Question #1: If you pay someone to "turn the crank" for you, then that is work for hire and which means that you own what they create.
Question #2: I wasn't thinking of changing that part. If you can't sue someone for patent infringement, then the patent isn't doing anything. Can you expand on what you mean by freedom-to-operate?
What if you could only own a patent if you manufactured something that used it? That would mean old unused patents would become public domain once they weren't needed (as determined by the market - if nobody was buying things that used it, and nobody made anything that used it, then the inventor could not hold the patent) Similarly, it means no one could buy a patent unless they were actively using it. It would remain with the original owner, or revert to the public domain if they went out of business.
I guess you might need protections then, to keep companies from just destroying another company to force the patents into the public domain. That could get sticky.
Could we do this with copyrights too? Ex: If you stop selling a book or piece of music, or stop selling a piece of software, it becomes public domain. That would help a lot with old video games. Hmm... what about art, where the artist doesn't want to make copies. Hmm....
Just stop this false dichotomy. Let me quote some excerpts from several posts above...
Yes, blame the victim. You didn't install triple deadbolts on your door.
Having a security question that is easily guessable is like leaving your car door unlocked.
I don't see why the fact that it is a computer system means that there is suddenly nothing wrong with the actions of the person deliberately breaking in.
If a door is locked, then people know they shouldn't enter and kicking in the door would be a crime.
We keep arguing over whose fault it is when someone breaks in. The reality is that all of the above points are right, and sometimes it can be both people's fault. There's nothing wrong with assigning blame to both parties.
If someone breaks into another person's home, car, twitter account, bank account - that person is to blame for it. But if the person secured their home, car, twitter account, or bank account with a post-it note that said "Don't enter here unless you know my mother's maiden name" then they are also to blame. And if someone designs a system where that is the only way to secure it, then they are also to blame.
The reality here is that people will always try to break into things. So it is the other two who have the responsibility to fix the problem: the end-user must demand better security, and the engineers must supply it.
rogramming is basically putting algorithms into a form a computer can understand. Nothing more. And where do these algos come from?
Most software today is business workflows, so it requires little math. The "algorithms" become things like "send the approval form to the purchasing manager, and verify that the form is signed within 7 days from the publication date." - Yes, it is math, but it isn't very complicated.
When math is involved, it is probably encapsulated by something like a SQL server or a collections object. The programmer probably chooses which tools to use, and lets those tools do the hard math for them.
It's almost like we need another term to distinguish "person who places business rules into a high-level language" as opposed to someone who takes complex mathematical algorithms, writes them into code, and optimizes them. I tend to use "programmer" -vs- "computer scientist" but that's not entirely satisfactory either.
1) Who is "we" in your question? This was done by:
Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) along with colleagues at the University College London, the Royal Free Hospital, and Careggi University Hospital in Florence
2) If you meant the United States, this would be government funded had it been done in that country since it deals with adult stem cells.
I have citations for everything you asked for, and then a few more:
Wear-leveling is done for bad sectors on a HDD, not as standard practice.
1) I still was considering that wear-leveling. Just after-the-fact wear leveling.:-) 2) However, Western Digital drives do have "Preemptive wear leveling" as a standard practice.
Wrong. I just ran a benchmark and...
On a HDD, writes are followed by an immediate read to verify the data wrote correctly. Take a look at some of the benchmarks on storagereview.com Compare the random writes to random reads: the writes are always slower. StorageReview doesn't compare continuous writes, because that is rare. However, you will find that there are drives specially designed for continuous writes for A/V purposes, that are made to address this issue.
Try to defrag a MLC drive a few times and it'll be dead in a week
My turn. [citation needed]. I'll provide my own references. According to Kingston
For USB Flash drives, Toshiba calculated that a 10,000 write cycle endurance would enable customers to “completely write and erase the entire contents once per day for 27 years well beyond the life of the hardware.”
...the X-18/25 SSDs have a mean time before failure (MTBF) rating of 1.2 million hours, which is on par with modern server hard drives. In addition, he claimed that the drives can withstand a workload of 100 GB worth of writes a day for five years.
They then go on to explain how it was actually hard to even write 100GB per day.
not degradation of the media itself.
Magnetic media does degrade. For one thing, it warps over time. I can't state all of the methods of failure.
Look, SSDs are great... But they are not ready to replace HDDs.
I agree. Just not for some of the reasons the Wikipedia article lists.
Each sector of a hard drive has a checksum. That checksum is used to verify that the data is in tact. During a write cycle, the drive reads back the values and verifies it against the checksum. If the checksum fails a certain number of times, the drive will map the sector to another physical location on the disk. You can probably find info about this by looking up S.M.A.R.T which allows you to query things like how many sectors have been reallocated as a result of bad checksums.
To combat this, Western Digital has something they call Preemptive wear leveling (more info here). I think other each drive manufacturer has their own way to deal with it.
Funny? Not so funny when you notice that your music, movies, project backups etc, are all corrupted and lost.
Cute alarmist anecdote, but that is not how SSDs fail.
No. TRIM does not solve that problem. Do you even know what TRIM is?
Yes. TRIM was created to address this problem. The articles comparing TRIM drives to non-TRIM drives show that the problem has been solved. For references on this, just check out prior Slashdot discussions. Tom's hardware, storage review, and Anandtech have articles on this.
If you have evidence that TRIM does not solve the problem, please post it. Asking "Do you even know what TRIM is" doesn't provide any evidence that it doesn't work.
And the answer is, that it’s much worse for SSDs.
Actually, SSDs fail gracefully, while hard drives die suddenly with a crunching sound and a destruction of data. If an SSD runs out of sectors to write to - it becomes read-only and you have to buy a new one and copy your files over.
SATA limits the speed. Not only the bus. But also the internal controller. Simple as that.
I see that I didn't explain why this part of the article didn't make sense. The reason is because it argues against SATA, but the article is about SSDs.
Yes, DVDs spin 2000 RPM, while HDD's spin between 5400RPM and 15000RPM. Big difference in power and heat. Plus, hard drives spin fragile magnetic disks on exotic fluid bearings with a physical head micrometers away. They are a lot more susceptible to damage.
Although this still misses a big point: DVDs and CDs are going away too.
In fact very intelligent people are rare both in the West and China.
Very true. So it seems that the advantage goes to the one whose educational system is best designed to weed out the average people and find the best. Since China has more people, that means they have more intelligent people. And since China is not afraid to label them as such, and give them scholarships, China finds those people better. Those two items put them way ahead.
As someone who has been buying their own health insurance for 10+ years, I can attest that individual health insurance is as good as company-provided ones. In fact, I have yet to work at a place that can compete with the plan I am on. My deductible is 4 times what my employers is, but I make-up for that in only a few months.
IMHO, employer-sponsored health care is a racket. The employers always pick the highest-end plans, and give you very few options. The insurance companies don't require medical examinations for employer-sponsored plans, so they have to bump the price up since they don't know who they are getting.
I suspect that the prices are artificially-inflated too: For example, suppose a would be $300 per month, with the employer contributing $200 per month. The insurance company will bump it to $400 month, with the employer contributing $300. Why? Because it is tax deductible for the employer anyway, and it provides incentive for the employee to stay in place when they see that they will have to pay that much more when they leave. The really skeptical part of me often wonders if the employer even pays that $100 difference - or if *wink win* *nod nod* they just pretend they are in the paperwork they give to the employee.
I can read a 2000 page novel in a weekend and give you a very detailed outline of what's in it.
First of all, no you can't. Even if you can, the other 99.99999999999999999% of humans cannot. Second, even if you could, you can't read a 2000 page piece of legislation and understand it in a weekend. Third, even if you could, an outline isn't enough to vote on a major piece of legislation.
All freedom comes with one crucial restriction: you cannot use your freedom to take away someone else's.
Ironic, isn't it? But not invalid.
In the specific case of the GPL, it grants everyone the freedom to copy the modify the software, so long as you do it in such a way that it doesn't take away someone else's right to do the same. The BSD license however, gives you the ability to copy and modify the software, and the ability to forbid someone else from doing the same thing. Is that more free or less free?
The only impediment is people who hand me printouts instead of sending me the original file. After they send me the file, I recycle the paper. Having worked from home for years, I can assure you that paperless is a no-brainer. The only mail I got from the company was e-mail.
I take that back though... I do use paper for handwritten notes some times.
These semantic/linguistic differences are very important to understanding a culture. For example, most Americans wouldn't say they want to kill Iraqis, or that the Iraq war was about religion. But they might call it a Crusade. Most Americans think that word means "very important thing worth dying for" but historically, and especially in the Middle East, it means a war of the holy Christian cross. I wonder how it is translated in the Iraqi media.
Do they plan to release a programming language? That is part of what made TI calculators so popular. Nintendo could learn from that model. (Well, before TI DRM'd them)
Why is it that fun is the antithesis of accuracy and precision? Accuracy and precision are requirements for fun.
It would be no fun to play Monopoly if I rolled a 6 but the game moved me 5 spaces. A shooting game would be frustrating if I shot the target but it says I miss. A fighting game is no fun if I make a really good move in the nick of time, but my character loses anyway.
This article is confusing - I apologize that I don't know much about IE9, so maybe these questions sound lame.
What features of IE9 will be hardware acceleration? Why is that acceleration required, not just a benefit? What APIs are they using that XP does not support? The only thing I can think of is that they are using DX10. I'm impressed that IE9 would really have any use for that, but I supposed they wouldn't code against DX9 just for backward compatibility.
Personally ESET NOD32 is my favourite and what I license
That has to be the worst product name ever! Just try pronouncing that! I thought maybe there was line noise or something, or maybe your keyboard exploded while trying to type something else. Next time someone complains about GIMP's name, I'll point to this product.
Slashdot Mirror
hmm.
Question #1:
If you pay someone to "turn the crank" for you, then that is work for hire and which means that you own what they create.
Question #2:
I wasn't thinking of changing that part. If you can't sue someone for patent infringement, then the patent isn't doing anything. Can you expand on what you mean by freedom-to-operate?
What if you could only own a patent if you manufactured something that used it? That would mean old unused patents would become public domain once they weren't needed (as determined by the market - if nobody was buying things that used it, and nobody made anything that used it, then the inventor could not hold the patent) Similarly, it means no one could buy a patent unless they were actively using it. It would remain with the original owner, or revert to the public domain if they went out of business.
I guess you might need protections then, to keep companies from just destroying another company to force the patents into the public domain. That could get sticky.
Could we do this with copyrights too? Ex: If you stop selling a book or piece of music, or stop selling a piece of software, it becomes public domain. That would help a lot with old video games. Hmm... what about art, where the artist doesn't want to make copies. Hmm....
Thoughts anyone?
Just stop this false dichotomy. Let me quote some excerpts from several posts above...
Yes, blame the victim. You didn't install triple deadbolts on your door.
Having a security question that is easily guessable is like leaving your car door unlocked.
I don't see why the fact that it is a computer system means that there is suddenly nothing wrong with the actions of the person deliberately breaking in.
If a door is locked, then people know they shouldn't enter and kicking in the door would be a crime.
We keep arguing over whose fault it is when someone breaks in. The reality is that all of the above points are right, and sometimes it can be both people's fault. There's nothing wrong with assigning blame to both parties.
If someone breaks into another person's home, car, twitter account, bank account - that person is to blame for it. But if the person secured their home, car, twitter account, or bank account with a post-it note that said "Don't enter here unless you know my mother's maiden name" then they are also to blame. And if someone designs a system where that is the only way to secure it, then they are also to blame.
The reality here is that people will always try to break into things. So it is the other two who have the responsibility to fix the problem: the end-user must demand better security, and the engineers must supply it.
rogramming is basically putting algorithms into a form a computer can understand. Nothing more. And where do these algos come from?
Most software today is business workflows, so it requires little math. The "algorithms" become things like "send the approval form to the purchasing manager, and verify that the form is signed within 7 days from the publication date." - Yes, it is math, but it isn't very complicated.
When math is involved, it is probably encapsulated by something like a SQL server or a collections object. The programmer probably chooses which tools to use, and lets those tools do the hard math for them.
It's almost like we need another term to distinguish "person who places business rules into a high-level language" as opposed to someone who takes complex mathematical algorithms, writes them into code, and optimizes them. I tend to use "programmer" -vs- "computer scientist" but that's not entirely satisfactory either.
1) Who is "we" in your question? This was done by:
Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) along with colleagues at the University College London, the Royal Free Hospital, and Careggi University Hospital in Florence
2) If you meant the United States, this would be government funded had it been done in that country since it deals with adult stem cells.
I have citations for everything you asked for, and then a few more:
Wear-leveling is done for bad sectors on a HDD, not as standard practice.
1) I still was considering that wear-leveling. Just after-the-fact wear leveling. :-)
2) However, Western Digital drives do have "Preemptive wear leveling" as a standard practice.
Wrong. I just ran a benchmark and...
On a HDD, writes are followed by an immediate read to verify the data wrote correctly. Take a look at some of the benchmarks on storagereview.com Compare the random writes to random reads: the writes are always slower. StorageReview doesn't compare continuous writes, because that is rare. However, you will find that there are drives specially designed for continuous writes for A/V purposes, that are made to address this issue.
Try to defrag a MLC drive a few times and it'll be dead in a week
My turn. [citation needed]. I'll provide my own references.
According to Kingston
For USB Flash drives, Toshiba calculated that a 10,000 write cycle endurance would enable
customers to “completely write and erase the entire contents once per day for 27 years well beyond the life of the hardware.”
Intel was more conservative with their report
...the X-18/25 SSDs have a mean time before failure (MTBF) rating of 1.2 million hours, which is on par with modern server hard drives. In addition, he claimed that the drives can withstand a workload of 100 GB worth of writes a day for five years.
They then go on to explain how it was actually hard to even write 100GB per day.
not degradation of the media itself.
Magnetic media does degrade. For one thing, it warps over time. I can't state all of the methods of failure.
Look, SSDs are great... But they are not ready to replace HDDs.
I agree. Just not for some of the reasons the Wikipedia article lists.
Each sector of a hard drive has a checksum. That checksum is used to verify that the data is in tact. During a write cycle, the drive reads back the values and verifies it against the checksum. If the checksum fails a certain number of times, the drive will map the sector to another physical location on the disk. You can probably find info about this by looking up S.M.A.R.T which allows you to query things like how many sectors have been reallocated as a result of bad checksums.
To combat this, Western Digital has something they call Preemptive wear leveling (more info here). I think other each drive manufacturer has their own way to deal with it.
Funny? Not so funny when you notice that your music, movies, project backups etc, are all corrupted and lost.
Cute alarmist anecdote, but that is not how SSDs fail.
No. TRIM does not solve that problem. Do you even know what TRIM is?
Yes. TRIM was created to address this problem. The articles comparing TRIM drives to non-TRIM drives show that the problem has been solved. For references on this, just check out prior Slashdot discussions. Tom's hardware, storage review, and Anandtech have articles on this.
If you have evidence that TRIM does not solve the problem, please post it. Asking "Do you even know what TRIM is" doesn't provide any evidence that it doesn't work.
And the answer is, that it’s much worse for SSDs.
Actually, SSDs fail gracefully, while hard drives die suddenly with a crunching sound and a destruction of data. If an SSD runs out of sectors to write to - it becomes read-only and you have to buy a new one and copy your files over.
SATA limits the speed. Not only the bus. But also the internal controller. Simple as that.
I see that I didn't explain why this part of the article didn't make sense. The reason is because it argues against SATA, but the article is about SSDs.
This article claims Google is using Intel SSDs. There's no source though, and Google declines to comment. Oh well.
I'll edit the article later. For now...
- Wear leveling used on flash-based SSDs...
Oops! Wear leveling is done on HDDs too. And it isn't a disadvantage: it is a solution.
- More expensive, lower capacity
Don't need to address that, since that is the topic of the article...
- Asymmetric read vs. write performance
Oops! Platter drives have this problem too!
- Requires TRIM
Solved.
- Limited lifetimes
Funny, that's considered the major downside to platter drives. Anyway, this is the same as the first point.
- Performance of SSDs degrades with use.
Solved. See TRIM. Note that this is also a problem on platter drives.
- SATA-based SSDs generally exhibit much slower write speeds.
This one doesn't even make sense.
- DRAM-based SSDs
Aren't what we are talking about, so that's irrelevant.
Yes, DVDs spin 2000 RPM, while HDD's spin between 5400RPM and 15000RPM. Big difference in power and heat. Plus, hard drives spin fragile magnetic disks on exotic fluid bearings with a physical head micrometers away. They are a lot more susceptible to damage.
Although this still misses a big point: DVDs and CDs are going away too.
In fact very intelligent people are rare both in the West and China.
Very true. So it seems that the advantage goes to the one whose educational system is best designed to weed out the average people and find the best. Since China has more people, that means they have more intelligent people. And since China is not afraid to label them as such, and give them scholarships, China finds those people better. Those two items put them way ahead.
As someone who has been buying their own health insurance for 10+ years, I can attest that individual health insurance is as good as company-provided ones. In fact, I have yet to work at a place that can compete with the plan I am on. My deductible is 4 times what my employers is, but I make-up for that in only a few months.
IMHO, employer-sponsored health care is a racket. The employers always pick the highest-end plans, and give you very few options. The insurance companies don't require medical examinations for employer-sponsored plans, so they have to bump the price up since they don't know who they are getting.
I suspect that the prices are artificially-inflated too: For example, suppose a would be $300 per month, with the employer contributing $200 per month. The insurance company will bump it to $400 month, with the employer contributing $300. Why? Because it is tax deductible for the employer anyway, and it provides incentive for the employee to stay in place when they see that they will have to pay that much more when they leave. The really skeptical part of me often wonders if the employer even pays that $100 difference - or if *wink win* *nod nod* they just pretend they are in the paperwork they give to the employee.
I can read a 2000 page novel in a weekend and give you a very detailed outline of what's in it.
First of all, no you can't. Even if you can, the other 99.99999999999999999% of humans cannot.
Second, even if you could, you can't read a 2000 page piece of legislation and understand it in a weekend.
Third, even if you could, an outline isn't enough to vote on a major piece of legislation.
All freedom comes with one crucial restriction: you cannot use your freedom to take away someone else's.
Ironic, isn't it? But not invalid.
In the specific case of the GPL, it grants everyone the freedom to copy the modify the software, so long as you do it in such a way that it doesn't take away someone else's right to do the same. The BSD license however, gives you the ability to copy and modify the software, and the ability to forbid someone else from doing the same thing. Is that more free or less free?
The only impediment is people who hand me printouts instead of sending me the original file. After they send me the file, I recycle the paper. Having worked from home for years, I can assure you that paperless is a no-brainer. The only mail I got from the company was e-mail.
I take that back though... I do use paper for handwritten notes some times.
Awesome post.
These semantic/linguistic differences are very important to understanding a culture. For example, most Americans wouldn't say they want to kill Iraqis, or that the Iraq war was about religion. But they might call it a Crusade. Most Americans think that word means "very important thing worth dying for" but historically, and especially in the Middle East, it means a war of the holy Christian cross. I wonder how it is translated in the Iraqi media.
It sounds like an error message.
Oh no, I got an ESET NOD 32! What does that mean?
Do they plan to release a programming language? That is part of what made TI calculators so popular. Nintendo could learn from that model. (Well, before TI DRM'd them)
Why is it that fun is the antithesis of accuracy and precision? Accuracy and precision are requirements for fun.
It would be no fun to play Monopoly if I rolled a 6 but the game moved me 5 spaces.
A shooting game would be frustrating if I shot the target but it says I miss.
A fighting game is no fun if I make a really good move in the nick of time, but my character loses anyway.
This article is confusing - I apologize that I don't know much about IE9, so maybe these questions sound lame.
What features of IE9 will be hardware acceleration? Why is that acceleration required, not just a benefit? What APIs are they using that XP does not support? The only thing I can think of is that they are using DX10. I'm impressed that IE9 would really have any use for that, but I supposed they wouldn't code against DX9 just for backward compatibility.
Personally ESET NOD32 is my favourite and what I license
That has to be the worst product name ever! Just try pronouncing that! I thought maybe there was line noise or something, or maybe your keyboard exploded while trying to type something else. Next time someone complains about GIMP's name, I'll point to this product.
I've wanted this ever since I saw they do it on ST:TNG. The viewscreen darkened a sun they were surveying.
Dang it, man! I meant "fall back to Theora"
Is there any way to specify multiple formats? Ex: that points to H.264, but falls back to H.264 if that isn't supported?