Is that your argument for everything? You really believe that is the type of comeback that can drive home the above point? You really think that making a joke about government corruption isn't ironic when you are going to sit there and praise corporate corruption? Give me a fucking break.
Private businesses which dont generate huge profits/growth, dont survive.
Your argument sounds awefully like the classic humans eat food argument. If you like it or you don't, it doesn't matter. Businesses don't have to generate huge profits or grow to survive. Most small businesses that are 5 years or older will never become a large profit generator. They will also probably never grow more than a few times their size. That is because they are small businesses.
It is surprising I have to remind you that small businesses exist. Typically someone with your claims would be trolling around bragging about how good small business is for our economy. How we need to give them tax breaks, and how we need to subsidize them with grants to get them on their feet.. etc etc...
But you already though of this and didn't bring it up because it is against your above argument.
But they survive for only 1 of 2 reasons. They are state operated or subsidized (either openly or quietly)
Well lets see, Microsoft is subsidized by government contracts. Boeing is subsidized by government contracts. IBM is subsidized by government contracts. Dell is subsidized by government contracts. But then what is a subsidary? The MPAA is subsidized by movie ticket buyers. The RIAA is subsidized by people who purchase albums and singles.
The money all comes from one place (the consumers) and all ends up in one place (the business or "providers"). The providers then divvy up the money back to the consumers how they see fit through payroll. The cycle continues.
The same exact cycle happens with government subsidary. The consumers get together, appoint leaders, and decide as a group which businesses a percentage of their money should go to. The difference is that (hopefully) it is for a cause that is for the greater good, rather than for the greed of the business executives.
Of course there is a lot unsaid here. But I hope you get the general idea. There isn't much difference either way except that government subsidary has a tendancy to be looked at negatively by the "conservative" economist and the coporate greed has a tendancy to be looked at negatively by the "liberal" economist. If you can call them that.
All these things are covered in high school economics class, it's strange to see people think some industries are cooler for the sake of humanity and completely missing the reason why every single business on earth exists: to generate revenue.
It is too bad that this attitude is all too common with recently college educated people.
You think that you are leaving high school economics behind with that statement? Or are you trying to say that you learned this in HS economics? The problem with your post is that it is 100% completely and utterly WRONG.
Businesses exist for several reasons. Most of the time it is to fill a gap in the market place. They exist to create jobs. They exist to provide a service that people need or want. They exist to provide a product which people need or want. They exist to further the social institution we as humans are always trying to improve on. They exist for several hundred reasons, and only one of them is to generate revenue. The revenue generation isn't that important if you take a step back and look at the big picture. This isn't about economics. It is about humanity. And even if it were you would still be wrong.
It must be a scary place looking through your economic worldview. No wonder you make such silly statements; you don't know any better.
And so your solution is dealing with them via laws and regulations
I never implied nor said that. The discussion was having to do with giving a tax break to this sort of person. Giving them a smaller/disproportionate responsibility in the tax burden compared to their wealth in our economy.
You worked your way up. I believe you. I work my way up. I respect working your way up. I respect working hard and making a lot of money. However, there is a line and I am not referring to upper middle class workers here. I am talking to the top 1% of the US wages or even more than that.
The facts are that the people who wield the most wealth are only that wealthy because they are propped up by a significant number of non-wealthy people. If this were not the case then they would not be wealthy. Thus they should have a higher tax burden. Period. And the fact that most of these people don't do their proportional amount of work/advancement w.r.t. their pay doesn't help their cause. I'm not talking about people earning their dime here. I'm talking about people who are earning a dollar at the expense of 10 people's dimes through lawsuits, lobbying, price fixing, destructive and aggressive marketing, news spins, youth molding, and just plain old fashioned coporate corruption (which btw costs our economy several times more than bureaucratic corruption per year)
Name one person who is truely rich.. I mean LOADED. like top 1% loaded. Name one person who is of this status who is not leeching money off of several hundred thousand or more poor people every single day. It is worse than the bittorrent leaches. They just suck and bitch when these hard working "I carry my own weight plus" people want to implement rules requiring them to support their fair share of the social infrastructure.
Please notice that I have said nothing about bloated or corrupt bureaucracy. I am for a smaller government as well (another discussion altogether)
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit just because we don't feel like plundering our more productive citizens hand over fist anymore is extremely bad policy.
only assuming rich == our more productive citizens.
The top 1% of the rich own what, 99% of the wealth? You are going to argue they are 99 times more productive than the guy at the top 2%? Your numbers don't add up. Your argument only makes sence if the richer people were more productive proportional to their wealth. this is NEVER the case when it comes to the upper class in america. The companies are run by workhorse employees who do their jobs well. The upper class consists of people who do one thing well: wheel and deal laws and regulations with pocket change.
The grandparent was right. There haven't been any exploits. Both you and the link you give confuses the concepts of exploit and vulnerability.
Wow, have you got a lot to learn... Did you not read the article AT ALL? Claiming that the apple system is a "properly layered security system" is an opinion, not a fact. Some might agree it is more proper than windows XP. I'm not here to argue wether that is true or not. I'm here to argue that either 1) a properly layered security system doesn't give you a secure system or 2) the MacOS doesn't have a properly layered security system.
One of the above(or possibly both) is true. It is up to you to decide which and quit sitting up on your high horse thinking you are a god for using MacOS.
This flash isn't a "fast storage" space. It exsits solely to be written to while the disk is spun down. It has no other purpose.
Trying to say it will improve performance by reading faster than disk is preposterous. This type of flash memory is not only slower, but has a limited write lifetime. Thus it could not be used effectively as a cache.
The permanent storage I speak of is when you write to it while the disk is down. If the power fails or if the system crashes, it is permanently on the disk and can be retrieved later. With a cache this cannot be done. The OS doesn't have to make difficult decisions on what to store on this 128MB flash chip. It will only store things which need writing while the disk is spun down.
same here.. TNG first, Enterprise second.. never really liked DS9 or Voyager.. they were too much the same thing over and over again "quark is selling something, Cpt. Janeway is making a friend and an enemy and fighting to try to get home while her mix and matched crew have internal conflicts" same ole same ole.
High end storage systems do this already.. It's a good idea... But they do it for another reason: to gain extra performance while under heavy load, and still prevent data loss on a system crash or power failure.
I believe (but may be wrong) that using this cheap flash memory in here is lower maintenance, cheaper to produce, less complex of a design, and more reliable than the battery backed up system. And since this isn't ment to improve system speed, but to prevent the drive from having to spin up while in a low power state, then it is a better solution to this particular problem.
Though you are right, battery backed up ram would probably do just as good of a job.. just more expensive.
You don't seem to realize that the purpose of a cache is precisely what you are claiming is so novel about flash: it exists to permit your computer to avoid spinning up the hard drive
You don't seem to realize that you are completely wrong on this point. Drive cache MUST spin up the hard drive any time it has something to write to it. The reason the cache exists is to the OS can write and forget about it quickly. The cache then writes it to the drive when it has a chance. This does not mean the drive cache will store the data indefinately until the drive can justify spinning itself up. It means the drive must wake up immediately and take its data before the power fails or a system crashes.
If the cache behaved like you say, saving a text file wouldn't actually save it. Changing a system setting wouldn't actually change it. and downloading a PDF file wouldn't mean that you can retrieve it later.. even if you used the save button.
Again, this flash memory is SLOWER than cache. It isn't used as a cache. It is a temperary static storage space that allows you to write data PERMANENTLY without spinning up the disk. No amount of cache will allow you to do this (unless you have a battery backed up cache like they have in high end storage systems.. event hen you are reliant on the battery life of the backup).
it has been present in 2.4 linux kernels for quite a time. when longhorn comes out, it'll be *years* behind schedule
Yea.. but you have to admit that the linux kernel has a long way to go for quality acpi support.
You might say this feature is in linux, and has been for a while. That doesn't change anything I stated in the above post. It only says that Linux has had this feature. I never said it didn't. And my statements aren't based on Linux not having it. In fact, I don't care for windows. It just so happens that someone posted misinformation to slashdot about longhorn and I corrected it. It doesn't make me anti-Linux or pro-Windows.
The silly thing about the article is that they're touting this new Samsung drive while at the same time touting Longhorn's capability
They are touting longhorn's ability because they are hinting that they will be decreasing the swapyness of the system when you use lots of RAM. They will also try to decrease having to load and unload libraries n stuff you need the most... They are basically saying, that with this new technology on the hard drive, along with tweaks from the OS, that you can pretty much live with just 128MB of permanent storage MOST of the timem.. and the times you need more the disk will spin up and give you access to it.
You are making it sound like 64Bit processors will not add more RAM to your system. You are making it sound like it is a useless improvement. You are making it sound like no matter WHAT, swap will destroy the benefits of this technology. You know what? You are wrong. It is a matter of tweaking the VM to help prevent the system from swapping in and out excessively while in a lower power state. It is just a matter of time before this is implemented on the OS level (in linux, macOS, and longhorn)
This may be a bad idea so correct me if I'm all wrong here.
You have valid concerns, but you have to watch out and not go with what everyone else on slashdot is saying...
This flash space on the drive has nothing to do with improving performance, etc etc... It's ONLY concern is to help prevent the disk from having to spin up when you need to write to it.
Imagine using MS word while you have autosave on. So every 2 minutes your 2K word file gets written out to disk. Well, you are on battery.. your power management settings says to spin down after 2 minutes of inactivity. But if you have word on autosave, then you have to spin back up.. every time.. Extra power requirements. Extra wear and tear on your drive.. With this flash memory you can write out all those small files to the drive without spinning it up. And it will be permanently stored on there. You cannot do this with volatile memory technology.
After you do enough 1K writes to the drive, all of your 128MB of flash will be taken up... Then you will have to bite the bullet and spin up the disk... But the whole point is that MOST users MOST of the time aren't doing that much disk activity.. and so they can go for hours without having to spin up the disk.. thus saving a good hour or 2 of your battery life.
This isn't anything like dynamic ram in the drive. It is a static buffer which does not require being written to the platter. When the system crashes or power fails, you don't lose your data while its on flash memory. In a memory buffer you do..
This is NOT a cache. It isn't used as a faster buffer between your system and the platter. It is NOT used to improve performance. It's ONLY PURPOSE is to be written to while the disk is spun down. This prevents the disk from having to wake up while you are browsing the web. It prevents the disk from having to spin up when you save a 2K word file. It prevents the disk from spinning up just because you sent an email. No amount of volatile memory is going to prevent the disk from spinning up when it needs being written to.
Exactly.. Likewise your employer can have less downtime therefore getting more work for the salary they are paying you...
Not to mention the most important issue: the power savings you get while on a battery..
It sounds like the parent poster is just trying to be grumpy and think that because he never uses a battery, and he doesn't know how to replace a hard drive in a laptop (actually, most laptop mfg's consider HDD's as end user servicable nowadays) and that if it goes down on him while he is at work he will still get paid... that none of this matters to him...
Hate to break it to him but the world doesn't revolve around one person.
You imply that a powerbook made by Apple Computer would somehow implement futuristic types of storage faster than other platforms. You might need a history lesson:
Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to implement USB2.0 into their systems for use with Hi Speed USB flash memory devices.
Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to install SATA drives into their systems.
Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to install DVD burners into their systems.
Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to move from SCSI to IDE for consumer systems.
I highly doubt Apple will be the first manufacturer to implement holographic storage into their laptops. As they are usually the last manufacturer to move to new types of storage technology in their products.
No this is not implemented in software yet. This isn't a cache. It is a storage buffer for a hard drive. It is significantly slower than a memory cache. It is even slower than the drive platters themselves. It is simply slow flash memory designed for one purpose only. That is to have a place to write to while the disk is spun down.
Cache does not provide this function because cache is volatile and if you write to it, you will lose it unless it writes it to the platter. Whith this system, you can write to it, and it is not lost with a power failure.
If you were to use this flash memory like a cache your memory would fail in a matter of months because flash memory of this sort isn't designed for continuous reading/writing to on an every day basis.
While your dreaming sounds wonderful, and I wish it were so, this particular circumstance isn't a cache. It is permanent storage built for one thing and one thing only: to prevent the drive from spinning up and still store data permanently (up to a certain size)
This flash memory will be slower than the hard drive's native writing. It will definately not work like a cache. It would destroy the flash memory in a matter of months, and would be much slower, if you used it like that.
The purpose of this design is so when the drive goes into sleep mode due to inactivity, the OS can still permanently write a file to the disk without waking it up. If you save your word file which is 2kilobytes, you send it to the disk, and the disk will spin up on a conventional system. On this new system it will write it to the flash storage.
Once you write 128MB of data to the disk, the disk must wake up and copy it over to the platters.. once the period of inactivity happens again(1 minute to several hours depending on your power management settings), the disk will spin down and the cycle will repeat.
But please don't confuse this with a cache. It doesn't work like a cache. It doesn't perform like a cache. And if you used it like a cache you would have a brick in as little as a month.
YOu don't understand the fundamental difference between this and a "cache"
This is NOT a cache. It is a permanent storage area on the hard drive which does not require the hard drive to spin up. I know one thing, in windows XP, my laptop hard drive spins up every 10 minutes because XP likes to do tons of shit even when i'm not using it. All it does is write 1 or 2K onto the disk, and for that it spins the damn drive up... every time. Witht his embedded flash memory it can write to it, and only after a long period of time, when those 1K writes add up to 128MB.. then the drive will spin up and copy all that flash ram into the hard drive... and the cycle starts over..
You see, most people who are using their drive to browse the web, work on a word file, IM chat, webcam chat, do email, etc etc... they aren't using their hard drive more than 128MB.. probably at most they are reading/writing to and from the drive in less than 64mb in a few hours time (provided you already have the applications loaded and you don't waste disk space on web cache) You save yoru word file every 5 minutes, but why spin up the disk and keep it running that whole time when all you are doing is writing out a few K every once in a while? You send and recieve a few emails, but why spin up your disk just to use it to send an email?
The point here is that battery life will significantly improve (probably by about double), and hard drive MTBF will significantly improve (probably more than double) in a laptop if you use this small flash PERMANENT (not cache) storage while your disk is spun down...
(notice that the flash memory is never used while the disk is spun up.. it is only used while the disk is spun down and it wants to try not to wake it up).
Because they didn't fly a babysitter tech lead over to walk the KHTML team through the changes, you're trying to make them look like the aforementioned.
Nobody is asking them to do this. In fact, nobody is even bitching at apple here. The article simply posts about how people (with attitudes such as yours) everywhere are claiming apple is doing all this good work on KHTML. The reality however proves they aren't.
Nobody wants apple to fly in a babysitter. They just want to be included in their project. Something they aren't currently allowed to do. They just want to see the cvs logs. They just want to work with apple on a solution rather than forking the code base.
If you are fine with the fork, more power to you. But don't claim it isn't a fork. It is. And that is what the article is about. Any discussion outside of talking about the fork and how to improve it is not related to this article and thus should be modded off topic.
Therefore, your post is off topic. Not to mention it is completely insulting to everyone who has worked on or supported KHTML.
A Radeon 9700 is far from beefy.. maybe 2 years ago it was. It plays doom3 and HL2 like garbage tho.
Just get a shuttle cube if you want a good gaming rig. Laptops suck ass at gaming and why would you want to have a laptop that big anyway. Buy a thin n light laptop and get a shuttle cube for your lan's.
Slashdot Mirror
You are very insightful. Thank you for your post. I was trying to get that point across and you did it very simply.
Is that your argument for everything? You really believe that is the type of comeback that can drive home the above point? You really think that making a joke about government corruption isn't ironic when you are going to sit there and praise corporate corruption? Give me a fucking break.
Private businesses which dont generate huge profits/growth, dont survive.
Your argument sounds awefully like the classic humans eat food argument. If you like it or you don't, it doesn't matter. Businesses don't have to generate huge profits or grow to survive. Most small businesses that are 5 years or older will never become a large profit generator. They will also probably never grow more than a few times their size. That is because they are small businesses.
It is surprising I have to remind you that small businesses exist. Typically someone with your claims would be trolling around bragging about how good small business is for our economy. How we need to give them tax breaks, and how we need to subsidize them with grants to get them on their feet.. etc etc...
But you already though of this and didn't bring it up because it is against your above argument.
But they survive for only 1 of 2 reasons. They are state operated or subsidized (either openly or quietly)
Well lets see, Microsoft is subsidized by government contracts. Boeing is subsidized by government contracts. IBM is subsidized by government contracts. Dell is subsidized by government contracts. But then what is a subsidary? The MPAA is subsidized by movie ticket buyers. The RIAA is subsidized by people who purchase albums and singles.
The money all comes from one place (the consumers) and all ends up in one place (the business or "providers"). The providers then divvy up the money back to the consumers how they see fit through payroll. The cycle continues.
The same exact cycle happens with government subsidary. The consumers get together, appoint leaders, and decide as a group which businesses a percentage of their money should go to. The difference is that (hopefully) it is for a cause that is for the greater good, rather than for the greed of the business executives.
Of course there is a lot unsaid here. But I hope you get the general idea. There isn't much difference either way except that government subsidary has a tendancy to be looked at negatively by the "conservative" economist and the coporate greed has a tendancy to be looked at negatively by the "liberal" economist. If you can call them that.
All these things are covered in high school economics class, it's strange to see people think some industries are cooler for the sake of humanity and completely missing the reason why every single business on earth exists: to generate revenue.
It is too bad that this attitude is all too common with recently college educated people.
You think that you are leaving high school economics behind with that statement? Or are you trying to say that you learned this in HS economics? The problem with your post is that it is 100% completely and utterly WRONG.
Businesses exist for several reasons. Most of the time it is to fill a gap in the market place. They exist to create jobs. They exist to provide a service that people need or want. They exist to provide a product which people need or want. They exist to further the social institution we as humans are always trying to improve on. They exist for several hundred reasons, and only one of them is to generate revenue. The revenue generation isn't that important if you take a step back and look at the big picture. This isn't about economics. It is about humanity. And even if it were you would still be wrong.
It must be a scary place looking through your economic worldview. No wonder you make such silly statements; you don't know any better.
And so your solution is dealing with them via laws and regulations
I never implied nor said that. The discussion was having to do with giving a tax break to this sort of person. Giving them a smaller/disproportionate responsibility in the tax burden compared to their wealth in our economy.
You worked your way up. I believe you. I work my way up. I respect working your way up. I respect working hard and making a lot of money. However, there is a line and I am not referring to upper middle class workers here. I am talking to the top 1% of the US wages or even more than that.
The facts are that the people who wield the most wealth are only that wealthy because they are propped up by a significant number of non-wealthy people. If this were not the case then they would not be wealthy. Thus they should have a higher tax burden. Period. And the fact that most of these people don't do their proportional amount of work/advancement w.r.t. their pay doesn't help their cause. I'm not talking about people earning their dime here. I'm talking about people who are earning a dollar at the expense of 10 people's dimes through lawsuits, lobbying, price fixing, destructive and aggressive marketing, news spins, youth molding, and just plain old fashioned coporate corruption (which btw costs our economy several times more than bureaucratic corruption per year)
Name one person who is truely rich.. I mean LOADED. like top 1% loaded. Name one person who is of this status who is not leeching money off of several hundred thousand or more poor people every single day. It is worse than the bittorrent leaches. They just suck and bitch when these hard working "I carry my own weight plus" people want to implement rules requiring them to support their fair share of the social infrastructure.
Please notice that I have said nothing about bloated or corrupt bureaucracy. I am for a smaller government as well (another discussion altogether)
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit just because we don't feel like plundering our more productive citizens hand over fist anymore is extremely bad policy.
only assuming rich == our more productive citizens.
The top 1% of the rich own what, 99% of the wealth? You are going to argue they are 99 times more productive than the guy at the top 2%? Your numbers don't add up. Your argument only makes sence if the richer people were more productive proportional to their wealth. this is NEVER the case when it comes to the upper class in america. The companies are run by workhorse employees who do their jobs well. The upper class consists of people who do one thing well: wheel and deal laws and regulations with pocket change.
The grandparent was right. There haven't been any exploits. Both you and the link you give confuses the concepts of exploit and vulnerability.
Wow, have you got a lot to learn... Did you not read the article AT ALL? Claiming that the apple system is a "properly layered security system" is an opinion, not a fact. Some might agree it is more proper than windows XP. I'm not here to argue wether that is true or not. I'm here to argue that either 1) a properly layered security system doesn't give you a secure system or 2) the MacOS doesn't have a properly layered security system.
One of the above(or possibly both) is true. It is up to you to decide which and quit sitting up on your high horse thinking you are a god for using MacOS.
Damn straight.
This flash isn't a "fast storage" space. It exsits solely to be written to while the disk is spun down. It has no other purpose.
Trying to say it will improve performance by reading faster than disk is preposterous. This type of flash memory is not only slower, but has a limited write lifetime. Thus it could not be used effectively as a cache.
The permanent storage I speak of is when you write to it while the disk is down. If the power fails or if the system crashes, it is permanently on the disk and can be retrieved later. With a cache this cannot be done. The OS doesn't have to make difficult decisions on what to store on this 128MB flash chip. It will only store things which need writing while the disk is spun down.
same here.. TNG first, Enterprise second.. never really liked DS9 or Voyager.. they were too much the same thing over and over again "quark is selling something, Cpt. Janeway is making a friend and an enemy and fighting to try to get home while her mix and matched crew have internal conflicts" same ole same ole.
Why not just use battery backed RAM?
High end storage systems do this already.. It's a good idea... But they do it for another reason: to gain extra performance while under heavy load, and still prevent data loss on a system crash or power failure.
I believe (but may be wrong) that using this cheap flash memory in here is lower maintenance, cheaper to produce, less complex of a design, and more reliable than the battery backed up system. And since this isn't ment to improve system speed, but to prevent the drive from having to spin up while in a low power state, then it is a better solution to this particular problem.
Though you are right, battery backed up ram would probably do just as good of a job.. just more expensive.
You don't seem to realize that the purpose of a cache is precisely what you are claiming is so novel about flash: it exists to permit your computer to avoid spinning up the hard drive
You don't seem to realize that you are completely wrong on this point. Drive cache MUST spin up the hard drive any time it has something to write to it. The reason the cache exists is to the OS can write and forget about it quickly. The cache then writes it to the drive when it has a chance. This does not mean the drive cache will store the data indefinately until the drive can justify spinning itself up. It means the drive must wake up immediately and take its data before the power fails or a system crashes.
If the cache behaved like you say, saving a text file wouldn't actually save it. Changing a system setting wouldn't actually change it. and downloading a PDF file wouldn't mean that you can retrieve it later.. even if you used the save button.
Again, this flash memory is SLOWER than cache. It isn't used as a cache. It is a temperary static storage space that allows you to write data PERMANENTLY without spinning up the disk. No amount of cache will allow you to do this (unless you have a battery backed up cache like they have in high end storage systems.. event hen you are reliant on the battery life of the backup).
it has been present in 2.4 linux kernels for quite a time. when longhorn comes out, it'll be *years* behind schedule
Yea.. but you have to admit that the linux kernel has a long way to go for quality acpi support.
You might say this feature is in linux, and has been for a while. That doesn't change anything I stated in the above post. It only says that Linux has had this feature. I never said it didn't. And my statements aren't based on Linux not having it. In fact, I don't care for windows. It just so happens that someone posted misinformation to slashdot about longhorn and I corrected it. It doesn't make me anti-Linux or pro-Windows.
The silly thing about the article is that they're touting this new Samsung drive while at the same time touting Longhorn's capability
They are touting longhorn's ability because they are hinting that they will be decreasing the swapyness of the system when you use lots of RAM. They will also try to decrease having to load and unload libraries n stuff you need the most... They are basically saying, that with this new technology on the hard drive, along with tweaks from the OS, that you can pretty much live with just 128MB of permanent storage MOST of the timem.. and the times you need more the disk will spin up and give you access to it.
You are making it sound like 64Bit processors will not add more RAM to your system. You are making it sound like it is a useless improvement. You are making it sound like no matter WHAT, swap will destroy the benefits of this technology. You know what? You are wrong. It is a matter of tweaking the VM to help prevent the system from swapping in and out excessively while in a lower power state. It is just a matter of time before this is implemented on the OS level (in linux, macOS, and longhorn)
This may be a bad idea so correct me if I'm all wrong here.
You have valid concerns, but you have to watch out and not go with what everyone else on slashdot is saying...
This flash space on the drive has nothing to do with improving performance, etc etc... It's ONLY concern is to help prevent the disk from having to spin up when you need to write to it.
Imagine using MS word while you have autosave on. So every 2 minutes your 2K word file gets written out to disk. Well, you are on battery.. your power management settings says to spin down after 2 minutes of inactivity. But if you have word on autosave, then you have to spin back up.. every time.. Extra power requirements. Extra wear and tear on your drive.. With this flash memory you can write out all those small files to the drive without spinning it up. And it will be permanently stored on there. You cannot do this with volatile memory technology.
After you do enough 1K writes to the drive, all of your 128MB of flash will be taken up... Then you will have to bite the bullet and spin up the disk... But the whole point is that MOST users MOST of the time aren't doing that much disk activity.. and so they can go for hours without having to spin up the disk.. thus saving a good hour or 2 of your battery life.
Obviously didn't read anything about this tech...
This isn't anything like dynamic ram in the drive. It is a static buffer which does not require being written to the platter. When the system crashes or power fails, you don't lose your data while its on flash memory. In a memory buffer you do..
This is NOT a cache. It isn't used as a faster buffer between your system and the platter. It is NOT used to improve performance. It's ONLY PURPOSE is to be written to while the disk is spun down. This prevents the disk from having to wake up while you are browsing the web. It prevents the disk from having to spin up when you save a 2K word file. It prevents the disk from spinning up just because you sent an email. No amount of volatile memory is going to prevent the disk from spinning up when it needs being written to.
Exactly.. Likewise your employer can have less downtime therefore getting more work for the salary they are paying you...
Not to mention the most important issue: the power savings you get while on a battery..
It sounds like the parent poster is just trying to be grumpy and think that because he never uses a battery, and he doesn't know how to replace a hard drive in a laptop (actually, most laptop mfg's consider HDD's as end user servicable nowadays) and that if it goes down on him while he is at work he will still get paid... that none of this matters to him...
Hate to break it to him but the world doesn't revolve around one person.
You imply that a powerbook made by Apple Computer would somehow implement futuristic types of storage faster than other platforms. You might need a history lesson:
Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to implement USB2.0 into their systems for use with Hi Speed USB flash memory devices.
Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to install SATA drives into their systems.
Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to install DVD burners into their systems.
Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to move from SCSI to IDE for consumer systems.
I highly doubt Apple will be the first manufacturer to implement holographic storage into their laptops. As they are usually the last manufacturer to move to new types of storage technology in their products.
No this is not implemented in software yet. This isn't a cache. It is a storage buffer for a hard drive. It is significantly slower than a memory cache. It is even slower than the drive platters themselves. It is simply slow flash memory designed for one purpose only. That is to have a place to write to while the disk is spun down.
Cache does not provide this function because cache is volatile and if you write to it, you will lose it unless it writes it to the platter. Whith this system, you can write to it, and it is not lost with a power failure.
If you were to use this flash memory like a cache your memory would fail in a matter of months because flash memory of this sort isn't designed for continuous reading/writing to on an every day basis.
While your dreaming sounds wonderful, and I wish it were so, this particular circumstance isn't a cache. It is permanent storage built for one thing and one thing only: to prevent the drive from spinning up and still store data permanently (up to a certain size)
This flash memory will be slower than the hard drive's native writing. It will definately not work like a cache. It would destroy the flash memory in a matter of months, and would be much slower, if you used it like that.
The purpose of this design is so when the drive goes into sleep mode due to inactivity, the OS can still permanently write a file to the disk without waking it up. If you save your word file which is 2kilobytes, you send it to the disk, and the disk will spin up on a conventional system. On this new system it will write it to the flash storage.
Once you write 128MB of data to the disk, the disk must wake up and copy it over to the platters.. once the period of inactivity happens again(1 minute to several hours depending on your power management settings), the disk will spin down and the cycle will repeat.
But please don't confuse this with a cache. It doesn't work like a cache. It doesn't perform like a cache. And if you used it like a cache you would have a brick in as little as a month.
YOu don't understand the fundamental difference between this and a "cache"
This is NOT a cache. It is a permanent storage area on the hard drive which does not require the hard drive to spin up. I know one thing, in windows XP, my laptop hard drive spins up every 10 minutes because XP likes to do tons of shit even when i'm not using it. All it does is write 1 or 2K onto the disk, and for that it spins the damn drive up... every time. Witht his embedded flash memory it can write to it, and only after a long period of time, when those 1K writes add up to 128MB.. then the drive will spin up and copy all that flash ram into the hard drive... and the cycle starts over..
You see, most people who are using their drive to browse the web, work on a word file, IM chat, webcam chat, do email, etc etc... they aren't using their hard drive more than 128MB.. probably at most they are reading/writing to and from the drive in less than 64mb in a few hours time (provided you already have the applications loaded and you don't waste disk space on web cache) You save yoru word file every 5 minutes, but why spin up the disk and keep it running that whole time when all you are doing is writing out a few K every once in a while? You send and recieve a few emails, but why spin up your disk just to use it to send an email?
The point here is that battery life will significantly improve (probably by about double), and hard drive MTBF will significantly improve (probably more than double) in a laptop if you use this small flash PERMANENT (not cache) storage while your disk is spun down...
(notice that the flash memory is never used while the disk is spun up.. it is only used while the disk is spun down and it wants to try not to wake it up).
Because they didn't fly a babysitter tech lead over to walk the KHTML team through the changes, you're trying to make them look like the aforementioned.
Nobody is asking them to do this. In fact, nobody is even bitching at apple here. The article simply posts about how people (with attitudes such as yours) everywhere are claiming apple is doing all this good work on KHTML. The reality however proves they aren't.
Nobody wants apple to fly in a babysitter. They just want to be included in their project. Something they aren't currently allowed to do. They just want to see the cvs logs. They just want to work with apple on a solution rather than forking the code base.
If you are fine with the fork, more power to you. But don't claim it isn't a fork. It is. And that is what the article is about. Any discussion outside of talking about the fork and how to improve it is not related to this article and thus should be modded off topic.
Therefore, your post is off topic. Not to mention it is completely insulting to everyone who has worked on or supported KHTML.
The difference is that Steve Jobs is claiming Microsoft is copying Apple with the dashboard... They simply aren't. End of discussion.
Sounds like Apple just re-invented the windows "Quick Launch" bar and "Task Tray" bar... Both have been in windows since win98.
Hell, Apple just got a window management tool (Expose) with 10.3. Windows has had it since the taskbar came out in win95.
This dashboard feature is just a bling bling version of quick launch and task tray, which have existed in KDE, GNOME, and Windows for YEARS.
A Radeon 9700 is far from beefy.. maybe 2 years ago it was. It plays doom3 and HL2 like garbage tho.
Just get a shuttle cube if you want a good gaming rig. Laptops suck ass at gaming and why would you want to have a laptop that big anyway. Buy a thin n light laptop and get a shuttle cube for your lan's.