But that doesn't help - it's the choice of moderators that is the problem, not the choice of what they.
Interestingly letting "Joe Shmoe" (by which I mean the general unselected public) do it would actually be better, just like Joe Shmoe vote on say energy policy is better than letting only 'experts' do it. It's because the biases of the Joe Shmoe's tend to cancel out. Whereas the expert's biases tend to reinforce each other.
E.g. a slashdot expert will get to moderate. Being an expert means that they've spent a long time, and if they spent a long time here they must agree to some extent with the biases of the site. The same would happen with a patent moderation.
Actually, the problem is finding a scientific sample of Joe Schmoes. Maybe it could work like jury duty.
You have to wonder whether it would work actually. Remember that you're asking people that the patent office considers to be industry experts to moderate. Realistically, they'd be people who already have patents, and are thus likely to have a strong pro patent bias. It'd be like a kind of anti-slashdot. E.g.
Patent - Method for obtaining gaseous oxygen via inhalation. +100 Highly original, Benefit to Mankind.
Complaint - my son suffocated after the patent, we couldn't afford the $1000/year license here in Ghana -100 Whining, Communist, Unamerican, Dirty Gnu Hippie.
I used to be very anti software patent, but then I started to think of situations where they are essential.
E.g. imagine I think of a way to speed up Graphics cards with some software algorithm. I have the idea, but I don't have a factory that makes VGA controllers. I could contact Nvidia say and tell them my idea, but then they'd just use it and not pay me a dime.
Copyright doesn't help me here - you can get around copyright on code too easily by making trivial changes. Even worse if the copyrighted code is VHDL, you'd be hard pressed to prove any copyright violation by examining the ASIC that are synthesised by it. With a patent, you could get coverage for a broad range of algorithms - you could chuck test vectors at the ASIC and prove that it used one of range of algorithms your patent covered. E.g. for a cache somewhere in the visualisation pipeline, you'd just need to show a drastic slowdown when the input data varies enough to have a large miss rate. Copyright would be hopeless - they could just claim that they had coincidentally thought of the same idea. And you wouldn't be able to do anything about it, since the only way to prove copyright violation would be to examine their source code.
That's the point of patents - the inventor can have an idea and no money, and can sell the idea safely to the company with money and no idea.
It seems to me that the whole anti patent movement is made up by the kind of people that are most likely to need them - penniless but smart geeks, which is pretty ironic.
The CPUs may be designed by humans, but all the low level synthesis is done by software - imagine some VHDL synthesis algorithm that produces low power CPUs for example.
Certainly the world was scandalized when Grean's quadrilateral began to sell for hundred of thousands of dollars and began to grace the walls of museums and executive boardrooms alike. And the grant from NEA, for funding to transform the quadrilateral to polygon with increasing number of vertices, nearly caused congress to dissolve the entity.
For an hefty markup, you can get an ugly grean quadrilateral.
Re:Inconsistent Metaphor?
on
The Neuron Drive
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Secondly, the fans baffle me. Given their distance from the drive, while they may be function in that they work, they're not functional in that they have no practical purpose. And how do they integrate with the "neuron" metaphor?
You mean your brain can run without noisy external cooling. Lucky you;-)
Must admit, I don't use VPN to work from a home machine, I don't know. But I'd guess that if you log on locally to a machine that you set up yourself you can decide whether or not your an admin, so you can use fast user switching. Connected to a domain, the domain admin makes that decision, so you can't.
In the VPN case, I don't know what the solution is, but I guess it will annoy a few people no matter what.
Hmm, it turns out that the excellent Old New thing has an entry on it
Actually the best way is to use Fast User Switching. Have an Admin account and your normal one. Do Adminy stuff in the Admin account and everything else in the normal one. Once you get used to it, it's a couple of keystrokes to flip between the two. Unlike Run As, the two zones are on different desktops, which means that you're invulnerable to Shatter attacks windows running with admin privileges
That site is great. It has articles on SUS/WSUS and LUA written my MVPs. They also have links to using FUS to flip between a LUA account and a DA or LA one./If you understood what these meant, you'd stop complaining about how Windows doesn't have SU.
If I understand you, whenever you want to write data to the flash, you have to update a whole EU.
Not quite. The rule is that you can always clear an arbitrary bit (at least on NOR). Setting a bit requires you erase a whole EU.
So to alter the contents of an EU (e.g. replace the data of 1 block), you read the EU into RAM, make the changes, and then write it out again.
So in your example, I'm not sure why you write the new block 1 to EU4, and then write to EU4 again immediately to write blocks 2 and 3.
EU4 starts of erased, full of ones.
Once the command comes in to write sector one, the lookup table entry is set to 0x0001. The first data area has the data for sector 1. Something similar hapens for sectors two and three. This is OK, we're just doing partial programs.
At the same time, we can overwrite the lookup table in EU1 - e.g for sector 1 we can flip flip the bit from a 1 to a zero by programming it. Once again this is OK, the limitation is that you can't set bits that were 0 without an erase.
Surely this is not exhibiting levelling behaviour? Or is it that block 2 is written and EU1 is used, then when block 3 is written, EU4 is used again, to even out the write distribution?
Real wear levelling would require a longer example than I could type. It's more subtle too, since you don't often get in a situation where all the blocks in one EU are obsolete, unlike in this example.
But you can get some idea of it - in this example if you keep writing block 1 it will walk through the EU's 1,4 and 5. That's actually half the flash area. If you occasionally swapped one of the infrequently erased blocks (in this case 2 and 3) with the ones in this set you could probably make it walk across the entire flash area.
The flash is broken up into Erase Units, which as the name suggests is the smallest block you can erase at any one time. IDE hard disks have a small fixed sectorsize of 512 bytes, smaller than one EU.
Imagine a 12KB flash with a 2KB Erase Unit and 6 units. One of these is bad - this can seen by the absence of a metadata signature for example.
You could use this as an IDE disk with 6KB capacity, since some of the erase units needs to be spare at all times.
Each EU can hold 3 IDE sectors, some metadata including the signature, and then 3 integers saying which logical block the physical block holds.
The EU starts off erased, all ones. Let's write a fileystem,
EU 1
lookup table contains (1,2,3)
IDE sector 1
IDE sector 2
IDE sector 3 EU 2
lookup table contains (4,5,6)
IDE sector 4
IDE sector 5
IDE sector 6 EU 3
lookup table contains (7,8,9)
IDE sector 7
IDE sector 8
IDE sector 9 EU 4
lookup table contains (-1,-1,-1)
spare - every bit in this EU is one EU 5
lookup table contains (-1,-1,-1)
spare - every bit in this EU is one EU 6
bad
Now imagine we need to update sector 1. We can use one of the spare blocks to store the data. The old copy can be left, but marked as unused by setting its lookup table entry to 0 - programming all the remaining bits.
EU 1
lookup table contains (0,2,3)
IDE sector 1 (obsolete data)
IDE sector 2
IDE sector 3 ... no change, damn lameness filter EU 4
lookup table contains (1,-1,-1)
IDE sector 1 (latest copy)
spare (all ones)
spare (all ones) ... no change
Now imagine that you need to write the next two blocks, 2 and 3. That way all the blocks in the first EU will be obsolete, and you can erase it.
EU 1
lookup table contains (-1,-1,-1)
spare (all ones)
spare (all ones)
spare (all ones) ... no change EU 4
lookup table contains (1,2,3)
IDE sector 1
IDE sector 2
IDE sector 3 ... no change
If you're not lucky enough to get all the blocks written at any one time, you need to compact by copying the block with the most obsolete blocks into one of the spare EU's. Obvously you can skip the obsolete blocks - you just copy the ones that are used and mark the rest as spare.
So far I've talked about one lookup table, the one in the flash which gives you the logical block which each physical block contains. This is the inverse of the lookup table you want for reading an arbitrary block, but this inverseness gives it the useful property that it only needs to be updated only once per erase cycle - some of the bits in an entry are programmed when the block is written, and the rest are programmed when the data becomes obsolete.
If you want to read logical block N, it's useful to have another lookup table which gives you the mapping logical block to physical block. This will need to be updated a lot - once for each write of a block. But it can be generated from the lookup table in the flash at insertion time, and kept in Ram.
There are some corner cases obviously - like the bad bits in the metadata area or whole EU's going bad, but there's usually a fair bit of space in an EU for metadata, and a reasonable number of spare EUs. Plus, if the flash has always been used like this, the bits should all wear out at the same time, which is obviously not something you can work around. But the trick to avoiding the problem you mention is to store an _inverted_ lookup table on the flash.
I googled for "Flash omium potential" and no hits. Google being google, I'm sure your post and this discussion will be in the index soon, so no worries - soon googling for "Flash omium potential fire hazard" will turn up enough hits for people to believe its a real problem.
Even better you said
"These conditions include higher levels of oxygen, and the like commonly found on airplanes."
Firstly, flash memory, like all IC's is sealed. Levels of oxygen around it can't affect it. Secondly, airplanes don't have "higher levels of oxygen" as far as I know. Thirdly, I work with flash memory a lot, and I've never heard of this scare story.
And then the killer
"Does this mean that the use of iBooks and PowerBooks will be banned on airplanes?"
There's no reason for them to be, but you're working hard on it. I must say, I like idea of me taking out my cheap plastic Fujitsu laptop, and yuppie next to me taking out his ultra hip (and ultra expensive) Powerbook only to be told he can't use it because of some bullshit firehazard while I work away.
Powerbooks are a firehazard BTW - their cases are made out of a material which is fire hazard. Even worse, terrorists may ignite them with a blow torch deliberately. The Department of Homeland Security must protect the homeland and band them now.
It's interesting choice of name, Windows Genuine _Advantage_. They're not saying that you can't run the warez version, just that there's an advantage (support) if pay for it.
Actually, if Apple wanted they could use Intel's VT to run Windows XP as guest OS.
OS/X would own the hardware and the XP kernel would think it owned the hardware, but would actually be running a virtual machine. With VT, it's quick too. All the instructions that you need to trap to virtualise Ring 0 code can be trapped and emulated. Most of the emulation is trivial - added offsets to page table bases and so on. There's no need to patch the guest OS or single step through bits of it. Interestingly, they could run Linux in the same way, at the same time. With a bit of tweaking, you could imagine having Windows applications appear on the Mac desktop.
Whether it's a good idea is another question - it wouldn't certainly put people off porting their applications.
A few years back, I worked on a website for buying stuff online. Nothing fancy - just some Javascript on the client and ASP/ActiveX on the server. It was all a frantic rush to get stuff working. I mentioned to my boss that we should spend a couple of days to get it working in Netscape, and older IE - some of the pages were broken. This is back when Javascript was completely different on Netscape and IE in things like date handling - there weren't standards to code to.
She vetoed it, on the grounds that people should just install IE 4.0. As it happened, my fix for Netscape was hidden in other fixes - I was scared of people managing to screw up orders by using the wrong browser and then suing us soI fixed it anyway. But the politically correct way to do it would have been to stop them logging in completely.
But that's the argument - people that are savvy enough to use a non mainstream browser are also savvy enough to switch back to a mainstream one if you tell them to. Also, most of our client companies - this site was not open to the public - wouldn't let people install an alternative browser in the first place.
And most of these companies will just ignore emails from activist types about how the website is broken on some browser with 90% market share. They know that you're not going to buy anything from them.
You'd be better off campaigning for your right to drive on the other side of the road quite frankly.
Internal name: Jazz Speaker 6906 Release Name: Game Beast. Name on the box: Game TERMINATOR Beast.
They're loud as fuck too - I can hear the screams and gunfire perfectly. I only wish they have silkscreened an 11 on the right of the volume knob. Maybe in the upcoming JS 10000 series, aka the Game DAISYCUTTER Beast.
One the one hand, I know from/. that Unix has no viruses. On the other hand, Microsoft must have done something evil. But if there are no viruses, how evil can it be?
Yeah, that must be the reason. If Microsoft software loads slowly it's because it's bloated and badly written. If it loads quickly, it's because it CHEATS!!!11!!
I see the press taking a position of making "China"(as distinct from the more technical definition of the "PRC") out to be a sort of enemy. The press does whitewash and skip over the atrocities of oppressive governments like the PRC. The press also makes "China"(a vague political entity useful for the identity politics the press plays) out to be an enemy of "democracy" or "freedom". These are just essentially names for us (the West, America, etc.). We are democracy, we are freedom, or, at least, freedom in contingent on us or needs us. As opposed to us needing it, which is true. It needing us is completely false and just used as an emotional/religious rallying point to further some agenda for someone.
But freedom does sometimes need us - e.g. when it was under attack by the Nazis in WW2, or the Communists in the cold war, or the PRC in a future Taiwan/PRC war.
There are degrees of freedom, and we have more here now than people had in Nazi Germany, or Communist Russia or the present day PRC. It's that greater freedom which puts a lower limit how rotten our rulers can be compared to the totalitarian alternatives. And it would be a tragedy if Western society was ever supplanted by any of those alternatives.
Have a look at what happened to civilisation in the 1000 years after the Roman Republic fell if you don't believe me. It's seriously scary - pretty much a total collapse of art and science.
Slashdot Mirror
But that doesn't help - it's the choice of moderators that is the problem, not the choice of what they.
Interestingly letting "Joe Shmoe" (by which I mean the general unselected public) do it would actually be better, just like Joe Shmoe vote on say energy policy is better than letting only 'experts' do it. It's because the biases of the Joe Shmoe's tend to cancel out. Whereas the expert's biases tend to reinforce each other.
E.g. a slashdot expert will get to moderate. Being an expert means that they've spent a long time, and if they spent a long time here they must agree to some extent with the biases of the site. The same would happen with a patent moderation.
Actually, the problem is finding a scientific sample of Joe Schmoes. Maybe it could work like jury duty.
You have to wonder whether it would work actually. Remember that you're asking people that the patent office considers to be industry experts to moderate. Realistically, they'd be people who already have patents, and are thus likely to have a strong pro patent bias. It'd be like a kind of anti-slashdot. E.g.
Patent - Method for obtaining gaseous oxygen via inhalation.
+100 Highly original, Benefit to Mankind.
Complaint - my son suffocated after the patent, we couldn't afford the $1000/year license here in Ghana
-100 Whining, Communist, Unamerican, Dirty Gnu Hippie.
I used to be very anti software patent, but then I started to think of situations where they are essential.
E.g. imagine I think of a way to speed up Graphics cards with some software algorithm. I have the idea, but I don't have a factory that makes VGA controllers. I could contact Nvidia say and tell them my idea, but then they'd just use it and not pay me a dime.
Copyright doesn't help me here - you can get around copyright on code too easily by making trivial changes. Even worse if the copyrighted code is VHDL, you'd be hard pressed to prove any copyright violation by examining the ASIC that are synthesised by it. With a patent, you could get coverage for a broad range of algorithms - you could chuck test vectors at the ASIC and prove that it used one of range of algorithms your patent covered. E.g. for a cache somewhere in the visualisation pipeline, you'd just need to show a drastic slowdown when the input data varies enough to have a large miss rate. Copyright would be hopeless - they could just claim that they had coincidentally thought of the same idea. And you wouldn't be able to do anything about it, since the only way to prove copyright violation would be to examine their source code.
That's the point of patents - the inventor can have an idea and no money, and can sell the idea safely to the company with money and no idea.
It seems to me that the whole anti patent movement is made up by the kind of people that are most likely to need them - penniless but smart geeks, which is pretty ironic.
The CPUs may be designed by humans, but all the low level synthesis is done by software - imagine some VHDL synthesis algorithm that produces low power CPUs for example.
Excellent.
Nice one, I hate those bastards too
If it really bugs you, get a Longhorn beta.
s/grean/green/g
For an hefty markup, you can get an ugly grean quadrilateral.
You mean your brain can run without noisy external cooling. Lucky you
Must admit, I don't use VPN to work from a home machine, I don't know. But I'd guess that if you log on locally to a machine that you set up yourself you can decide whether or not your an admin, so you can use fast user switching. Connected to a domain, the domain admin makes that decision, so you can't.
/ 21/55799.aspx
In the VPN case, I don't know what the solution is, but I guess it will annoy a few people no matter what.
Hmm, it turns out that the excellent Old New thing has an entry on it
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11
Actually the best way is to use Fast User Switching. Have an Admin account and your normal one. Do Adminy stuff in the Admin account and everything else in the normal one. Once you get used to it, it's a couple of keystrokes to flip between the two. Unlike Run As, the two zones are on different desktops, which means that you're invulnerable to Shatter attacks windows running with admin privileges
Here's a good blog with much more info
Some people even prefer this to su.
That site is great. It has articles on SUS/WSUS and LUA written my MVPs. They also have links to using FUS to flip between a LUA account and a DA or LA one. /If you understood what these meant, you'd stop complaining about how Windows doesn't have SU.
Not quite. The rule is that you can always clear an arbitrary bit (at least on NOR). Setting a bit requires you erase a whole EU.
EU4 starts of erased, full of ones.
Once the command comes in to write sector one, the lookup table entry is set to 0x0001. The first data area has the data for sector 1. Something similar hapens for sectors two and three. This is OK, we're just doing partial programs.
At the same time, we can overwrite the lookup table in EU1 - e.g for sector 1 we can flip flip the bit from a 1 to a zero by programming it. Once again this is OK, the limitation is that you can't set bits that were 0 without an erase.
Real wear levelling would require a longer example than I could type. It's more subtle too, since you don't often get in a situation where all the blocks in one EU are obsolete, unlike in this example.
But you can get some idea of it - in this example if you keep writing block 1 it will walk through the EU's 1,4 and 5. That's actually half the flash area. If you occasionally swapped one of the infrequently erased blocks (in this case 2 and 3) with the ones in this set you could probably make it walk across the entire flash area.
Funnily enough I saw Cube just before I saw Resident Evil, so I'd seen the idea before - it's used in Cube's memorable opening sequence. Oddly enough, Paul Anderson claims to have never seen Cube - yeah right
But I have no illusions - if I were a film director, I'd be Paul Anderson.
The flash is broken up into Erase Units, which as the name suggests is the smallest block you can erase at any one time. IDE hard disks have a small fixed sectorsize of 512 bytes, smaller than one EU.
Imagine a 12KB flash with a 2KB Erase Unit and 6 units. One of these is bad - this can seen by the absence of a metadata signature for example.
You could use this as an IDE disk with 6KB capacity, since some of the erase units needs to be spare at all times.
Each EU can hold 3 IDE sectors, some metadata including the signature, and then 3 integers saying which logical block the physical block holds.
The EU starts off erased, all ones. Let's write a fileystem,Now imagine we need to update sector 1. We can use one of the spare blocks to store the data. The old copy can be left, but marked as unused by setting its lookup table entry to 0 - programming all the remaining bits.Now imagine that you need to write the next two blocks, 2 and 3. That way all the blocks in the first EU will be obsolete, and you can erase it.If you're not lucky enough to get all the blocks written at any one time, you need to compact by copying the block with the most obsolete blocks into one of the spare EU's. Obvously you can skip the obsolete blocks - you just copy the ones that are used and mark the rest as spare.
So far I've talked about one lookup table, the one in the flash which gives you the logical block which each physical block contains. This is the inverse of the lookup table you want for reading an arbitrary block, but this inverseness gives it the useful property that it only needs to be updated only once per erase cycle - some of the bits in an entry are programmed when the block is written, and the rest are programmed when the data becomes obsolete.
If you want to read logical block N, it's useful to have another lookup table which gives you the mapping logical block to physical block. This will need to be updated a lot - once for each write of a block. But it can be generated from the lookup table in the flash at insertion time, and kept in Ram.
There are some corner cases obviously - like the bad bits in the metadata area or whole EU's going bad, but there's usually a fair bit of space in an EU for metadata, and a reasonable number of spare EUs. Plus, if the flash has always been used like this, the bits should all wear out at the same time, which is obviously not something you can work around. But the trick to avoiding the problem you mention is to store an _inverted_ lookup table on the flash.
This has to be the best troll ever.
I googled for "Flash omium potential" and no hits. Google being google, I'm sure your post and this discussion will be in the index soon, so no worries - soon googling for "Flash omium potential fire hazard" will turn up enough hits for people to believe its a real problem.
Even better you said
"These conditions include higher levels of oxygen, and the like commonly found on airplanes."
Firstly, flash memory, like all IC's is sealed. Levels of oxygen around it can't affect it. Secondly, airplanes don't have "higher levels of oxygen" as far as I know. Thirdly, I work with flash memory a lot, and I've never heard of this scare story.
And then the killer
"Does this mean that the use of iBooks and PowerBooks will be banned on airplanes?"
There's no reason for them to be, but you're working hard on it. I must say, I like idea of me taking out my cheap plastic Fujitsu laptop, and yuppie next to me taking out his ultra hip (and ultra expensive) Powerbook only to be told he can't use it because of some bullshit firehazard while I work away.
Powerbooks are a firehazard BTW - their cases are made out of a material which is fire hazard. Even worse, terrorists may ignite them with a blow torch deliberately. The Department of Homeland Security must protect the homeland and band them now.
It's interesting choice of name, Windows Genuine _Advantage_. They're not saying that you can't run the warez version, just that there's an advantage (support) if pay for it.
Actually, if Apple wanted they could use Intel's VT to run Windows XP as guest OS.
OS/X would own the hardware and the XP kernel would think it owned the hardware, but would actually be running a virtual machine. With VT, it's quick too. All the instructions that you need to trap to virtualise Ring 0 code can be trapped and emulated. Most of the emulation is trivial - added offsets to page table bases and so on. There's no need to patch the guest OS or single step through bits of it. Interestingly, they could run Linux in the same way, at the same time. With a bit of tweaking, you could imagine having Windows applications appear on the Mac desktop.
Whether it's a good idea is another question - it wouldn't certainly put people off porting their applications.
A few years back, I worked on a website for buying stuff online. Nothing fancy - just some Javascript on the client and ASP/ActiveX on the server. It was all a frantic rush to get stuff working. I mentioned to my boss that we should spend a couple of days to get it working in Netscape, and older IE - some of the pages were broken. This is back when Javascript was completely different on Netscape and IE in things like date handling - there weren't standards to code to.
She vetoed it, on the grounds that people should just install IE 4.0. As it happened, my fix for Netscape was hidden in other fixes - I was scared of people managing to screw up orders by using the wrong browser and then suing us soI fixed it anyway. But the politically correct way to do it would have been to stop them logging in completely.
But that's the argument - people that are savvy enough to use a non mainstream browser are also savvy enough to switch back to a mainstream one if you tell them to. Also, most of our client companies - this site was not open to the public - wouldn't let people install an alternative browser in the first place.
And most of these companies will just ignore emails from activist types about how the website is broken on some browser with 90% market share. They know that you're not going to buy anything from them.
You'd be better off campaigning for your right to drive on the other side of the road quite frankly.
That's why they're getting the asses kicked by Nvidia. Gamers like macho names.
I've got a pair of Game Beast speakers.
Internal name: Jazz Speaker 6906
Release Name: Game Beast.
Name on the box: Game TERMINATOR Beast.
They're loud as fuck too - I can hear the screams and gunfire perfectly. I only wish they have silkscreened an 11 on the right of the volume knob. Maybe in the upcoming JS 10000 series, aka the Game DAISYCUTTER Beast.
One the one hand, I know from /. that Unix has no viruses. On the other hand, Microsoft must have done something evil. But if there are no viruses, how evil can it be?
ERROR! ERROR!
Yeah, that must be the reason. If Microsoft software loads slowly it's because it's bloated and badly written. If it loads quickly, it's because it CHEATS!!!11!!
But freedom does sometimes need us - e.g. when it was under attack by the Nazis in WW2, or the Communists in the cold war, or the PRC in a future Taiwan/PRC war.
There are degrees of freedom, and we have more here now than people had in Nazi Germany, or Communist Russia or the present day PRC. It's that greater freedom which puts a lower limit how rotten our rulers can be compared to the totalitarian alternatives. And it would be a tragedy if Western society was ever supplanted by any of those alternatives.
Have a look at what happened to civilisation in the 1000 years after the Roman Republic fell if you don't believe me. It's seriously scary - pretty much a total collapse of art and science.
you mean
.cry Jesus Baby makes endian Little