It's possible, even likely, that something somewhere else (supernova, the big bang, etc.) made some in olden times. But these were brand-spankin' new.
And I get called pedantic!
Given that energy and/or matter cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another, I submit that nothing was "made" here, only converted from the same energy that had existed since the moment of the big bang.
Clearly the ThinkPad Tablet must have some sort of docking port, since TFA mentions a clamshell keyboard case that docks with it. Does anyone know what this is?
I believe the full-size USB port IS the docking port for the keyboard folio case.
Good thing he didn't try to spell out his entire name. He'd run out of desert. Besides, if you look this up in Google Maps, you can read "Futaisi Island" right next to it and it didn't cost a thing.
"Adding NAND flash memory to a PC does more for performance than DRAM and costs less" isn't a statement about markets. It's a statement about how the use of certain technologies affect the overall performance of a PC.
But it doesn't say that in the article. That's what the summary says. Everyone who's been here a while knows that the summary is usually way off the mark as to the true content of the story.
I'm coming in a bit late to this debate, but I got a completely different take on what the article was about than just about every post here.
Everyone here seems to have used the article as an excuse to drag out the old "tired" debate of NAND vs HDD (and DRAM in this case) and which is better (from a technical perspective). I didn't see anything in the article that compared these on a technical front. The article was about the NAND market vs the DRAM market going into the future. It makes total sense to me.
For instance, my main development machine is (a fairly typical) quad-core machine with 8GB RAM and lots of HDD. With the various development tools I use, I generally run about 75% RAM utilization with little or no swapping. If I were to add another 8GB RAM I would see virtually no performance increase. However, if I were to add an SDD to the machine (especially if used for the OS and tools I frequently use - mostly read only files) I would see a dramatic improvement. Ergo, my money would be better spent on SDD than DRAM. That's it. That's what I took away from the article.
While one can certainly point up specific examples of where adding DRAM would increase performance more than adding NAND, that's not the point of the article.
I can certainly see the industry getting to the point where the DRAM begins to level off (how much RAM do "typical" users really need and at what point does adding DRAM stop adding value and begin to degrade the "overall" performance characteristics of the machine when power, especially battery life, is factored into the equation).
The article is all about the blend of DRAM, NAND and HDD storage and how the market for NAND is expected to rise much more rapidly than the market for DRAM, perhaps even leading to a decline in DRAM revenues.
Nowhere is the article suggesting one can directly replace DRAM with NAND, That's just silly. They are completely different technologies intended for completely different application.
just in case they have slipped in something that would hurt Apple's own business.
Personally, I don't think it's possible to hurt Apple's business. They have a near religious following that can see no wrong in Apple or their tactics. If Apples products started exploding and removing people's appendages in the process, these same amputee's would go right back to Apple to get a replacement, and pay to dollar for it in the process, just so they could log back onto/. to defend Apple's honor.
I've been around a long time, but I don't recall ever seeing anything like it. Certainly, I like Apple's products, though I think they're overpriced and too locked down, but whatever floats your boat. I like Windows 7, though it's got it's share of quirks and prickly thorns and I'm no fan of MS's business tactics. I REALLY like Linux and the whole FOSS movement, but I'm first to admit there's a lot that needs to be done with it to make it as user friendly as Windows or OS/X. My point is, I can like a product or company, but still be critical of it because criticism and competition is what forces innovation. Patting your favorite company on the back does nothing to make them want to invest more time or money. Threatening to choose a competitor's product does.
H. neanderthalensis is thus, descended from a species that left Africa, but is not FROM Africa.
This is questionable. A paper published in 2010 on a draft sequence of Neanderthal genome would suggest that the source population of non-African modern humans were already more closely related to Neanderthals than other Africans were, due to ancient genetic divisions within Africa
We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.
I was, of course being facetious in my remark. However, it got me thinking (dangerous I know). Is it not possible that, due to some very minor genetic mutation in Africans 170,000 years ago or so the, pituitary gland began to produce ever-so-slightly less GH, while it continued normally for Neanderthal populations. This reduction in GH produced Africans with less pronounced facial features, while these feature remained prominent in Neanderthals. It seems to me, as many genetic mutations do, that every once and a while there is some recessive trait that surfaces again. I'd be curious if there are any studies of frequency of gigantism by genetic origin.
waves of populations come in and slaughter the existing population, completely displacing it.
GP doesn't necessarily contradict this theory. It makes sense to me. They killed all the males and kept the females for pleasure, many of which resulted in offspring. These offspring came to dominate to the point that very few tribes existed that were not tribes descendants of this hybridization. Not too hard for me to believe.
In the early '90s I used to play hot potato with a floppy loaded with just Nethack or Hack. We passed it around on a character death so we can build up that death list and laugh at each other.
OMG!!! I knew/. was news for nerds, but this is beyond the pale and venturing into territory that would make Steve Urkel appear macho.
You will not be able to plug this into anything in 3100 AD. All electronic devices will be from Apple with no external interfaces. You'll try and convince Apple to load the thumb drive into the App Store, a request which Steve Jobs XIX will absolutely refuse, but will offer to allow you to install iChainWorld instead for a fee.
Well, so what? If I'm in charge of IT at a big company, and it is my job to run a server that will be heavily loaded with lots of I/O and the company expects that the only downtime will be once-a-year maintenance on Christmas Day, which will I run? HURD claims to be wonderful, but everyone I know is running Linux and Linux is working. I'm going to run Linux too.
This is an example of "network effect" where sometimes people use something because "everybody else uses it". HURD is not benefiting from network effect, and Linux is.
Even if HURD has a theoretical advantage over Linux for reliability, Linux systems are running reliably now. Hard evidence beats theory.
I think you're missing my point. No one is just running "Linux". You're probably running RHEL, CentOS, SUSE, or some other distribution that uses Linux as it's kernel. If at some point in the future (admittedly a big IF) the HURD kernel is able to outperform the Linux kernel (e.g. offer better performance or better stability or better security, etc), most likely your distro of choice will offer the HURD kernel as an alternative for the Linux kernel, just as Debian has a FreeBSD, NetBSD and now a HURD based port. Obviously, none of these ports are "better" at this point in time, but if at some point in the future HURD proves itself to be better, and is supported (or even recommended) by the distribution of your choice, why wouldn't you migrate to it?
Apologies. I did note after I posted that I should have left the "No" off the start of the post. My intent was not to refute your statement, but rather to augment it with comments about the technical arguments. I completely agree with your position as to the marketing aspect.
Valid points all. However, have HURD claims not panned out because of flaws in the theoretical framework, or because of lack of developers to implement it properly (I'm asking - I don't know the answer to that and I don't believe you do either - which is exactly why I feel this is a worthwhile endeavor)? I do question your conclusions on your second and final points however.
Second, a microkernel architecture, while more robust than a monokernel, cannot be as fast as the monokernel. If one subsystem wants another subsystem to do something, it must format and send a message; the other subsystem then receives the message, unpacks it, validates it, and then does the action. This is more secure and more stable than the monokernel, where the one subsystem will just make a function call in the other subsystem's code; but it is inherently slower. So Linux is scaling better than HURD expected, and Linux has an inherent speed edge, so HURD is unlikely to outperform Linux. Meanwhile, while it might be true that HURD is easier to debug than Linux, the kernel developers have figured out how to debug Linux, and there just isn't enough benefit there to warrant a switch to HURD.
This may be true with today's hardware, but massive-multi-core CPUs with hardware support for high speed message passing may negate or at least mitigate this overhead. This is especially true in clustered systems.
Finally, Linux is widely used and well understood; lots of businesses are running mission-critical apps on Linux. Even if HURD's microkernel design gave it a theoretical edge on Linux for reliability, the real-world experience is all on Linux; it has been shown to be Good Enough while HURD is only theoretically better.
steveha
We're talking kernel level here. Business software, indeed MOST (Unix) software is written to the API level so as long as a POSIX layer sits on top of the kernel, most software should work with only a recompile.
Slashdot Mirror
Aww, c'mon! And I was sure you were going to call me feeb, Guess I stole your thunder.
Nope. They made them.
It's possible, even likely, that something somewhere else (supernova, the big bang, etc.) made some in olden times. But these were brand-spankin' new.
And I get called pedantic!
Given that energy and/or matter cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another, I submit that nothing was "made" here, only converted from the same energy that had existed since the moment of the big bang.
I understand you feeb.
My guess is they've discovered an old particle.
Clearly the ThinkPad Tablet must have some sort of docking port, since TFA mentions a clamshell keyboard case that docks with it. Does anyone know what this is?
I believe the full-size USB port IS the docking port for the keyboard folio case.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/20/lenovo-thinkpad-tablet-and-keyboard-folio-case-hands-on-video
This is written in sand. In 2000 years, if it's visible at all, it's probably read "Dowap".
Good thing he didn't try to spell out his entire name. He'd run out of desert. Besides, if you look this up in Google Maps, you can read "Futaisi Island" right next to it and it didn't cost a thing.
There's a video demoing it, along with the keyboard folio case. The stylus pretty cool to me. http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/20/lenovo-thinkpad-tablet-and-keyboard-folio-case-hands-on-video/
So what is going to be the draw? Especially for a business, where the third party aftermarket is much more extensive for the iPad?
Ummm. It's not from Apple. That's enough for many...
"Adding NAND flash memory to a PC does more for performance than DRAM and costs less" isn't a statement about markets. It's a statement about how the use of certain technologies affect the overall performance of a PC.
But it doesn't say that in the article. That's what the summary says. Everyone who's been here a while knows that the summary is usually way off the mark as to the true content of the story.
I'm coming in a bit late to this debate, but I got a completely different take on what the article was about than just about every post here.
Everyone here seems to have used the article as an excuse to drag out the old "tired" debate of NAND vs HDD (and DRAM in this case) and which is better (from a technical perspective). I didn't see anything in the article that compared these on a technical front. The article was about the NAND market vs the DRAM market going into the future. It makes total sense to me.
For instance, my main development machine is (a fairly typical) quad-core machine with 8GB RAM and lots of HDD. With the various development tools I use, I generally run about 75% RAM utilization with little or no swapping. If I were to add another 8GB RAM I would see virtually no performance increase. However, if I were to add an SDD to the machine (especially if used for the OS and tools I frequently use - mostly read only files) I would see a dramatic improvement. Ergo, my money would be better spent on SDD than DRAM. That's it. That's what I took away from the article.
While one can certainly point up specific examples of where adding DRAM would increase performance more than adding NAND, that's not the point of the article.
I can certainly see the industry getting to the point where the DRAM begins to level off (how much RAM do "typical" users really need and at what point does adding DRAM stop adding value and begin to degrade the "overall" performance characteristics of the machine when power, especially battery life, is factored into the equation).
The article is all about the blend of DRAM, NAND and HDD storage and how the market for NAND is expected to rise much more rapidly than the market for DRAM, perhaps even leading to a decline in DRAM revenues.
Nowhere is the article suggesting one can directly replace DRAM with NAND, That's just silly. They are completely different technologies intended for completely different application.
just in case they have slipped in something that would hurt Apple's own business.
Personally, I don't think it's possible to hurt Apple's business. They have a near religious following that can see no wrong in Apple or their tactics. If Apples products started exploding and removing people's appendages in the process, these same amputee's would go right back to Apple to get a replacement, and pay to dollar for it in the process, just so they could log back onto /. to defend Apple's honor.
I've been around a long time, but I don't recall ever seeing anything like it. Certainly, I like Apple's products, though I think they're overpriced and too locked down, but whatever floats your boat. I like Windows 7, though it's got it's share of quirks and prickly thorns and I'm no fan of MS's business tactics. I REALLY like Linux and the whole FOSS movement, but I'm first to admit there's a lot that needs to be done with it to make it as user friendly as Windows or OS/X. My point is, I can like a product or company, but still be critical of it because criticism and competition is what forces innovation. Patting your favorite company on the back does nothing to make them want to invest more time or money. Threatening to choose a competitor's product does.
H. neanderthalensis is thus, descended from a species that left Africa, but is not FROM Africa.
This is questionable. A paper published in 2010 on a draft sequence of Neanderthal genome would suggest that the source population of non-African modern humans were already more closely related to Neanderthals than other Africans were, due to ancient genetic divisions within Africa
We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710
I was, of course being facetious in my remark. However, it got me thinking (dangerous I know). Is it not possible that, due to some very minor genetic mutation in Africans 170,000 years ago or so the, pituitary gland began to produce ever-so-slightly less GH, while it continued normally for Neanderthal populations. This reduction in GH produced Africans with less pronounced facial features, while these feature remained prominent in Neanderthals. It seems to me, as many genetic mutations do, that every once and a while there is some recessive trait that surfaces again. I'd be curious if there are any studies of frequency of gigantism by genetic origin.
how would they be almost indistinguishable? They were more muscular, stockier, and had very prominent orbital ridges.
To this I reply "Richard Kiel".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Kiel_2.JPG
Case closed.
waves of populations come in and slaughter the existing population, completely displacing it.
GP doesn't necessarily contradict this theory. It makes sense to me. They killed all the males and kept the females for pleasure, many of which resulted in offspring. These offspring came to dominate to the point that very few tribes existed that were not tribes descendants of this hybridization. Not too hard for me to believe.
Put on yer glasses Grandpa. Let me go fetch yer cane so you kin whoop the young whippersnappers fer being uppity.
In the early '90s I used to play hot potato with a floppy loaded with just Nethack or Hack. We passed it around on a character death so we can build up that death list and laugh at each other.
OMG!!! I knew /. was news for nerds, but this is beyond the pale and venturing into territory that would make Steve Urkel appear macho.
Then there would be parallel universes. Just make sure no two copies come in contact with each other!
The idea that if you gave me a program now it would still be working in 30-50 years when I am likely to die is pretty silly.
I was written in COBOL. It will outlast the pyramids.
You will not be able to plug this into anything in 3100 AD. All electronic devices will be from Apple with no external interfaces. You'll try and convince Apple to load the thumb drive into the App Store, a request which Steve Jobs XIX will absolutely refuse, but will offer to allow you to install iChainWorld instead for a fee.
Well, so what? If I'm in charge of IT at a big company, and it is my job to run a server that will be heavily loaded with lots of I/O and the company expects that the only downtime will be once-a-year maintenance on Christmas Day, which will I run? HURD claims to be wonderful, but everyone I know is running Linux and Linux is working. I'm going to run Linux too. This is an example of "network effect" where sometimes people use something because "everybody else uses it". HURD is not benefiting from network effect, and Linux is. Even if HURD has a theoretical advantage over Linux for reliability, Linux systems are running reliably now. Hard evidence beats theory.
I think you're missing my point. No one is just running "Linux". You're probably running RHEL, CentOS, SUSE, or some other distribution that uses Linux as it's kernel. If at some point in the future (admittedly a big IF) the HURD kernel is able to outperform the Linux kernel (e.g. offer better performance or better stability or better security, etc), most likely your distro of choice will offer the HURD kernel as an alternative for the Linux kernel, just as Debian has a FreeBSD, NetBSD and now a HURD based port. Obviously, none of these ports are "better" at this point in time, but if at some point in the future HURD proves itself to be better, and is supported (or even recommended) by the distribution of your choice, why wouldn't you migrate to it?
Apologies. I did note after I posted that I should have left the "No" off the start of the post. My intent was not to refute your statement, but rather to augment it with comments about the technical arguments. I completely agree with your position as to the marketing aspect.
Valid points all. However, have HURD claims not panned out because of flaws in the theoretical framework, or because of lack of developers to implement it properly (I'm asking - I don't know the answer to that and I don't believe you do either - which is exactly why I feel this is a worthwhile endeavor)? I do question your conclusions on your second and final points however.
Second, a microkernel architecture, while more robust than a monokernel, cannot be as fast as the monokernel. If one subsystem wants another subsystem to do something, it must format and send a message; the other subsystem then receives the message, unpacks it, validates it, and then does the action. This is more secure and more stable than the monokernel, where the one subsystem will just make a function call in the other subsystem's code; but it is inherently slower. So Linux is scaling better than HURD expected, and Linux has an inherent speed edge, so HURD is unlikely to outperform Linux. Meanwhile, while it might be true that HURD is easier to debug than Linux, the kernel developers have figured out how to debug Linux, and there just isn't enough benefit there to warrant a switch to HURD.
This may be true with today's hardware, but massive-multi-core CPUs with hardware support for high speed message passing may negate or at least mitigate this overhead. This is especially true in clustered systems.
Finally, Linux is widely used and well understood; lots of businesses are running mission-critical apps on Linux. Even if HURD's microkernel design gave it a theoretical edge on Linux for reliability, the real-world experience is all on Linux; it has been shown to be Good Enough while HURD is only theoretically better.
steveha
We're talking kernel level here. Business software, indeed MOST (Unix) software is written to the API level so as long as a POSIX layer sits on top of the kernel, most software should work with only a recompile.
Performant isn't a real word.
Sure it is. The dictionaries have just not caught up yet. Check back at a future date.