added later and itself had nothing to do with the symbolism of Libertas.
The poem was written in 1883 and read at the Opening of the Statue of Liberty to the public in 1886. While it took almost 20 years before a plaque was added to memorialize the poem in 1903, it was very much in the original spirit of the the Freedom the Statue represents.
It was not like the addition of "In God We Trust" on our money, or "Under God" to the Pledge during the McCarthy era of rampant fears of God-less communism.
Here's the original for those too lazy to search:
"The New Colossus"
Emma Lazarus - 1883
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Because those guys have making walls (and floors and ceilings) transparent to sound completely mastered.