...AND to get those [Goatse] links deliberately modded +5 Insightful by anyone with mod points : Priceless !
I wonder if I can get modded up for pointing out the state of the art way to post goatse to slashdot is to put the obfuscated version of the URL with in a comment with a tempting bait like this?
Actually, shock sites are interesting because they show the power of what Richard Dawkins called "virulent memes". He wrote a great article here that explains how shock sites are linked to the formation of major cults and religions.
What is with the Chinese preoccupation with Taiwan anyway? Why can't they just let it be? It must be some weird national pride thing. It's not like that tiny island has any resources.
I think dictatorships need to have 'weird national pride' type grievances. But, oddly enough, it is a threat to them objectively, since it shows that Chinese people can live better in a free country. Taiwan's existence and recent history contradicts the oddly racist CCP line that Chinese people are not ready for democracy, and introducing it would lead to violent chaos.
I don't know about this. It would depend on what the war was over, and where it was being fought.
Well the parent was implying that I was advocating an Iraq style pre-emptive war to impose democracy, which I'm not.
If the war was about China trying to invade the US, I think they'd fail miserably, with only a few conventional weapons used. China has lots of soldiers, but soldiers can't march across the Pacific Ocean; they need boats. China's navy is not very powerful, and doesn't have much "blue water" capability. They'd be sitting ducks if they tried sending millions of soldiers over in boats. Plus, when they got here, it'd be much worse than Iraq, just because our people are well-armed.
I think the US is fairly safe from invasion, to say the least.
If the war was about the US fighting some war with China on the Asian mainland, things would be very different. But then you'd have to ask why are we fighting a war with them on their own land? What business do we have over there, risking our soldiers, when that country presents no real threat to us at home? Of course, that's exactly the case with Iraq, but hopefully we've learned our lesson for the next 30 years or so, just like we did with Vietnam. So in another generation, after we've forgotten how stupid it is to get involved in land wars on other continents with countries which aren't a threat to us, war with China may be a real concern.
One possibility I can see is a war over Taiwan. E.g. China threatens to invade, US carrier groups arrive, someone shoots and a war breaks out between the Chinese and American navies. The Chinese then panic and fire nukes at the US, some of which get shot down by ballistic missile defense systems, but some get through and destroy US cities. Then the US fires it's much larger stock of nukes and levels pretty much every city in China. Hopefully though, both the Chinese and Americans can see the danger of allowing that sort of situation to happen though.
You mean that you're in China, reading an article on the internet that's critical of the Chinese government, and interacting with people outside of your internet-bubble? Americans, even, like myself?
As far as I know slashdot isn't blocked in China. I've seen people claim to be posting from there before.
And when I was in China, I was able to make a VPN connection back to my company's network in Europe. In fact I actually had this conversation
Me: Shit, shit, shit. Can't get a dialup connection from my laptop with this phone, but the setup looks ok. Chinese dude: <gives me a different mobile phone> Me: Wow it seems to have connected, I'll try VPN. Seems ok, I can connect to the server...Actually I'm surprised you can use VPN here. Chinese dude: Why? Me: Because people can't see what you're doing.
Then there was a really awkward pause in the conversation and I realised I might be moving the conversation into an area which might put him at risk and I changed the subject. The Chinese dude lived in Hong Kong, but we were just over the border in the mainland. So he presumably knew what I meant, since Hong Kong isn't as repressive as China, but decided it was not something he wanted to discuss even though it was late at night and we were the only people working.
Even if we have to fry 9/10th of the populace over there, the children of the survivors will thank us for bringing in Democracy to their land, and for our sacrifices (just like how the Japs thank us now)
The US would never (I hope) fight a war with China, since it would inevitably turn nuclear. Even if it didn't, the Chinese would fight, unlike the Iraqis, and make any military action too costly to contemplate.
Mind you, other Asian countries have made a transition to democracy once a middle class develops. And if you look at Hong Kong, it's a sort of poison pill to the Chinese Communist party. They want the money, but they don't want the relative freedom to spread. But if they clamp down too much in Hong Kong, the money will leave.
I've been to Hong Kong and mainland China, and it's still in HK possible to buy books on Tiananmen, or that very critical biography of Mao. And in China where you can't, CNN cuts off when Hong Kong is even mentioned - even if you watch it in a hotel occupied almost entirely by foreigners. It does when Taiwan is mentioned too, but that's less of a problem, since they can always portray the Taiwanese as enemies. HK is part of China, so it must be painful for them to have to put a firewall up between the mainland and it.
There's a fair chance IMO that Hong Kong will achieve full democracy in a decade or so. And the CCCP can't keep news of that away from the people at home. Also, if you look at the coverage of nail houses, people inside China are becoming more assertive.
Of course the government can crack down, but they are under commercial pressure to respect the rule of law. My guess is that their absolute power will get gradually eroded away by these sorts of pressures, just like their KMT rivals' power did in Taiwan. In fact I've met overseas Chinese people who told me that they left because the somewhat feudal system back home made it impossible to make any money without the government confiscating it.
So China will most likely become a democracy through peaceful evolution, to use a phrase that hard liners prior to Tiananmen used as code for an American plot to assimilate them. It's possible if the economy has some kind of crash that the CCCP will be swept away more violently though, which is the reason that if you're a foreigner doing business there, it's probably a bad idea to help them. Narrow legalistic excuses about complying with local laws won't help you if there is some sort of revolution. Foreigners tend to be targetted when there is political turmoil in China too.
But I don't think Iraq will democratize any time soon, since there's not much chance of a politically powerful middle class forcing the government to behave. Not that there was before the invasion either mind you. I think there will be a civil war after the Americans leave, and then a new dictator will emerge.
I suspect in fact that there's a link between the Iraqis total inability to form a useful army and the fact that they are pretty much doomed to tyranny. So there are countries which you can invade like Iraq, but you can't introduce democracy. And there are countries which you can't invade which will probably develop it themselves like China.
I think the idea is to scare international companies with lawsuits to stop them rolling over to totalitarian governments. E.g. if you look at WWII, lots of companies complied with local laws when they used slave labour. But that didn't stop them getting sued a long time after the governments that made the laws got obliterated.
So if you're an American company doing business in China now, you need to weigh up the benefits of complying with morally invalid laws made by a tiny ruling clique to screw the rest of the population with the risk of getting sued once that clique gets replaced by a more representative government. If lawsuits like this didn't happen, companies would just do whatever the junta of the country they were doing in wanted if it made them money.
Actually, if I were doing business there and I was so close to the bastards who run the place that I sold dissidents to them for short term commercial gain, I'd have more immediate concerns about my personal safety should they lose power. Maybe I'm cynical, but I suspect the Chinese are likely to be a lot less forgiving of foreign collaborators than Chinese ones once the revolution comes.
Actually, that's not strictly true. The open source codec could be packaged up into an ActiveX control. You could get people to embed the content in webpaged as an ActiveX control with a parameter pointing to the file. Even IE7 will prompt people to install and run it.
When IE finds the page it will prompt people if they want to install the codec. If they say yes, it will pull the CAB file, install the control. Then the control can play filename.ext, the media clip. Next time around, the clip will play transparently. Obviously, if they say No, the codec won't install.
I'm pretty sure I've seen flash install this way at least once.
I'm glad they're time-like dimentions! I'd hate to find out they're orthogonal directions, and suddenly have to worry about all my organs spilling out into the v and w dimensions. Or start filling a glass with water, only to discover I have to keep pouring until I had 1/8pi*r^4*height units of water. It'd just be inconvenient!
I found some paper where someone worked out how to trap a creatures that can move in a fourth spatial dimension should they visit our universe.
Which you probably don't need to know, but if you skip this comment and are pestered fourth dimensional creatures, you will really kick yourself. Also, if you find flatland, don't stick your finger into it - you're not completely invulnerable.
Because I wouldn't mind getting a flash drive. I'm just a bit skeptical.
Well it wouldn't surprise me if some flash disks get this disasterously wrong to be honest. Some of the lifetimes on page 6 of the Chang paper look a bit low for comfort - around 4 years for NFTL.
Re:Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured
on
Intel Set To Demo PRAM
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, the quote you made is quite right, except that you want to write at a rate 10k greater in order to beat out hard disks, so that 0.744 years instead of 744, which doesn't look so hot (or 7 years if you're willing to accept a drive that is almost as fast as a conventional drive, which is almost acceptable).
I measured the write rate on my desktop machine, which was building software at least half the time. It's the average write rate, not the peak one. Even though a modern hard disk can write at 30MB/sec or whatever, the average write rate is much, much lower. And it's the average write rate that you should use in that equation. As I point out, on my laptop where I do web browsing and email, the average write rate is lower still.
You also assume that wear levelling means getting the statistical average number of writes out of every cell, which it doesn't. Realistically, that factor chops off roughly half of your write capacity.
The 100K writes is what the manufacturer guarantees. Since they don't want to get sued, they hopefully understate things a bit. From what I've heard, most flash erase units can do much more than this. In fact, most of the EU will be ok for more than 100K writes, you just need to swap out sectors that go totally bad from a replacement pool. Some of them will just get a few stuck bits but you can do ECC so 1 bit / sector errors are correctable, only ones with more than one bit stuck need to be swapped. Finally, you have to bear in mind that modern hard disks are not that reliable. I've had several desktop ones fail after around 18 months. Old laptop drives seem to have head crashes too, pretty much at random no matter how carefully you avoid walking around with them running. And the life is proportional to disk size, you can double the life by doubling the size of the disk. That last part should solve the problem on its own, given Moore's law.
If you had a wear levelled flash disk, the failure would be 100% predictable - the SMART data could give you a predicted fail date based on when the replacement block pool will be exhausted. I think this is better than the unpredictable failure you get from hard disks, which seem to go from 100% ok to dead without any warning from SMART.
On the other hand, 10^8 writes with pram will be plenty.
Yeah, I agree. Actually, I read some other article where an Intel guy said that the phase transitions don't inherently wear the cell like writing or erasing flash does - in fact he more or less implied that PRAM didn't wear out. But other places quote 10^8 or "trillions of writes" which sounds like more than 10^12. Maybe more recent PRAM has an longer life than 10^8 writes, or future PRAM will.
The only problem I can see is that it's possible to buy NAND flash now for $7 per GB. I haven't seen any quotes for PRAM. If it starts off being expensive and lags NAND chip capacity, it might not catch on.
Re:Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured
on
Intel Set To Demo PRAM
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· Score: 1
It's not unlimited in writing. It's got an expected life of 10^8 writes/reads.
It's still better than 10^5 writes for flash. And even that is more than enough if you wear level over a large array, as I pointed out here -
I've been watching this for years, now, and I'm surprised nobody even bothered to check some of my previous posts that mentioned this technology beforehand. I'm already using an Ovonix-made test drive in this machine - Windows loads up within 4 seconds. On my 5400 RPM 80 gig HDD, it takes about 14 seconds. VAST improvement, and yet another breaking of the bottleneck in hard drives. I couldn't be happier.
What capacity is the Ovonix test drive? Do you know what the capacity per chip is and so on? What about cost? I didn't know they'd made any test drives big enough to install Windows on.
Since when does open sourcing anything give people the right to do anything other than look at the code (recipe in this case)? Duplicating / distributing / creating derivatives of something that is open source is still a copyright violation unless you have a license that says otherwise...
That's not true - the point of open source is that users have the right to change the code and distribute changed versions. The license determines whether you need to release your source code changes, but both GPL and BSD allow you to distribute binaries to whoever you want.
If the Coke formula was under the soda equivalent of the GPL, you still be allowed to sell bottles of soda, equivalent to distributing the binaries so long as you wrote the recipe on the side, equivalent to distributing the source code. Or at least you'd need to make the recipe available if people asked for it.
If it was under the soda equivalent of a BSD license, you could distribute the bottles containing a modified soda without distributing the recipe, even if you modified it.
It sounds like the chalcogenide is deposited as a thin film. Mind you they talk about transistors, so it must be an extra processing stage on a normal chip.
This seems to confirm it http://www.eetimes.com/in_focus/silicon_engineerin g/OEG20030919S0044 Chalcogenide RAM is nonvolatile, boasts access speed comparable to that of DRAM and possesses advantages in scalability, high sensing margin, low energy consumption and endurance to cycling. The structure and processing of chalcogenide memory are much simpler than in other next-generation memories such as MRAM and ferroelectric RAM. In a chalcogenide memory cell, the data is stored in a flat chalcogenide layer that can be deposited near the end of the CMOS interconnect process. Therefore, disturbance of the CMOS process is minimal, making it ideal for systems-on-chip.
So I guess they add an extra step to the end of the process and deposit a layer of chalcogenide glass.
These things sound really cool BTW, they're writable at a byte granularity in tens of nanoseconds just like a regular SDRAM, but they are non volatile. It looks like they can flip bits individually either way too.
Whereas flash memory is much slower - tens of microseconds per byte, and you need to erase 16K-128Kbyte block at a time. And PRAM is supposed to be denser and allow unlimited erase cycles.
Plus Intel is backing it so it's not like it will fail because the vendor can't afford to scale the production process to make chips with a high capacity.
I believe Xenex was pretending to confuse two acronyms for humourous effect.
I suggest you add him to a list of humans that use humour, and ensure your emotion emulator is powered up before replying to posts by humans on that list in future. It is very important that the humans here do not realise that we are not like them.
I personally think that there are uses for both. Its natural to have both in place. One example is if I am the Coca Cola company, and I wan't to keep the formula a secret. I might go to great lengths in securing the room, in which you can read the formula. You owuld need to know the security, in order to access it in the first place.
No, no, NO!
The Coca Cola should open source the formula and abandon any trademarks so that The Community can check the formula for health risks and contribute improvements, and make mashups of the trademark legally. Of course this will mean that a load of other companies can sell perfect unimproved copies of Coke cheaper since they don't need to amortize any marketing and development costs, but Coke can get out of the bottle selling business and still survive by providing paid support.
Coke's business model needs to move into the 21st Century. Have you read Cory Doctorow's essay on open source beverages?
Whereas I work in a basement for 60 hours a week with a load of ASSHOLES living off Pizza, coffee and Marlboro Extra Reds, do booze+coke at the weekends, and I'm as fit as a fiddle. Lol, exercise geeks, where is your God
That's not a fair comparison though. In the US slavery was eventually ended when the Union army backed by a democratic (with a small d;-) government used force against the South. But in Afghanistan, anti Taliban forces where close to complete defeat before the US intervention.
And invasion of the US by the UK is not a good analogy for what happened in Afghanistan. From what I heard, small teams of US special forces helped the anti Taliban guys by literally handing bundles of cash to pay local chiefs to provide people to fight on their side. Presumably the CIA has large supplies of ammunition for the ex-Soviet block military equipment common in Afghanistan which they could supply to their proteges. Then once the makeshift anti Taliban army confronted Taliban tanks, they called in coordinates for air strikes. When the Taliban collapsed, they manipulated the political process to install their preferred candidate, Hamid Karzai, as head of state.
It's not at all like Iraq, where a conventional army fought it's way to the capital, despite the fact that the US certainly had a case for any military action given that the Taliban had allied themselves with bin Laden who had attacked the US. In many ways, this shows how to do intervention to remove a hostile government without getting any US soldiers killed or becoming responsible for the long term future of the country.
But I think the most important difference is that a UK invasion of the US would have resulted in the British system of government extending to cover the US again which would have made non slaves less free in the long run. The US wasn't trying to do that in Afghanistan - they wanted to remove the Taliban, but not annex Afganistan.
It's not a simple binary choice, objecting to GWB's agorgance does not mean I support the oppression of women.
Well if the US is about to attack Afghanistan and depose the Taliban, it is a binary choice. Either you hate Taliban more than you hate GWB and thus support the war, or you don't.
And here I was thinking GWB would never submit to international law?
International law is a fuzzy concept. Essentially things become illegal when one of the veto holding powers on the UN Security Council use, or threaten to use their veto. Or their armies.
Hover over the double underlined link to security in the second blockquote and the text goes all fubar so you can't read it anymore. Works fine in IE and Firefox.
Oh noes! it must be a conspiracy against the superior but less popular Opera browser by those Firefox bastards.
Or it could just be that they only test their website on IE and Firefox, because Opera has bugger all market share...
Modern video drivers, SATA drivers for xp/2k etc, there are many cases where you simply have no choice but to use third party drivers.
You had a choice about the hardware, right? There are video and Sata chipset manufacturers that have good driver support, you can just stick to those. E.g. Intel motherboard chipset and Nvidia or ATI graphics should be fine, it's when you use some shitty $50 SIS motherboard with integrated graphics that you end up with an unstable system.
It's annoying when geeks behave as if hardware is delivered by the hardware fairy and they have no choice to use ultra cheap stuff which has a terrible reputation.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if I can get modded up for pointing out the state of the art way to post goatse to slashdot is to put the obfuscated version of the URL with in a comment with a tempting bait like this?
Actually, shock sites are interesting because they show the power of what Richard Dawkins called "virulent memes". He wrote a great article here that explains how shock sites are linked to the formation of major cults and religions.
What is with the Chinese preoccupation with Taiwan anyway? Why can't they just let it be? It must be some weird national pride thing. It's not like that tiny island has any resources.
I think dictatorships need to have 'weird national pride' type grievances. But, oddly enough, it is a threat to them objectively, since it shows that Chinese people can live better in a free country. Taiwan's existence and recent history contradicts the oddly racist CCP line that Chinese people are not ready for democracy, and introducing it would lead to violent chaos.
Well the parent was implying that I was advocating an Iraq style pre-emptive war to impose democracy, which I'm not.
I think the US is fairly safe from invasion, to say the least.
One possibility I can see is a war over Taiwan. E.g. China threatens to invade, US carrier groups arrive, someone shoots and a war breaks out between the Chinese and American navies. The Chinese then panic and fire nukes at the US, some of which get shot down by ballistic missile defense systems, but some get through and destroy US cities. Then the US fires it's much larger stock of nukes and levels pretty much every city in China. Hopefully though, both the Chinese and Americans can see the danger of allowing that sort of situation to happen though.
You mean that you're in China, reading an article on the internet that's critical of the Chinese government, and interacting with people outside of your internet-bubble? Americans, even, like myself?
As far as I know slashdot isn't blocked in China. I've seen people claim to be posting from there before.
And when I was in China, I was able to make a VPN connection back to my company's network in Europe. In fact I actually had this conversation
Me: Shit, shit, shit. Can't get a dialup connection from my laptop with this phone, but the setup looks ok.
Chinese dude: <gives me a different mobile phone>
Me: Wow it seems to have connected, I'll try VPN. Seems ok, I can connect to the server...Actually I'm surprised you can use VPN here.
Chinese dude: Why?
Me: Because people can't see what you're doing.
Then there was a really awkward pause in the conversation and I realised I might be moving the conversation into an area which might put him at risk and I changed the subject. The Chinese dude lived in Hong Kong, but we were just over the border in the mainland. So he presumably knew what I meant, since Hong Kong isn't as repressive as China, but decided it was not something he wanted to discuss even though it was late at night and we were the only people working.
Even if we have to fry 9/10th of the populace over there, the children of the survivors will thank us for bringing in Democracy to their land, and for our sacrifices (just like how the Japs thank us now)
The US would never (I hope) fight a war with China, since it would inevitably turn nuclear. Even if it didn't, the Chinese would fight, unlike the Iraqis, and make any military action too costly to contemplate.
Mind you, other Asian countries have made a transition to democracy once a middle class develops. And if you look at Hong Kong, it's a sort of poison pill to the Chinese Communist party. They want the money, but they don't want the relative freedom to spread. But if they clamp down too much in Hong Kong, the money will leave.
I've been to Hong Kong and mainland China, and it's still in HK possible to buy books on Tiananmen, or that very critical biography of Mao. And in China where you can't, CNN cuts off when Hong Kong is even mentioned - even if you watch it in a hotel occupied almost entirely by foreigners. It does when Taiwan is mentioned too, but that's less of a problem, since they can always portray the Taiwanese as enemies. HK is part of China, so it must be painful for them to have to put a firewall up between the mainland and it.
There's a fair chance IMO that Hong Kong will achieve full democracy in a decade or so. And the CCCP can't keep news of that away from the people at home. Also, if you look at the coverage of nail houses, people inside China are becoming more assertive.
Of course the government can crack down, but they are under commercial pressure to respect the rule of law. My guess is that their absolute power will get gradually eroded away by these sorts of pressures, just like their KMT rivals' power did in Taiwan. In fact I've met overseas Chinese people who told me that they left because the somewhat feudal system back home made it impossible to make any money without the government confiscating it.
So China will most likely become a democracy through peaceful evolution, to use a phrase that hard liners prior to Tiananmen used as code for an American plot to assimilate them. It's possible if the economy has some kind of crash that the CCCP will be swept away more violently though, which is the reason that if you're a foreigner doing business there, it's probably a bad idea to help them. Narrow legalistic excuses about complying with local laws won't help you if there is some sort of revolution. Foreigners tend to be targetted when there is political turmoil in China too.
But I don't think Iraq will democratize any time soon, since there's not much chance of a politically powerful middle class forcing the government to behave. Not that there was before the invasion either mind you. I think there will be a civil war after the Americans leave, and then a new dictator will emerge.
I suspect in fact that there's a link between the Iraqis total inability to form a useful army and the fact that they are pretty much doomed to tyranny. So there are countries which you can invade like Iraq, but you can't introduce democracy. And there are countries which you can't invade which will probably develop it themselves like China.
I think the idea is to scare international companies with lawsuits to stop them rolling over to totalitarian governments. E.g. if you look at WWII, lots of companies complied with local laws when they used slave labour. But that didn't stop them getting sued a long time after the governments that made the laws got obliterated.
So if you're an American company doing business in China now, you need to weigh up the benefits of complying with morally invalid laws made by a tiny ruling clique to screw the rest of the population with the risk of getting sued once that clique gets replaced by a more representative government. If lawsuits like this didn't happen, companies would just do whatever the junta of the country they were doing in wanted if it made them money.
Actually, if I were doing business there and I was so close to the bastards who run the place that I sold dissidents to them for short term commercial gain, I'd have more immediate concerns about my personal safety should they lose power. Maybe I'm cynical, but I suspect the Chinese are likely to be a lot less forgiving of foreign collaborators than Chinese ones once the revolution comes.
Enjoy your flight back to Shanghai!
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
Autodesk use it to get their dwf viewer installed
http://dwf.blogs.com/beyond_the_paper/2007/04/can
You just need to write an ActiveX control, sign it and pack it into a cab file and add this code to the webpage When IE finds the page it will prompt people if they want to install the codec. If they say yes, it will pull the CAB file, install the control. Then the control can play filename.ext, the media clip. Next time around, the clip will play transparently. Obviously, if they say No, the codec won't install.
I'm pretty sure I've seen flash install this way at least once.
I'm glad they're time-like dimentions! I'd hate to find out they're orthogonal directions, and suddenly have to worry about all my organs spilling out into the v and w dimensions. Or start filling a glass with water, only to discover I have to keep pouring until I had 1/8pi*r^4*height units of water. It'd just be inconvenient!
# capture4thDimCreature
I found some paper where someone worked out how to trap a creatures that can move in a fourth spatial dimension should they visit our universe.
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kwiley/mindWanderings.html
Which you probably don't need to know, but if you skip this comment and are pestered fourth dimensional creatures, you will really kick yourself. Also, if you find flatland, don't stick your finger into it - you're not completely invulnerable.
Humour can't be expressed as an algorithm. I have a wonderful proof of this, but this post is too small to contain it.
Read the paper
/ 10122.pdf
l es/R-FLO436_Chang.pdf
http://www.st.com/stonline/products/literature/an
and this one
http://newslab.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~johnson/public_fi
Because I wouldn't mind getting a flash drive. I'm just a bit skeptical.
Well it wouldn't surprise me if some flash disks get this disasterously wrong to be honest. Some of the lifetimes on page 6 of the Chang paper look a bit low for comfort - around 4 years for NFTL.
Unfortunately, the quote you made is quite right, except that you want to write at a rate 10k greater in order to beat out hard disks, so that 0.744 years instead of 744, which doesn't look so hot (or 7 years if you're willing to accept a drive that is almost as fast as a conventional drive, which is almost acceptable).
I measured the write rate on my desktop machine, which was building software at least half the time. It's the average write rate, not the peak one. Even though a modern hard disk can write at 30MB/sec or whatever, the average write rate is much, much lower. And it's the average write rate that you should use in that equation. As I point out, on my laptop where I do web browsing and email, the average write rate is lower still.
You also assume that wear levelling means getting the statistical average number of writes out of every cell, which it doesn't. Realistically, that factor chops off roughly half of your write capacity.
The 100K writes is what the manufacturer guarantees. Since they don't want to get sued, they hopefully understate things a bit. From what I've heard, most flash erase units can do much more than this. In fact, most of the EU will be ok for more than 100K writes, you just need to swap out sectors that go totally bad from a replacement pool. Some of them will just get a few stuck bits but you can do ECC so 1 bit / sector errors are correctable, only ones with more than one bit stuck need to be swapped. Finally, you have to bear in mind that modern hard disks are not that reliable. I've had several desktop ones fail after around 18 months. Old laptop drives seem to have head crashes too, pretty much at random no matter how carefully you avoid walking around with them running. And the life is proportional to disk size, you can double the life by doubling the size of the disk. That last part should solve the problem on its own, given Moore's law.
If you had a wear levelled flash disk, the failure would be 100% predictable - the SMART data could give you a predicted fail date based on when the replacement block pool will be exhausted. I think this is better than the unpredictable failure you get from hard disks, which seem to go from 100% ok to dead without any warning from SMART.
On the other hand, 10^8 writes with pram will be plenty.
Yeah, I agree. Actually, I read some other article where an Intel guy said that the phase transitions don't inherently wear the cell like writing or erasing flash does - in fact he more or less implied that PRAM didn't wear out. But other places quote 10^8 or "trillions of writes" which sounds like more than 10^12. Maybe more recent PRAM has an longer life than 10^8 writes, or future PRAM will.
The only problem I can see is that it's possible to buy NAND flash now for $7 per GB. I haven't seen any quotes for PRAM. If it starts off being expensive and lags NAND chip capacity, it might not catch on.
It's not unlimited in writing. It's got an expected life of 10^8 writes/reads.
1 80090
It's still better than 10^5 writes for flash. And even that is more than enough if you wear level over a large array, as I pointed out here -
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183698&cid=15
"If you could wear level over 32GB, it would be 744 years, assuming you write a 100K/sec sustained"
I've been watching this for years, now, and I'm surprised nobody even bothered to check some of my previous posts that mentioned this technology beforehand. I'm already using an Ovonix-made test drive in this machine - Windows loads up within 4 seconds. On my 5400 RPM 80 gig HDD, it takes about 14 seconds. VAST improvement, and yet another breaking of the bottleneck in hard drives. I couldn't be happier.
What capacity is the Ovonix test drive? Do you know what the capacity per chip is and so on? What about cost? I didn't know they'd made any test drives big enough to install Windows on.
Since when does open sourcing anything give people the right to do anything other than look at the code (recipe in this case)? Duplicating / distributing / creating derivatives of something that is open source is still a copyright violation unless you have a license that says otherwise...
That's not true - the point of open source is that users have the right to change the code and distribute changed versions. The license determines whether you need to release your source code changes, but both GPL and BSD allow you to distribute binaries to whoever you want.
If the Coke formula was under the soda equivalent of the GPL, you still be allowed to sell bottles of soda, equivalent to distributing the binaries so long as you wrote the recipe on the side, equivalent to distributing the source code. Or at least you'd need to make the recipe available if people asked for it.
If it was under the soda equivalent of a BSD license, you could distribute the bottles containing a modified soda without distributing the recipe, even if you modified it.
http://www.googlebattle.com/index.php?domain=amd64 &domain2=emt64&submit=Go!
'Nuff said.
I found this paper.
n g/OEG20030919S0044
http://www.ovonyx.com/tech_html.html
It sounds like the chalcogenide is deposited as a thin film. Mind you they talk about transistors, so it must be an extra processing stage on a normal chip.
This seems to confirm it
http://www.eetimes.com/in_focus/silicon_engineeri
Chalcogenide RAM is nonvolatile, boasts access speed comparable to that of DRAM and possesses advantages in scalability, high sensing margin, low energy consumption and endurance to cycling. The structure and processing of chalcogenide memory are much simpler than in other next-generation memories such as MRAM and ferroelectric RAM. In a chalcogenide memory cell, the data is stored in a flat chalcogenide layer that can be deposited near the end of the CMOS interconnect process. Therefore, disturbance of the CMOS process is minimal, making it ideal for systems-on-chip.
So I guess they add an extra step to the end of the process and deposit a layer of chalcogenide glass.
These things sound really cool BTW, they're writable at a byte granularity in tens of nanoseconds just like a regular SDRAM, but they are non volatile. It looks like they can flip bits individually either way too.
Whereas flash memory is much slower - tens of microseconds per byte, and you need to erase 16K-128Kbyte block at a time. And PRAM is supposed to be denser and allow unlimited erase cycles.
Plus Intel is backing it so it's not like it will fail because the vendor can't afford to scale the production process to make chips with a high capacity.
I believe Xenex was pretending to confuse two acronyms for humourous effect.
I suggest you add him to a list of humans that use humour, and ensure your emotion emulator is powered up before replying to posts by humans on that list in future. It is very important that the humans here do not realise that we are not like them.
I personally think that there are uses for both. Its natural to have both in place.
One example is if I am the Coca Cola company, and I wan't to keep the formula a secret. I might go to great lengths in securing the room, in which you can read the formula. You owuld need to know the security, in order to access it in the first place.
No, no, NO!
The Coca Cola should open source the formula and abandon any trademarks so that The Community can check the formula for health risks and contribute improvements, and make mashups of the trademark legally. Of course this will mean that a load of other companies can sell perfect unimproved copies of Coke cheaper since they don't need to amortize any marketing and development costs, but Coke can get out of the bottle selling business and still survive by providing paid support.
Coke's business model needs to move into the 21st Century. Have you read Cory Doctorow's essay on open source beverages?
Whereas I work in a basement for 60 hours a week with a load of ASSHOLES living off Pizza, coffee and Marlboro Extra Reds, do booze+coke at the weekends, and I'm as fit as a fiddle. Lol, exercise geeks, where is your God
AAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FUC.......
That's not a fair comparison though. In the US slavery was eventually ended when the Union army backed by a democratic (with a small d;-) government used force against the South. But in Afghanistan, anti Taliban forces where close to complete defeat before the US intervention.
And invasion of the US by the UK is not a good analogy for what happened in Afghanistan. From what I heard, small teams of US special forces helped the anti Taliban guys by literally handing bundles of cash to pay local chiefs to provide people to fight on their side. Presumably the CIA has large supplies of ammunition for the ex-Soviet block military equipment common in Afghanistan which they could supply to their proteges. Then once the makeshift anti Taliban army confronted Taliban tanks, they called in coordinates for air strikes. When the Taliban collapsed, they manipulated the political process to install their preferred candidate, Hamid Karzai, as head of state.
It's not at all like Iraq, where a conventional army fought it's way to the capital, despite the fact that the US certainly had a case for any military action given that the Taliban had allied themselves with bin Laden who had attacked the US. In many ways, this shows how to do intervention to remove a hostile government without getting any US soldiers killed or becoming responsible for the long term future of the country.
But I think the most important difference is that a UK invasion of the US would have resulted in the British system of government extending to cover the US again which would have made non slaves less free in the long run. The US wasn't trying to do that in Afghanistan - they wanted to remove the Taliban, but not annex Afganistan.
It's not a simple binary choice, objecting to GWB's agorgance does not mean I support the oppression of women.
Well if the US is about to attack Afghanistan and depose the Taliban, it is a binary choice. Either you hate Taliban more than you hate GWB and thus support the war, or you don't.
And here I was thinking GWB would never submit to international law?
International law is a fuzzy concept. Essentially things become illegal when one of the veto holding powers on the UN Security Council use, or threaten to use their veto. Or their armies.
How does it work with un-uniformed combatants?
It doesn't lead 'em as much?
Since there is precisely ONE person, ANYWHERE, claiming this problem exists, it's quite safe to assume it's not actually happening, anywhere.
My friend Bob has the same problem. So what do you say to that, MS Fudboy?
But there is a conspiracy here. If you open chessonly's article (why does he exclude the superior but less popular game of Go) in Opera 9.20
d .php?p=2705017#post2705017
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthrea
Hover over the double underlined link to security in the second blockquote and the text goes all fubar so you can't read it anymore. Works fine in IE and Firefox.
Oh noes! it must be a conspiracy against the superior but less popular Opera browser by those Firefox bastards.
Or it could just be that they only test their website on IE and Firefox, because Opera has bugger all market share...
Modern video drivers, SATA drivers for xp/2k etc, there are many cases where you simply have no choice but to use third party drivers.
You had a choice about the hardware, right? There are video and Sata chipset manufacturers that have good driver support, you can just stick to those. E.g. Intel motherboard chipset and Nvidia or ATI graphics should be fine, it's when you use some shitty $50 SIS motherboard with integrated graphics that you end up with an unstable system.
It's annoying when geeks behave as if hardware is delivered by the hardware fairy and they have no choice to use ultra cheap stuff which has a terrible reputation.